Magically Imperfect Groupwork

Team Limitless Project Prototype. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeRIMO3Gwkg

Group work in Tina Seelig's MOOC was a rewarding high-impact learning experience for me. In this post, I describe why it was so. 

We faced quite a few odds. Communication was a significant problem along a few dimensions. Night is day to my team mates. I want to sleep and they want to discuss potential project solutions. We used Whatsapp for synchronous and asynchronous communications after our MOOC message boards failed dismally. [I noticed that Whatsapp is popular with my international friends, but not so among my American friends]. My Whatsapp alerts were buzzing off constantly during those 2 weeks.

Five out of seven of us in the group lived outside of the USA. They do not use English most of the time. We all had fulltime jobs or school. I told my team-mates I could only communicate during pockets of time in a day when I wasn't working or sleeping.

We had different expectations about participation. Based on my earlier experience in this MOOC, I expect to put in about 5 to 10 hours of work per week. On my team members' profiles, I found out that they expect to contribute about 3 to 5 hours. This signaled a mismatch?

Despite these challenges, I deem our group work a success because of a few reasons (commitment, and willingness to work hard), but the top one is WE NEEDED EACH OTHER TO SUCCEED. If I can do everything myself, why would I need to be in a group? Teachers should seriously consider designing assignments where students are interdependent upon each other for success.

Our first group project required that we find a problem that would have a musical solution. We had to brainstorm at least 100 solutions. The second project required us to implement the best solution. We were ambitious - our best solution entailed the following:

• rewriting a song - Jason Mraz's "Make It Mine"
• singing the song
• spinning a story creatively about the solution

All in in less than a week's time.

We got to work in different time zones.

• My Armenian team-mate rewrote the LYRICS with me.

  

  Ani

• Two singers recorded the tune with new lyrics - Aditya from India and Ani from Armenia. It wasn't without challenges -- we tried to find an accompaniment track but the pitch was too high for our male singer! Two audio tunes were recorded but I realized they were in MP4 format, so they had to be converted before I could merge them in the video-production software.
  
• I had to work with our sound engineer, Jeremy, who would merge/edit/mix the audio files from different continents together. I got them to him but sound alone does not a video maketh.

  

  Jeremy
• We needed images. Our Mexican team-mate Jonathan volunteered to take pictures. He took a few black-and-white pictures and that meant the rest of the images we use had to be converted to black-and-white ones.
  
• With the deadline creeping up on us (we each had jobs to do, school to attend), I tried to put everything together. Someone has to coordinate all the work across all the continents and time zones! Without the sound files merged, I couldn't produce the video and it was getting late on my side of the world. I needed help!
• Jeremy, 3 hours behind me, dashed home from school in time and asked how he could help. Help he did with the production of the video after merging the sound files from India and Armenia. After some discussion about video hosting and text overlay, the video was made.
• Ani submitted the assignment. 
• Aditya gave some more feedback to tweak the product for clarity. 
• It was done.  

The end result may not look as sleek as other folks with professional graphic design and video production expertise. But the teamwork process was magical. I am glad to have this learning experience. I will always treasure it. Blogging about it is my way of archiving this with the other major learning experiences in my life. Someday I will look back and read this again with gratitude.

In the most unexpected of ways, my team rose to the challenge. We all brainstormed and came up with ideas (including other members above - Rathna, Arman), bounced them around, took on the roles of image editor, songwriter, storyboarder/script writer, singer, photographer, video editor, sound editor, and came up with this prototype. Sure, it could be more polished but I'm still proud of it. I couldn't do everything myself and that is the secret to group work that works!

Thank you, Team Limitless for the learning experience. This song from Wicked the Musical -- "For Good" -- is dedicated to you all!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzrGFQysfYU

Desiring to Learn is Not Enough by Itself

I've enrolled in numerous MOOCs and finished just one -- so far. I think I may have found another that I will complete: UQx: Think 101x The Science of Everyday Thinking. Up to 80,000 people are taking part in this MOOC run by the University of Queensland.

It's Week 2 -- the instructors organize the units into Episodes -- and I've completed all assignments (except one) in Episode 2, on the very day it was made available. I'm astounded by my effort. What is it about this MOOC that has me working so diligently?

Here's a reflective mindmap:

I have quite decided that four factors have probably helped make this MOOC a winner with me.

