Penn’s Open Learning Commons: Breaking the Course Barrier Marni Baker Stein and Lisa Minetti University of Pennsylvania

A New Social Learning Platform

Pilot Course Description  12 content units centered on 36 hours of HD-quality streaming video lectures  Weekly self reflection assignments with optional publish to blog  Weekly discussion forum assignments and calls for students to initiate their own forums  Chatter (micro-blogging)  Two “required” writing assignments submitted for feedback  Two asynchronous events hosted by professor  One live event hosted by professor

Course Stats  576 students  275 international students from 43 countries  200 students over the age of 55  Students represent a wide-range of professional/personal interests in taking the course: –K-12 educators –Higher Ed instructors –HR managers –Military personnel –Recent Retirees –Coaches and Clinicians –Parents

Design Assumptions Grounded in consumer-based research, we believed that:  The large percentage of students would only have three to four hours a week to spend on the course – and the course as designed would take much more time than this.  The large percentage of students recruited from our Authentic Happiness.org site would be excited about the topic and ready to discuss related issues with others.  A percentage of students would prefer not to socialize and would require a purely self-study track.  Many students would appreciate both structured activities to promote blogging and discussion, while others would be motivated by an open atmosphere where they could initiate conversations relevant to their own purposes for taking the course.  Students would be familiar enough with the web that it would be fairly easy to communicate this flexible design both through instruction lines and the user interface.

What happened…time on course:

What happened…self-study vs. social participation:

Student Voices  “I had never thought about interactions with others and I thought I would just log in study, log out, but the interactions with other, amazing, intelligent and insightful individuals from around the world has been a real highlight of the course. I plan to keep in contact with the group and personally with a number of people. It is a brilliant social/professional network of intelligent like-minded individuals, with global perspectives.”  “This course provided an engaging, interesting and thought provoking dip into the fascinating arena of positive psychology. The course structure has been well thought out with the ability to take as much as you wish from the content provided. The effort put into the social networking of students not only aids with the desired outcomes for the course but also engages the students in a community making for a far less remote learning experience. The online learning environment was undoubtedly one of the best I have seen. Very easy to navigate, clearly presented, and importantly, the academic staff were always very visible and highly accessible.”

Student Voices  “Though I was not an active participant in networking and socialization, it was nice to see classmates' profiles (careers, locations, etc.) and know that I could reach out to someone with a common interest if I was so inspired.”  “I was very frustrated with this aspect of the course. It was difficult to interact because the size of the blogs were so big and I could not keep track of them, and it was difficult to find a post later, and very often the thread of communication was truncated by lack of response. For the first half of the course, I was blogging every night, but I eventually got discouraged and found time spent on readings and lectures more rewarding.”  “I am naturally an introvert who takes time to reflect on things before responding. So it was interesting to see this was the same for me in an online learning situation.

Questions