learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Kaido Kikkas et al.
A typical task set included weekly 'lecture' texts (1 or 2 per week; available from the course page at
Wikiversity), a weekly blogging task at the end of the lecture text (to be completed by the next
Monday noon) and a weekly Skype text chat meeting (at SSNC and ELNM; lasting typically 1-1.5
hours). In addition, everyone was to post to the course forum following the weekly topic, but this task
did not have fixed weekly regimen. Finally, the SSNC and ELNM had to write a wiki-based group
paper and review another group's work (as an individual blog post).
The SSNC and ELNM courses lacked formal examination, the ESPAIT featured an optional written
exam (a 'backup' option for less active people or also an extra way to raise the grade – but it was
possible to earn the highest grade without it). Thus, the SSNC and ELNM did not have the 'end rush'
at all, while at the ESPAIT it was much milder than is typically seen at traditional courses.
The exact graduation systems varied somewhat by course, but a typical one consisted of:
40% - the wiki-based group paper (or in the case of ESPAIT, a written exam essay)
35% - blogging tasks (typically compact pieces of opinion, ~1 page each)
25% - forum posts (of substance – the 'me too!'-type and offtopic were typically not counted in)
10% - weekly Skype chats (for consulting as well as community building).
Note: the course point system featured a ~10% surplus, designed to give students some choice.
3.2 Approach 2: Blog-centred course designs
These courses were organized as blogging seminars with weekly topics and assignments. New
assignments were given every Monday, the students had to write a blog post by the end of the week.
In addition to Wikiversity, a course blog was used in all courses. Wikiversity was used for course
syllabus and enrolments while weekly assignments and summaries were published in the course
blog.
The 10-week online courses WSRRME and CUOER included a video conference during the first and
the last week of the course. Weeks 5 and 10 were left without assignments so that people could
complete the assignments they had not managed to do in time. In case of Master level courses there
were also 4...6 classroom meetings during the course. Besides individual blogging, the Master level
courses required substantial group work. Students typically used a shared blog, a wiki or Google
Docs to complete the group assignment.
To emphasize openness, the learning environment consisted mostly of tools that were open source or
provided with free hosting. The course blog was hosted at WordPress.com, the learning resources
were published at LeMill and SlideShare and links were shared through Delicious. In the CUOER
course also Skype was used for text chat. In 2010 it was decided to use Twitter instead of Skype for
rapid communication. However, in Estonian context Twitter is not still actively used by the educational
community. Another service that was added in 2010 was Mendeley, used to share references to
research papers. The only closed tool used during the courses was FlashMeeting that was used for
video conferences in the WSRRME and CUOER courses.
A complicated issue in open courses is to manage the list of participants and to aggregate all their
blog posts. In the first courses, Wikiversity was used for course enrolments and blog posts were
aggregated using Pageflakes. This required a lot of manual work from the facilitator. That led us to
design and develop the EduFeedr tool that handles course enrolments, manages assignments and
aggregates all the blog posts (Põldoja, 2010). Since 2010 EduFeedr has been used for managing the
courses and Wikiversity is used only for course syllabus that can be collaboratively edited.
4. Discussion
To start with, we have to agree with Seely Brown and Adler (2008) in that the world is becoming both
flat
(in that the virtual communication has eliminated many obstacles by reaching almost any place in the
world) and spiky (in that the local level of productivity and innovation will determine the success of a
location, and the differences will increase). Thus, it is necessary to not only supply the next
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