My first MOOC

Last fall I first heard of these massive open online courses (or MOOCs) that are becoming popular (thank you to Owen Guthrie for enlightening me). A MOOC allows anyone with internet access and interest to join courses, often taught by university faculty, at no cost. As the “massive” part implies, these open enrollment courses can have tens of thousands of participants. This month my Instructional Design instructor, Carol Gering, reported on the major themes she observed at this year’s EduCause conference, one of which was the MOOC.

I decided to go out and take a look at what is being offered in these MOOCs. I found mooc-list.com to be very helpful for seeing what courses are offered soon and identifying major MOOC providers/platforms (visiting each individually provided course listings much farther into the future). One MOOC in particular seemed so  interesting and relevant that I signed up regardless of the strain of my current work- and courseload: Social Media on the Canvas platform.

Instructor Maria Anderson, Ph.D., provides this description of the course:

“Students explore emerging social media technologies and processes and study their application in a variety of contemporary settings. Students will learn how to use and author content for online tools such as blogs, microblogs, collaboration mechanisms, podcasts, RSS-feeds, video, bookmarking, and other emerging web technologies. The course will also study how to use these technologies to monitor conversations on the Internet, engage online communities, identify influencers, and establish thought leadership.”

Though I have long been a user of social media, I am excited to learn the tools more in-depth, to explore their uses, and study the social media phenomenon as a whole. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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