ILP 2 - edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course

edX is a site where teachers and professionals can post classes or training courses to teach and earn certificates online without the need to go into a classroom or enroll in schools.  You can use this for ongoing education or use the certification process to show your continued educational growth.  I figured that I would go straight to the beginning and learn how to go about creating an edX (edX) course for others to use.

The course begins with the five basic steps you need to do in order to make the course successful, they are:
1 - Get the word out - It won't help anyone if they don't know/can't find it.
2 - Creating the content - This is all about making sure your course has the desired effect.
3 - Create the grading policy - Establishing a process for determining a student's success.
4 - Preparing your course - Syllabus and schedule creation, preparing the course outline.
5 - Delivery of the course - Actually teaching the course, how to moderate and the certification process.

The initial section is getting you to understand what your students might be looking for in this.  You need to understand what they want in order to help them achieve their goals.  You then move into an overview of the creation process.  They recommend a 6-8 month development time for your course and emphasize the fact that you will need a team to accomplish this, and you will need to remember to focus on the goals of what you're trying to teach.  Don't think of it as merely a bunch of videos, but keep in mind the point of your course.  

Getting the word out on your "about" page and video are important.  This is likely the place the students will go when they're trying to determine if this is a course they want to take, and the page will be published on the site possibly months before the course actually begins.  You should engage, not just provide a list of topics you will cover.  The platform also offers some advertising and marketing themselves for you to help get the word out, and they go through the various social media and professional networks that you should use to help spread the word of your course.

The next section is about the process of creating content. How, and what you should be doing.  The differences between a normal lecture course, and an online learning environment.  They go through the four main types of content: Discussion - having an interactive board for questions and discussion, HTML - the base pages where you can add text, links, images, etc, Video - the basic videos where you convey information, and problem - the quizzes, tests, and create problems for your students to solve.  It then takes you through each of these to give you a starter's guide to what you can do with each different type of page.  There is a big emphasis on video, as this is the main method you will likely use to engage and teach the students.  It also goes over copyright issues.

We then go to the grading policies.  One note is that with online courses, you must take into account people taking your class in different time zones and with differing levels of connectivity, so you must be careful not to exclude anyone.  They then move on to class setup, scheduling, welcoming notices, your syllabus.  Generally, how you need to welcome students to your class and provide them with the tools to succeed. 

Then we get to the class itself.  How you present, fostering discussion, the practice of putting students into smaller groups to help move along discussion and cooperation, perhaps using social media to engage your students.  It also goes through the difference between the certified courses and audited courses. and gives you a brief overview of the analytical tools you can use to get more information on your students.

Then comes the final exam (I passed).  Overall, this was a nice brief (1-2 hour) overview of what goes into setting up a course on edX.  It helps prospective teachers understand what needs to be done in order to convert lecture into online courses.  It's not a complete walkthrough, but more of a, "Here are things you will need to deal with, so prepare" kind of thing.  It should be a mandatory guide for anyone who has to create an online class, as many of the concepts are not followed in online learning. 9/10, would recommend.

Blog Post 9

I think the "flipped classroom" is a great innovation for education.  It's the idea that classroom time would be better used by explaining content deeply and working through issues that the students have with the material instead of merely teaching.  To achieve this, students get homework, which consists of watching a short video of what in a normal classroom would be a condensed version of the normal classroom lecture.  Then the class time is spent working through any issues or questions that the students have with the material.  I feel that this approach is preferable to the normal structure because it allows the students to get responses from the teacher for questions instead of sitting through the lecture, then struggling with homework when they do not have any resources available to help them understand the material.  It probably wouldn't be ideal for every subject, but I do believe that in the majority of cases, it would benefit the students more than traditional methods.

"OER" or Open Educational Resources, are simply teaching materials and classes that are made available for study or as educational resources, freely online.  This is usually done through a creative commons license.  It can be anything a teacher or student might need in the teaching or learning, of a subject, including videos, tests, papers, software, and any other tool for learning or teaching.  This paper: http://www.ictliteracy.info/rf.pdf/OERMovement.pdf  is an excellent resource, as is has a brief history of the OEM movement, a list of some of the major contributors and what they offer, and also sections on the challenges there are in both producing and keeping access to the materials, and a section on the future and where the next logical step will take us.  Their thinking is that the next step is going to be OER with more interactivity between the producers and consumers and I think that is probably correct.  I would love to see these ideas carried through and hope that the backing for projects like those they describe continues to be available.

The PowerPoint projects were interesting, I learned a bit about the non-linear format and how it's used, which should come in handy in the future.  I apparently still am not so good with the footers and numbering and naming, but I don't think that having my name on all of the slides is all that important as a teaching device.  So long as the information is there, that's the important part.  The process is time-consuming, much more so than simply writing lecture notes, but it is more engaging for the viewer, so that is a definite plus.  I think the best thing about these is that they enforce conciseness.  You simply don't have the space to ramble on at length about a subject, and that is something I definitely struggle with.