Beginning next week, I am participating in a collaborative online event called Connected Courses. It is a cMOOC organized to discuss practices on creating effective open online learning. I’ll be posting to my new Out Loud Learning blog, and you can follow along there if you like.
If you teach online, design corporate MOOCs, or are interested in open learning – you might want to join the Connected Courses community as well. We need to do more cross-discussion between corporate L&D practices and academic practices for learning facilitation. I’ll be keeping one foot in each of those two practice areas for the duration of the course myself.
This post is a copy of my initial post for Connected Courses.
Not ready, get set.
We have something of a dilemma in the learning and development world these days. On the one hand, the vast resources of the internet, the reach of social media, and the availability of videos, webinars, free courses, and MOOCs make learning easy to access. On the other hand, many people have neither the time nor the learning skills to pursue the learning they really need. They simply aren’t ready to take advantage of new tools and strategies for learning.
Whether in the corporate L&D space or in the academic world, there are challenges to changing our strategies for facilitating learning. Open, self-directed learning can be hard. Learners have to find helpful resources, which can be a daunting task with the world wide web as a database. Even when we curate the resources, many people are not accustomed to facilitating and processing their own learning activities.
We’ll get better at all this, I am sure, but in the meantime, we need to scaffold open, self-directed learning. I am convinced that there is more that we can do as designers of learning activities to help people get set up for success in the world of open learning.
That’s what is prompting me to join the Connected Courses active co-learning course over the next few months. I am looking forward to learning from and with all the folks who are joining in. I recognize some of the participants as people on the leading edge in developing open learning strategies, and I’m seeing posts from fellow participants who are thoughtful explorers like me.
To introduce myself, I am a consultant to folks who work in corporate L&D and a faculty member teaching designers, human resource development specialists, and learning technology folks. I design and teach courses for those who design and teach and consult on learning strategies. I am also actively promoting a learning environment design framework that I believe can help us to set learners up for success, even when they’re not quite ready to manage their own ongoing development. So learning more about connected learning is a priority for me. (More About me)
I am not immune to the challenges of participating in a loose “course” like this one. Like many, I have started and not fully engaged in a variety of open learning offerings, so I know that unless I have some pressing goals for staying on top of the conversation, this, too, will get buried by other priorities. (Self-directed leaning 101) To begin, then…
My goals for Connected Courses (not in any particular order):
- Observe facilitation and learning in the course and leverage strategies that might work in the environments for which I design learning.
- Deepen understanding of underpinning strategies and theory to better discern what is essential (and not essential) and how to customize approaches effectively.
- Connect to people whose ongoing work I find interesting (and who may be interested in my work).
- Curate resources useful in the context of courses and topics I currently facilitate.
- Strengthen my skills in engaging in connected learning in an open learning context.
- Actively apply what I’m learning in Connected Courses to the redesign of my e-collaboration course for January 2015.
So I’m in. I’m gearing up and scheduling time to engage. I look forward to working with you all.
Get ready, get set.