Who is still participating?
George Siemens on Nov 24th 2008
Mike Bogle asked a question last week. Being somewhat chaotically organized these days, I failed to answer him in time for his presentation – sorry Mike 
.
His question – “I’m wondering if you have a guestimate on the current number of active participants” – is valuable as we move to wrap up mode in CCK08, so I’ll tackle it anyway.
First, my time. I have spend a minimum of 12 hours per week on CCK08. Some weeks, especially at the start, were likely closer to about 30 hours. On average, my time breakdown weekly is as follows:
- Contribute to The Daily: 3-5 hours a week (this includes reading posts and including with short commentary in The Daily
- Reading moodle forum contributions: 5-7 hours a week. This includes reading and posting. Self-organization on the part of participants has minimized this over the last few weeks. I still read all of the posts and would like to respond to many, many more than I do.
- Recording/wrapup/intro for next week – this ranges from zero some weeks to ~2 hours others
- Live sessions: 3+ hours. This includes elluminate and UStream sessions.
- Responding to email (when I’m actually punctual): 2-5 hours a week
- Marking papers: ~1 hour min per paper – reading, reflecting, and trying to write something coherent and hopefully of value to the participants. Total marking time for the course (this is still ongoing, so I’m guessing): ~75 hours
I posted on my course prep time earlier – just can’t remember where. I should have kept slightly better notes, but my time spent in advance of the course in organization, pulling together readings, chats with Stephen, Dave, and others, planning interaction, creating the syllabus, setting up the site/blog/wiki are comfortably in the 60-80 hour range.
Total time I spent on CCK08: between 375-425 hours.
Ok. On to Mike’s question: How many people are still active?
Well, The Daily still has over 1800 people signed up. This means they, a) don’t know how to unsubscribe or b) are at least somewhat engaged. The moodle forum has fairly active discussion, though their are likely less than 50 participants that have been regular participants. The Second Life group has met numerous times, but I don’t know the stats or attendance numbers or their recent activity. Fleep Tuque has some thoughts on SL, but doesn’t really provide information on numbers attending and frequency of meetings. Blogs are fairly wide ranging. There is some overlap with moodle contributions, but many are only blogging. Numbers are hard to guess, but I would say we have about 35 people who are still blogging. Others have not created their own blog, but have participated through comments to those who were blogging. Delicious shows almost 1200 tags for CCK08, Google Blog Search shows just under 9000 references to CCK08, and the list of small, fragmented contributions goes on across the multiple forums and sites that comprise “being online” today.
What has been the impact of CCK08?
I don’t know. I have spoken to people at conferences who have said “I’m a student in your course”. But I often don’t recognize their name. Since CCK08 started, I’ve had the same experience at every conference I’ve presented: ALT-C in Leeds, COHERE in Torontoa, Web 2.0 in Portugal, NW Elearning Conference in Pasco, multiple presentations in Australia, Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations online conference, and last week at E-Learn in Las Vegas. The numbers I cited above – less than 200 active participants across multiple spaces – seems small in light of the number of learners we had sign up (about 2400 at one stage, I believe). This doesn’t take account of individuals that will access the course resources after the course is officially done. If the online conferences we ran last year at University of Manitoba are any indication, access after the event exceeds during-event participation.
By way of a final analysis, thousands came, less stayed, and even less contributed. Did we change the world? No. Not yet. But we (and I mean all course participants, not just Stephen and I) managed to explore what is possible online. People self-organized in their prefered spaces. They etched away at the hallowed plaque of “what it means to be an expert”. They learned in transparent environments, and in the process, became teachers to others. Those that observed (or lurked as is the more common term), hopefully found value in the course as well. Perhaps life circumstances, personal schedule, motivation for participating, confidence, familiarity with the online environment, or numerous other factors, impacted their ability to contribute. While we can’t “measure them” the way I’ve tried to do with blog and moodle participants, their continued subscription to The Daily and the comments encountered in F2F conferences suggest they also found some value in the course.
All in all. It was fun. I’ll try and pull together more cohesive reflections over the next few weeks. As will Stephen and the numerous participants, I imagine.
Filed in Uncategorized | 20 responses so far
Mike Bogle Nov 24th 2008 at 06:08 pm 1
Hi George,
Holy crap! 60 to 80 hours for CCK08 every week? That’s incredible! I’ll be very interested in reading your reflection when you find time to do it – especially with regard to one of the questions you asked us to cover in the wrap up email: “whether you feel this course approach could be applied to other subject areas.”
Based on your estimates, the issue of resource/time investment is as equal a consideration as the model itself. E.g. how could we make the model sustainable so as to not drive facilitators, educators and teachers to sheer exhaustion?
Thanks very much for taking the time to put together these numbers as well – it put’s things into perspective. For example given the 27 responses I received to the poll, if there are less than 200 participants the sample could be nearly 10%, which is a bit more respectable.
It’s unfortunate to hear now few people are now actively participating – but as you say the realities of it’s impact may not be realised until more time has passed. I for one didn’t manage to get to nearly as much of the material I’d hoped to, but have every intention of going back through it over time. Providing we continue to explore and discuss the concepts we covered I suspect the ideas will begin to spread across our respective networks. This is yet another argument in favour of Open Education. I think it has a far greater impact in the open than in closed environments. Sharing begets sharing.
