Number 14, ‘Be clear about your objectives’ is particularly important and it fits with many of the other points, such as 26 ‘Have a clear, stated reason for all synchronous sessions’. There should be a clear reason for everything that is included in the course and the students should be able to clearly see why things are included and why they are doing it.

In relation to that, I would go further than 31 & 31 (about group work). I think informal group work should be encouraged but I think course designers should think long and hard about whether structured group work (for want of a better name) is really necessary. In my experience, students with similar interests or from similar locations flock together given the space and opportunity to do so. I took a Coursera MOOC, for example, found a group of people from or related to my country in the forum and we all helped each other out and offered support and ideas. There was no official group work in the course but there was lots of it going on because the space was there for it to happen.

Finally, about the dropout rate (Number 8), there are clearly going to be high-drop out rates when there are such a wide range of people doing low-stakes courses, and in many cases, there will be nothing the course organizers could have done to keep the students on the course. However–please forgive my idealistic teacher voice here–I still think that educators hold a responsibility to think about problems students might meet and to put measures in place to minimise them where possible. For example, if you have people signing up to your course from all over the world, you should probably ask yourself if you are doing enough to make the language accessible for that kind of audience. Are you adding subtitles/providing transcripts for all your video/audio material? Are you avoiding using idiomatic language that is often highly specific to a certain culture? Just like any regular course, you are more likely to keep your students if you have considered who is going to take it and have made efforts to make it as accessible as possible for them.

41. Life is full of tradeoffs (e.g. ‘brilliant course’ vs ‘shipping it soon’): don’t spend so long perfecting your approach to the previous 40 tips that you miss the boat.

A great example of the ‘do it now and see how it goes’ is personified by Prof Keith Devlin of Stanford who has created a very interesting Mathematics course on Coursera while actively blogging about his trials and tribulations at http://mooctalk.org/ He’s no learning theorist, but that’s precisely the point – his reflections are worth a lot, and he’s having a large impact. Sure, everyone is going to reinvent numerous wheels, but that makes for a great ‘evolutionary stew’!

FYI I don’t really follow the OER/MOOC literature these days – this was a random ‘dip in the water’ by a longtime/passionate OU evangelist, who has also enrolled in some Coursera courses (very enjoyable).

Best wishes,

-Marc

Really interesting take on motivations for sharing. I think (in OER/academic fields anyway) we also need to do more to encourage and support the habit of sharing too, so that it becomes part of everyday practice. I guess altruism and habits are pretty inter-twinned so I think explore some models as you suggest could be very valuable.