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Course Design Orientation
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Questions Organizers Would Like To Learn Answers For During Orientation
I have several questions that I would like to learn the answers to or discuss options during this orientation:
(1) What is the expectation for how we would use the http://qa.p2pu.org/ utility during our courses?
(2) Are their specific plans for conducting surveys of (a) course organizers and (b) course participants during this session to generate some feedback for improving the administrative process and course delivery in the future? It might be helpful to form those plans now during orientation so there is greater participation and focus when any such surveys are launched.
(3) I am particularly interested in learning what communication tools and resources are effective for online learning and would like to see substantial feedback on how practical some of the resources in the toolbox are and how well they scale:
My thoughts for these points:
(1) In my opinion that tool seems best suited to questions about P2PU, and isn't necessarily so suitable (at least, in this deployment) for subject-matter questions about the courses. That said, there's no real reason *not* to give it a shot: you can effectively create your own Q&A tool by making a new tag, like this one: http://qa.p2pu.org/tags/webcraft/ -- even so, I think it may in some cases be more useful to find another (external) place to ask subject-matter questions.
(2) I also have some questionnaire questions in mind for participants in my course so if there's a small "working group" about creating and running questionnaires/surveys, I'd like to join in that discussion.
(3) A more specific question or set of questions would be easier to answer. My general advice is "find the right tool for the job". When you say "scaling", what scale or scaling properties are you talking about? As a quick guess, everything asyncronous or unidirectional should scale to large numbers of people very easily... with things that are syncronous and multidirectional more thought may be required (e.g. a 20 person Skype call *might* be a bad idea, but can either find a way to make it work, dig up something that works a bit better).
Hi Dan,
(1) I echo Joe's advice about http://qa.p2pu.org, it's up to the community to build it as a FAQ resource. It was put into use very recently.
(2) The P2PU research working group has taken ownership of this survey process. Anyone can join this working group: http://wiki.p2pu.org/research (landing page) and furthermore, if there are aspects of building P2PU you'd like to know more about, we have an overview of all working groups here: http://wiki.p2pu.org/mailing-lists .
(3) P2PU has provided the minimum set of tools for communication on course pages. Before you helped us add more tools to the wiki, the idea was that community members would add tools they like + their wisdom on how best to use each to the http://wiki.p2pu.org/Course-Design-Handbook
The http://wiki.p2pu.org/community-toolbox page would benefit from clearly added space for folks to add their constructive comments about outside tools. There are comments on this page from Bee that give links to blogs and more suggestions, too.
There's certainly no panacea, and the more involved and structured a tool is, the more time participants spend on learning to navigate it rather than working through course content. This takes a toll on 6 week peer-to-peer courses.
Dan,
sorry to have not been able to provide the Webcraft answer on OSQA until after Joe and Alison entered the fray. Their answers are slightly incorrect!
QA.P2PU.org is designed to be used as a general purpose question and answer service and will also be specifically used in Webcraft to manage assessments.
We'd also love for http://qa.p2pu.org/tags/webcraft/ to be used for general questions about technology - for your course I'd encourage starting jQuery and JavaScript tags.
Ideally http://qa.p2pu.org/tags/webcraft/ will take some of the occasional "I can't get this to work" Qs off the Webcraft project list.
P*