Abstracts written

Dissemination of the project

My focus this week has been on drafting abstracts for dissemination of the work. It is a tricky process, as the bulk of the work has not yet been ciompleted, and the conclusions are not known, so the abstract needs to find the right balance. It needs to entice the reviewer, and convince then that there is work of merit and interest on the way, but at the same time, it does not want to promise the Earth, and then fail to deliver.

The abstract (or abstracts, for there were two) have been written with useful feedback from colleagues, and submitted to two conferences in March and April - the Association of Law Teachers 50th Annual Conference, in Cardiff, and the Socio-Legal Studies Association 25th Annual Conference, in Warwick. I've gone for "Can you make it more MOOCy?" as the title, althuogh this may change slighlty as time goes on. I've always had a tendency for short, snappy titles for papers, as I strongly believe that it is important to grab the reader / conference delegate's attention and make them want to attend.

As the date for the UoN ILT Annual Conference has also been announced (21st May 2015), the abstract can be revised and submitted there as well.

A first draft of a paper is going to be presented at the Law Staff Seminar day in January 2015, and the feedback from that will be incorporated into later versions.

This week is more of a looking to the future week, and by next week, I hope to have some progress to report from the students.

How will we select our student helpers?

This has been a bugbear of the project, but a rather elegant solution has presented itself.
This year, one of our Year 3 Law modules has been partially revamped, and part of the content is going to involve the students covering one section of ILOOC as part of their seminar preparation.
This is, to coin a prhase making a virtue out of a necessity, but the students used for evaluating the content ILOOC and the likelihood of this type of content being suitable for face to face classes.

Time-wise, the project is progressing largely as expected, althuogh the student evaluation of content and subsequent revision of content will slip by a week or so. This is not problematic, since a degree of slippage was incorporated into the project timetable.

What did we use in ILOOC? #2

One of the elements that was used several times in ILOOC was the short (5-10 minute) Youtube clip, prepared by external bodies.

This worked quite well, and we were aware of the importance of keeping the clips short - this links to last week's post, and will be important for clips that we create.

Disturbingly, there is some suggestion that even the 5 minute clip may be too long. In 2008, the consultancy company Tubemogbul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) assessed people's attention span while watching video clips.

Their results suggest that fewer that 1 in 10 viewers made it to 5 minutes

It is important to keep in mind that these figures were drawn from video sharing sites, rather than academic course content sites, but they nevertheless reinforce the importance of keeping it short.

It is Week 7 of the project, and we are still on schedule.

What did we use in ILOOC? #1

After a brief hiatus, I have been able to look at the range of elements that the ILOOC site used, and I will be talking about each in turn over the next few days.

Pieces to Camera 

The first thing that strikes you about the ILOOC material is that the video recorded pieces to the camera are rather stilted and, depsite excellet graphics and background material, it is clear that the performers have not had sufficient training in developing this skill

Neither Nick nor I had done this before, and although both of us have been delivering classes in front of large audiences for many years, it appears that the skill set involved in recorded delivery is a different one.

This is important to keep in mind if this type of delivery is favoured by the students when they look at the content of ILOOC next month - considerable training and practice is going to be needed to make sure that the delivery does not detract from the content!

Student recruitment itself is going more slowly than expected, as the students seem to be focusing on their assignmrnts at this time. As a self-selecting group has not emerged, next week I am going to invite a number of strudents to participate. This may not give the same results as allowing the group to pick itself, but it will be a good starting point.

Week 6 is complete, and things are still on schedule.

Week 1, well 4

The first week of the project has been mostly taken up with sorting out the students who are going to play such a vital role in helping to decide which aspects of the ILOOC make it through - not the specific content, but the type of delivery.

It is going to be a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students, law-based, and according to the Gantt-chart, I need to get recruiting asap.

I've callsed this Week 1, but in effect, this is Week 4, as the project start date slipped a little.

The Gannt chart below shows where the projwect should be, and there is a little catching up to be done over the next couple of weeks

ILOOC Revisited

This blog is linked to the ILOOC revisited project, funded by the Instituute of Learning and Teaching at the University of Northampton.

The purpose of the project is ot look at the International Law OOC (or ILOOC) which was set up (http://bit.ly/ILOOC-Site) in May 2014 by Nick Cartwright, and Simon Sneddon, with excellent technical support from Simon Thompson.

Different elements of ILOOC will be considered as to their appropriateness for embedding into existing taught modules - the levelness, the content, the design and so on will all be examined.