Friday, April 06, 2018

#lilac18 becoming a digital citizen:designing a massive open online course

Susan Halfpenny and Stephanie Jesper from University of York spoke about the development of a digital citizenship MOOC on the Futurelearn platform supporting the digital strategy at the university.  They saw it as an opportunity to move beyond “just” skills teaching and engage with a topic of social interest. It was also an opportunity to engage with members of academic staff who research in this area from a range of disciplines, and to reach a wide and diverse audience. They covered “digital access” “digital identity and security” and “digital participation and ethics” across the 3 week MOOC. The dev lopment of the MOOC enabled them to talk to academic staff in a different way than they would do normally as a librarian, and invited academics to contribute videos on their areas of expertise.  It was great opportunity to engage with the learners on the MOOC, with quizzes and discussion boards, although the discussions progressed really well on their own. The MOOC for the first time ran in January 2017, and had nearly 6000 registrations. Of those 923 engaged actively and  644 completed the MOOC. There was a broad spread of learner ages, and 30% of them were based in the UK, and th other 70% were based from all around the world. Generally feedback was very positive, and the course ran again in July 2017, although with fewer learners. Content had to be updated as in the meantime Trump has been elected and a lot of the material had to be updated. This is the challenge with running a course that included content that was so current. They are going to run a new MOOC on digital wellbeing.

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