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.