1. Affect.
There are many open-access courses and MOOCs available from several major players. Among those that I've been interested in, I've always tried to complete required readings, videos and quizzes. I typically drop out after 2 or 3 weeks despite the best of efforts and interest in the MOOC topic. The desire to learn alone did not see me through to completion. Yet there is something different about this course. There are interesting stories to hear. The content videos are not boring videos of talking heads. Nor do they last longer than 7-odd minutes. Phew! Authenticity and emotional engagement score.

2. Course Design.
I've mentioned the well-crafted content and reflective videos. Besides an understanding of user attention, the videos are filmed as conversations. People are talking to each other like in real life.

There are no long "required" chapters to read. I could "learn more" or "learn even more." Words matter.

3. Platform Design.
Hands down, EdX is one of my two favorite MOOC platforms so far -- the other is Stanford's NovoEd platform where I completed the Crash Creativity course. There are drawbacks to EdX (e.g. close-captioning is beside the video instead of being layered over the video), but the interface is clean. I like simplicity.

4. Content.
 Needless to say, how the mind works is one area that fascinates me. The course instructors have asked some provocative questions and revealed a bit of the findings. Apparently, 84 percent of some thousands of people believe that there are traditional and non-traditional health practices that are not being explored because pharmaceutical companies or scientists shun them (UQx course info, 2014).

Also, here are participant responses on what they think about, in one word:

We asked the 80,000 @Think101x students across the globe to pick one word to describe what they think about. pic.twitter.com/ZyOEYQT1jC
— Think101 (@Think101x) March 12, 2014

On-campus participants took part in a survey like us and were filmed (and hence seen) in a short segment. I'm curious as to how this on-campus segment is going to run throughout the course.

Notice I've ranked content last because that alone does not see me till the end, always. 

To-Be-Improved

I believe we are always tweaking courses as they are being implemented. I hope they do something about the Courseware discussion board. It's a one-column design; it's not easy to interact with others when you can't read their postings unless you scroll up and down frequently. This is why interaction with peers hasn't contributed to my learning engagement as yet. In addition, we need a Twitter hashtag, not just a course Twitter account.

March 14, 2014: To clarify, there is a separate tab or section for Discussion where the discussion board has a different interface. It has two columns for easier interaction -- for reading and sorting of comments.

Still, I can't wait for Episode 3!

#CrashCreativity Thoughts Post 1

This MOOC, Crash Course on Creativity, is taught by Prof Tina Seeling (http://about.me/tinaseelig) of Stanford University and runs on Venture Labs' e-platform. There is a lot of interest in this course with over 35,000 enrollees from all over the world. The platform is pretty minimalistic in a good way, with a menu bar that lets students navigate to Home, Lectures, Assignments and Community.

I've watched a short course video intro so far and a week 1 TED talk by Prof Seelig on the Innovation Engine. Both were not captioned, nor do they have transcriptions (Just observing, I'm not the Accessibility police person!) These are my preliminary thoughts, so far, of the MOOC experience:

1. Energy and Diversity

The nature of the course has attracted many people who are allegedly creative, inventive and entrepreneurial. Designers, artists, entrepreneurs, the wannabes... There is this high energy and intensity about the course and the participants that is palpable. My team of 5 has all these, and probably more. Four have responded to conversations and emails. I hardly know them, but yet, I know them, in a sense. I'm at a loss for words now. It'll come to me. Through preliminary descriptions, I feel that there is something that runs through us all. Before the course officially started, many of these self-directed learners were already active in the course. The course has spawned Groups in the major social media outlets - a FaceBook group, a hashtag on Twitter, a Google+ group, a LinkedIn group. Greetings were issued from various corners of the world. It is truly a group of global learners. Here is where community starts for a MOOC. Students use third-party collaboration tools to connect. Someone has offered to map locations of all learners in the course. Course statistics show 10K people have been active today.I venture to say that a MOOC is all about connecting with someone who has some shared interest with you.

2. Repetition

With large numbers also come repetitive questions about the same concerns.Where are my team-mates? Why don't we do this? ... try that?

3. Teaming with Strangers

The first assignment had people thrown together randomly to complete an assignment on finding commonalities among all members. Well, nice thought, but many groups are voicing their concerns that their teammates are non-existent and unresponsive. Of course, the lurkers and those who just want to audit the course are silent. As a result, a FAQ announcement has been drafted to answer salient issues. The next assignment will be an individual assignment. Prof Seelig is learning that until she hears back from individuals, they should not be placed in teams. Well done!

4. Assessments

Asking creative people who are independent thinkers to find commonalities is an apt challenge, except that some people are just not ready at the first lesson to share their lives. Still, there are 2 more days to go.

Let's see how the community emerges as I participate in the course.