SMITHX MOOC
As the Instructional Designer for Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World, I have had the opportunity to design the user experience for a little over 14,000 students enrolled to date in Smith College's first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).
My role entailed designing the UX and interactive content, building the course on the edX platform, managing course communication and discussion board activity, promoting student engagement, promoting and producing live streams, and managing social media. One of my key objectives for designing this course was to implement open-source tools wherever possible. With this in mind, Smith students created timelines of each of the 9 activists featured in the course using TimelineJS, an open-source tool developed by Knight Lab at Northwestern University. I combined quizzes with these and asked students to research the answers within the attached timelines and implemented an introduction icebreaker using ZeeMap which allowed our MOOC students to post a pin on their location in the world to introduce themselves. Professor Duncan hosted Live Meeting Q&A sessions with two of her TAs on YouTube and the final session included renowned activist, Gloria Steinem. Our promotional efforts were done primarily through social media using Facebook and Twitter.
One of the unique blended learning aspects of this project is that the Smith seminar students enrolled in Professor Lauren Duncan's on-ground course did the research and developed the timelines as part of their course curriculum. They were assigned the task of creating content for the MOOC version of the course and facilitating the discussion boards which pedagogically provided a great opportunity to teach peers what they were learning in class. More about this and the students highlighted in the course can be read in the About the Course Team.
Link to the article I wrote on the concepts behind the user experience design for this MOOC
MOOC User Experience Design: Reflecting Smith College in a Global Online Course.
Video promo Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World Intro
Access to the archived course on edX Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World