Not just for Christmas: using online courses to engage educators with open resources.

In December 2014 Regent’s University London offered an open online course, The Twelve Apps of Christmas. This course attracted hundreds of active participants from HE institutions worldwide. Over the course of the twelve days educators were introduced to a diverse range of free applications and resources with potential for use in teaching.

Regent's University London (RUL) is a private, not-for-profit, charitable university located in Regent's Park, central London.

regents.ac.uk

Learning Resources at RUL comprises the library, learning technology, and media services teams.
Chris and Andy's previous collaborations include a series of lunchtime workshops on copyright for academics, streamed as videos under the umbrella "The Copyright Trilogy".
Last year they worked together on a Ten Days of Twitter course based on Helen Webster's work at the University of Newcastle.
It was on the basis of this successful partnership that Chris invited Andy to get involved with the Twelve Apps of Christmas.

1. Authentic: Examples should be from the HE sector. eg Apps like Blackboard Mobile and Turnitin.


2. Situated learning: Participants should be able to explore the apps using their own devices – so they are learning in a familiar context (rather than unfamiliar computer or systems)

3. Discursive: participants need to be able to raise and discuss the apps – and look at alternatives.

Real time: Course run over a defined time - 12 days

How did we decide on the apps?
Official RUL' apps.
Aimed at Academics.

• Day One – 4th December: Blackboard Mobile Learn
• Day Two – 5th December: Padlet
• Day Three – 8th December: QR Reader
• Day Four – 9th December: Instapaper
• Day Five – 10th December: Poll Everywhere
• Day Six – 11th December: Wunderlist
• Day Seven – 12th December: Prezi
• Day Eight – 15th December: Dragon Dictation
• Day Nine – 16th December: MyScript Memo
• Day Ten – 17th December: SimpleMind+
• Day Eleven – 18th December: Turnitin
• Day Twelve – 19th December: Track Santa!

1. Structure of each day:

What is it?
What can it do?
Download it.
10 minute task.
The joke
Discussion Board
Further tasks
Further resources

From 30 students signed up a week before the course was due to start, we went to over 500 within the first two days. Participants came from HEIs around the world.

For future courses, we will be bearing this last-minute surge in take-up in mind.

Photograph of Cairns, Australia, posted on discussion board for Day One by Julie Esson.

What we learned running the course:
Make time for troubleshooting and technical issues, especially at start.
Schedule time to monitor forums, social media etc, and do reply to posts.
Social tasks (forum discussions, sharing, etc) build community and engagement.
Catch up with students from other time zones who participate overnight.

Padlet was one of the apps we looked at. The posts to this online "wall" are a good example of how social tasks engaged students and helped to build a community.
Another wall created for this task (http://padlet.com/apjhorton/classroom) shows the collaborative benefit of the course, as learners shared their experiences and recommended a range of resources and apps, some of which will probably feature among this year's Twelve Apps.
We felt it was important to maintain an element of fun for participants throughout the course. The daily cracker jokes were part of this, as was the light-hearted choice for the final app.

Evaluation:

1. A bit underdeloped!

2. The figures. Participation:
Enrolement. - over 550
Discussion boards.

Some nice quotes:

1. ...a bit like a conference.

2. transferability

3. its fun

Twelve Apps of Christmas won the prestigious Credo Digital Information Literacy Award, which was presented at LILAC 2015.

Recognition of this sort, along with other demonstrable success, can be used to support further cross-department collaborations. There will be a Twelve Apps of Christmas 2015, and other projects on which the library and learning technology teams will be working together.

The courses:

Twitter - https://regents10dot.wordpress.com/

12AoC15 - https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc-catalog/courseDetails/view?course...

Blogging - https://rulb4b.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3&action=edit&message=1

The Digital Scholar - https://thedigitalresearcher.wordpress.com/

Why this format?


A different type of training from a workshop – ‘bite sized’ where participants could dip in and out of it.

Tops if you want to run this course

1. Make time

2. Motivation.....our competition (tweet your favorite joke)

3. Develop a team

Twelve Apps of Christmas is openly available to reuse under a Creative Commons licence and is available at: https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc-catalog/courseDetails/view?course... (To access 12AOC click on the Enrol button and create a new account).

You are welcome to use and adapt the course at your own HEI. We would love to hear from you about it, and are happy for you to contact us with any questions you may have.

hortona@regents.ac.uk

rowellc@regents.ac.uk

Chris's blog: https://totallyrewired.wordpress.com/

On Twitter:

Chris: @chri5rowell

Andy: @fechtbuch