[Lou McGill]

Tell us about some of your positive experiences of online learning?

Why was this so positive for you?
Was it something you achieved, or the process of learning itself?
Tell us about the situation and whether other people were involved?

[dkernohan]

Easily the best online learning experience I have had was #ds106, a digital storytelling course which was (at the time) run out of the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.

Briefly I liked it because:

– it was of the web, not just on the web. The focus on what essentially amounted to web cultural and technical literacies helped here, but it inserted itself into the way I used the web rather than tried to move me into a less “resident” mode of interaction.

– huge efforts were made to build and cohere a strong community – in terms of promoting comment, interaction and reaction.

– it was fun! Even though we dealt with a fascinatingly broad range of theoretical content (drawing from film and cultural studies, radical pedagogies, sociology and literary theory) alongside some fairly in-depth technical practice – the spirit of anarchy and playful intertextuality was compelling and refreshing.

– it was non-prescriptive and unbounded. There was no concept of “drop-out” (indeed, it was more of a “drop-in” course…) and it was possible to take what you needed from the course.

[Lou McGill]

Have to agree with you David. The best for me too. My absolute favourite learning experience with #DS106 was the collaborative radio show.

I don’t actually really enjoy “collaborative learning” so I did cheat a bit and collaborated with my family (partner and home educated son). We made a pirate radio show and In addition to learning loads of technical skills with audio production, and creative storytelling and writing we just laughed so much. So this experience was a brilliant combination of face to face work and online interaction.

The community of DS106 is really supportive and inspirational. Another favourite aspect of that course was the way they created an assignment bank where students could contribute assignments, build on those already there, and create tutorials. I’m a fan:)

[Pip Bruce Ferguson]

The best online learning experience I had was a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) called Learning to Teach Online, run by Drs Simon McIntyre and Negan Mirriahi from University of New South Wales, Australia.
It was great because it allowed for complete techno-newbies to participate and succeed; there were strong efforts to engage the thousands of students taking it, through a combination of mediated forums and the summary of common questions via a start-of-theme video; it used a combination of peer assessors to mark the work of those who sought the certificated badge; the videos used for instructional purposes came from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and were rarely more than 8 minutes long.

They’ve run it again at least twice since I did it, and won awards for online teaching based on this MOOC. I warmly recommend it.