MOOCs and Libraries: A Brewing Collaboration

Introduction

MOOCS: Assessing the Landscape and Trends of Open Online Learning

We’ve come a long way since our first MOOC in the fall of 2012, the so-called “Year of the MOOC”! After working with a broad range of courses, across four MOOC platforms and numerous sponsor institutions, we have noticed some trends. While there seems to be little danger now that MOOCs will displace traditional education, there are exciting developments that seem to indicate that MOOCs—or at least MOOC-like-objects are here to stay and influencing teaching and learning for all of today’s students.

This presentation will detail some of what ProQuest SIPX has learned working with both schools and publishers during the last three years.

The RootsMOOC Project or: that time we threw a genealogy party and 4,000 people showed up

In order to teach a large audience the basics of genealogy research, the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University (ZSR) and the State Library of North Carolina (SLNC) entered into a yearlong partnership to develop RootsMOOC, a massive open online course (MOOC) for beginning genealogy researchers. This IMLS grant-funded project eventually enrolled more than 4,000 learners, more than 500 of whom were from North Carolina. RootsMOOC provided participants easy, free access to high-quality genealogy instruction in a highly interactive and social learning environment, which sits squarely within the philosophical mission of libraries to foster lifelong learning in their communities.

This presentation will highlight the logistics of and challenges involved in producing, marketing, and managing the course, including content creation and course building, forming partnerships with libraries of different types and with external organizations, and collaboratively managing an online community of learners.

MOOCS and Me: Georgetown's Experience with MOOC Production

The good, the bad, the ugly. By now you've probably seen MOOCS that fit in each category, but from an academic digital creator's standpoint, how do you go about creating a great looking MOOC, while implementing effective and substantive pedagogical practices? My participation in the "MOOCS and Libraries" talk will walk you through the production highs and lows of MOOC creation at Georgetown University. You will be able to gain insight of the procedures that were undergone during MOOC pre-production and learn how this planning translated into a finished product on EdX's platform.