Implications for Today's Education System:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

This week, Adriana Arevalo, Andrew Kapral, Michael Sanregret and I created a Voicethread presentation about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

We all coordinated our division of labor via Gmail and then "graduated" to using Google Docs. We created a shared Google Microsoft "Wordish" document that we could all post to in order to update each other with our ideas. Another couple type of documents that we created were a spreadsheet, a presentation document (PowerPoint) and a whiteboard document if we needed to post some type of organized data tables that we would want to share, start on our group PowerPoint presentation or just jot down ideas.

Research was done on our own. I managed to gather up quite a bit of articles and information via a Google Scholar search. I was able to download all of these articles and compressed all of them into a .ZIP file which I posted to a Dropbox account that had a public link enabling any of the group members to download the article "package.

Using Wordle, it was east to pick out the common thread among all of the articles as far as the most popular key words, etc. I also went through each article and grabbed an abstract or introductory paragraph along with keywords in order to see what common terminology was out there concerning our topic.

The PowerPoint was assembled online using Google Docs and on the weekend we were able to come together as a group and edit and polish our presentation. The Google Chat functionality embedded into the Google Docs presentation editor was quite handy because we could see who was looking at what slide, what was being edited, or post questions to each other.

It was easy to download the Google Docs PowerPoint presentation to a local drive and then export the slide stack for the presentation to either PNG files or an Adobe PDF document to upload to the Voicethread site. We were able to download an .mp4 of the Stephen Downes YouTube file using SaveTube. Here is the URL: http://www.savetube.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-eNoTC5jRqs. We were also able to successfully download his YouTube presentation using Keepvid as well.

Once we had all of that prepped, Adriana uploaded all of these raw assets to her Voicethread account and emailed us the link so we were all able to embed the file wherever we wanted and were able to post comments on it using USB headsets. I did all of my work on my Mac laptop and it is so great that Google Docs allows you to use many of the hot keys within their free online Google applications.

What an interactive, high energy and rewarding experience Module 4's collaborative project has proven to be!