Jörg Pareigis -

Excited about 2nd run of @openUCE

In 10 days, we will start the second run of our open networked learning course "Understanding Customer Experience". We got a new homepage and I'm testing all new functions and gimmicks. Stay tuned for more info. Ah, btw. If you want to join the conversation, connect your blog and join us on Twitter using #uce152.

Day two of cMOOC with internet havoc

What a rollercoaster ride the first two days of our new open course have been. After a fantastic start yesterday, with a lot of new registrations and the first participants connecting their blogs to the course homepage, the unthinkable happened this afternoon. A digging accident in the east of Sweden damaged two major fiberinternet cables, resulting in unaccessibility of our university homepages, including our course homepages. We actually chose our university's servers to run our homepage over an external webhotel, for safety reasons. What an irony.

After six hours of uncertainty and mild to high levels of stress, the internet connection is up again and so is traffic on our course homepages. Hopefully, this was the first and the last major technical hick-up during the course, but it certainly shows how dependent and vulnerable we are. When I think about it, the incident makes another completely unexpected argument for a personal learning environment, instead of the LMS. As our LMS was down, Twitter and Youtube, where up, where our video lectures are stored, the blogs of the students were up and learning in a distance course would still have been possible.

Tomorrow, we will have a kick-off meeting for the officially registered students in the course and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the participants in person. I am also very curious about what day three of our course might bring.

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by miguel77

Start of my first open networked learning course

After a good year of planning, I finally kicked-off my first cMOOC today. Almost one and a half years ago, I started this blog as a participant in FDOL. Today, already on the first day of the course, I have participants from Sweden and around the world connecting their blogs to our course homepage. This is such a great reward for the hard work me and my colleagues put into developing the course and a fantastic feeling!

The development of the course would not have been possible without the fantastic community of open scholars out there, such as Chrissi Nerantzi, Lars Uhlin, Sue Beckingham, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Martin Weller or Jim Groom to name just a few. Particularly the last mentioned opened my eyes with his inspirational keynote speech at #mri13. I am truly thankful for getting in touch with such a bunch of inspirational scholars which lead the way for me and our team at the Service Research Center in the development of our courses.

I am really looking forward to the next 20 weeks of open networked learning and cannot wait to engage with the variety of practitioners (more than 80 and counting), who already signed up for the course.

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Drriss & Marrionn