Hey Molly did you see Adelina’s post She…
Hey Molly, did you see Adelina’s post? She also took both PBR & Site Dance!
http://practicebased.re/search/hello-adelina/
Hey Molly, did you see Adelina’s post? She also took both PBR & Site Dance!
http://practicebased.re/search/hello-adelina/
I’ve just done a quick browse of Udacity, Iversity, NovoED, and Coursera, and Coursera definitely seems to be the Arts MOOC leader. Or perhaps they’re just the biggest and have the most of everything…
https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&cats=arts
They all sound pretty cool, but 5 weeks of Warhol starting 21 April has to be the winner for me. Which one would you take?
https://www.coursera.org/course/warhol
I’ve never heard how many students enrolled in Practice Based Research in the Arts or Creating Site Specific Dance & Performance Works, but The Future of Storytelling from Potsdam / Iversity is now up to 80,000. I’m sure PBR & Site Dance are vastly smaller, still in all cases it’s thousands at least.
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Also, only NovoED even has the feature of messaging classmates. On both Coursera & Iversity your only hope of communicating with colleagues outside of the closed, soon to be shut down, forums, is if you can find them out on the web. Some students put URLs in their profiles, but shockingly many do not.
Again, in a “massive” course, of course you can’t expect 1-to-1 contact with faculty or TA’s, so it is very much peers & colleagues that we need to form relationships with. Otherwise a MOOC is just a lecture class, and that’s a lot less.
I’m taking Practice Based Research from NovoED and also Site Dance from Coursera.
ADVANTAGE NOVOED: So much easier to find and communicate with interesting classmates.
ADVANTAGE COURSERA: So much easier to give quick & meaningful peer review feedback.
CURRENT SCORE: Deuce!
Yes! Yes! I am taking both of these courses as well! Both are fantastic for content. I’ve found Cousera to be a bit sprawling in the forums. There are many more threads posted than over at NovoEd and I’ve had trouble weeding through them to give feeback. This is partly the instructors design (they encouraged individual threads with the first assignment LandMark) partly the platform design and partly my fault for not always being the most tech savvy.
Yes Molly, I’m grateful for both, yet not entirely happy with either. It is interesting how “tech details” can so dramatically effect the experience you have in these different spaces. And for sure what we’re experiencing on both sites is an interaction between the platform and the instructor’s design.
On Peer Review for example, on NovoED it takes me forever to do them, it’s painful and I hate it, and in the end I don’t really feel that I said anything useful. On Coursera I wind up doing extra ones because it’s so fast, easy, and fun to do, but I also feel like I’ve actually given the artist some sort of useful feedback.
The Stanford/NovoEd course Practice Based Research in the Arts entered week five and launched a new function —Studio West described in the syllabus as “our bespoke online artist studio space.” I’ve spent the weekend moving into my online studio space and I am trying to understand this new platform/format/function/site. What exactly is Studio West? (More …)
Yes Molly! I think you raise many insightful and important questions about the studio we’ve all been wondering about and waiting for, for the past month. I agree with all your points. The only real answer I can give is that Studio West seems very beta.
I can’t imagine this is the final version since the functionality is so limited. If it is still in development, it may not have the better functionalities you describe before the end of the course. But if it does achieve that, it could still be a nice tool going forward.
Limited as SW is, it’s still nice to see images of our classmates work. That such a crippled Studio West can still be better than NovoED is perhaps an observation that MOOC platforms too are very beta. I imagine platforms like NovoED were launched on tech topics like the famous Stanford Robotics course, and they haven’t really built out to embrace visual culture yet.
For me, meeting new colleagues is even more valuable than lecture content, so I’m eager to see platforms like NovoED, Coursera and iversity have better visual offerings, indexes of students, links to student’s own websites, the option for turned in projects to “reveal creator’s identity” and the option to “reveal peer reviewer’s identity.” The option for privacy here is fine, but I’m not doing all this work to be invisible, I want to meet the classmates whose work I find compelling.
Studio West has gone to Reverse Chron order! Now let’s really move in and take this site for a spin. I agree that the compelling part of this course, Studio West and this site is the ability to connect with colleagues and engage in critical dialogue.
huh… I’m confused… it seems like Reverse-Chron when I’m not logged in, but then when I log in it seems to go back to Chron only…
PEER REVIEW
I’m not positive on these details, but it seems like on NovoED you know who you are reviewing, and on Coursera you do not. One can imagine the privacy value of having Project Designer and Project Reviewer both be anonymous — HOWEVER — since I see meeting new colleagues as the single biggest benefit from MOOCs, it’d be nice if both the Designer & Reviewer had a “Make my identity known” or “Make my identity public” checkbox. (I wouldn’t even mind if the default was that the box was checked)
It’s so frustrating to see someone’s great project and have no idea who they are. These MOOCs are all too big to permit “hanging out with the faculty” but when the structure actively prevents “hanging out with classmate / colleagues” that sucks.
While waiting for that checkbox — peeps who post work could also blog the work, or even an extended version with more pix, etc, and then add their URL to their turnin post. Thus providing both identity and content for anyone who’s interested.
Perhaps reviewers could also add a link to their site.
Gosh, V. This reply does not directly address the points you raise above but it’s in the same ball park: I’ve been wondering if the interactions would be richer if we were compelled to really work together on a project rather than working in groups where, frequently, the only uniting feature is the text box that binds the individual entries… What if, rather than bringing an individual “creative project” to the table we were encouraged to build a creative project with our exciting, creative peers?
Good point, Van. The more we are able to build potential collaborative relationships through these MOOC experiences, the more valuable they will be.
Some individuals will prefer, no doubt, anonymity during critique. But many others, such as yourself, will desire the opposite. IT should be a personal choice, determined by each individual, and no the institution offering the MOOC.
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