MOOCocracy Community Dashboard Learning Tools

MOOCocracy, a non-profit group working to improve online education, is piloting this Food Insecurity IDEA (informed dialogue for effective action) to introduce new learning tools for public engagement. These tools were created to solve some commonly-described problems with Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) learning environments.

Facilitator’s Feed

Some MOOC participants report a sense of isolation and disengagement, due to the challenge of tracking facilitator presence and activity in the large learning environment. We’ve provided you with a feed exclusively focused on tracking facilitators’ interactions with MOOCocracy participants and content, so that you can directly follow the guidance and conversations.

Weekly Reflections

This dashboard space is used to gauge personal responses to a new reflection statement each week. Sometimes, you may choose to “lurk” and not participate in a larger discussion board, yet still have personal opinions about the content. Facilitators’ can create a personal reflection statement for you to react to on an individual level, instead of within the larger community. You can reflect on the statement by sharing your opinion, confidence in that opinion, and explain your personal thoughts. Only the facilitator will see your reflection.

Attitude-Focused Slider

The MOOCocracy’s Weekly Reflections and Discussion Board incorporate a sliding gauge that allows you to declare your level of agreement/disagreement with a statement, as well as level of confidence in your answer.

Activity Feed

When thousands of people participate in an online environment, it’s easy to get lost in the volume of activity. Our solution is to provide you with a curated list of your interactions within the course, including your posts and replies, as well as the other community members’ replies and votes on your posts. Additionally, you can bookmark interesting resources and posts within the MOOCocracy Dashboard and return to them in the Activity Feed.

User-Declared Goals

We know people engage in online learning environments for a variety of reasons. The MOOCocracy dashboard allows you to declare and update your own goals throughout the engagement. While a certificate of completion may be important to some, others may have a different focus. This tool allows goal-setting to be self-directed to measure success of the environment at the individualized-level from the bottom-up, instead of the top-down.

Community Knowledge Base

We’ve also created a central repository for information that learners have found useful or relevant to the class. By contributing to this knowledge base, each iteration or the course will build a user-generated online library for future learner.