In closing I’d like to say a big THANK YOU to you and Stephen for a super-human effort this session. I’ve benefited from the course significantly and look forward to researching this further as time passes. I’ve also posted my evaluation and feedback here.
Thanks again for a great session!
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Bogle Nov 24th 2008 at 06:16 pm 2
Correction, you said between 12 and 30 hours per week during session and 60 to 80 during planning stages. Even so, that’s a lot of dedication
dave cormier Nov 25th 2008 at 07:05 am 3
Being along for the ride has been an excellent experience, both from the perspective of learning about connectivism and learning about how the internets might work. The problem, as Mike noted and as we’ve seen in most of these courses is the work load. How do we account for taking this model and moving it out to more people… I’ve seen George work on this kind of stuff… he’s very efficient and can move from thought to word very quickly, which means his ‘12-30′ hours might not be the same as the same number of hours from a less experienced educator.
So many things to learn from the trailblazing that’s been done here…
d.
Silvia G. Nov 25th 2008 at 11:03 am 4
Hi George,
I suppose you know it by now, but it is always refreshing to know that you contribute to change someone’s perspective of life.
I am not a native speaker (as you may notice). I am a university professor in a Latin American country, and have been following the course very closely, though I never participated actively. However I want you to know that this has been an amazing experience and I thank you and Stephen for this course.
One of the most important things I learned from CCK08 was how “unimportant” participation can be sometimes. In fact, I think it is overrated in the school system.
I take it from my own experience. In these few weeks I have learned a lot, and much of what I have learned, has been shared and discussed with my students. However I didn’t share my ideas with the CCK08 class. It does not mean that I was not engaged in learning or sharing; on the contrary, I think that I acted attending a subconscious need to transfer, prove and validate all these new ideas in my own environment.
This small piece of knowledge gave me the key to rethink the way we have been trying to educate social groups and poor communities. They have so much going on, that they can hardly engage in formal or even informal education programs where they have to demonstrate what they have learned to the instructor. I think that what really matters to them is how and when they will use what they have learned to change their quality of life. This is something we are not giving them.
More than “contextual learning” with contents created by the instructor to fit their needs, I think that in communities, education is more about learning through sharing, talking and inventing among them based on their everyday experience, and about having their own space and time (all they need) to validate in their own contexts what others come to teach them. This gives a new perspective to teaching and learning.
Once again. Thanks.
Silvia
Mark Friedman Nov 25th 2008 at 12:05 pm 5
I can speak only for myself, one of the thousands who started this course with a very high energy level, only to watch it wane, as weeks 7, 8 and 9 passed on – and now at week 11/12, as even more work-related business strains for my attention.
I thought I would learn about a new and emerging way of seeing Web 2.0 tools for elearning, and I think that I not only achieved that goal, but also participated via my blog, via commenting on other’s blogs, and via the Daily readings — that maybe I work differently on a daily basis because of the course experience.
Maybe the entire effect of CCK08 will not be felt by the participants until after the course is over and time to reflect upon our whirlwind tour has time to sink in, and become “modus operandi”.
ruthdemitroff Nov 25th 2008 at 12:16 pm 6
I have the simplest life of the 2200 enrolled and I fell behind but didn’t give up. Most others had demanding jobs, travelled, were creating and publishing for career purposes, etc. Although we don’t see any input from them here, I suspect if we had a window into their world, a lot of output is happening. I’m sure they are grabbing anything that increases their efficiency or effectnesses without wanting the whole people/relationship aspect of connections. Our society is a knowlege vacuum cleaner sucking info in and a knowledge volcano spewing info out but only value people who give with no expectation of reciprocity. Some days I feel like Darth Vader – more machine with a distant, fuzzy memory of something else. In the movies the girl grabs the guys watch, tosses it out the window and teaches him how to be a kid again. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. It hurts our heads to even think about it.
Wendy Drexler Nov 25th 2008 at 12:28 pm 7
George,
I echo the thanks that Mike and Dave posted. The hours you spent in preparation and ongoing maintenance of the course verify my continuing experience with designing and delivering quality online instruction. It’s very time intensive. In fact, it requires considerably more time than most of my face-to-face instruction. I know I’ve said this before, but this has been one of the most valuable learning experiences I have had. The fact that it was confusing (and not particularly fun) at the beginning has been a huge lesson in how to approach this with my own students. As I’ve been helping them build their first personal learning networks, I encourage them and reassure them that it’s confusing at first…but it WILL get better. It goes a long way to calm their anxiety. Connected learning is a paradigm shift for both teacher and student. It’s comforting to know that we’re all in this together. A very warm, heart felt thank you to you, Stephen, Dave, and everyone else who contributed to my learning. (Thanks also for the data.)
Peace!
Wendy
Fleep Tuque Nov 25th 2008 at 01:01 pm 8
I can’t really say how many of the SL cohort are still “active” since I’m not sure what the definition of active is, but my guess is, there are probably 15-20 people still paying enough attention to CCK08 either through email, twitter, blogs, The Daily, or other means to at minimum be following its progress, and depending on the thing that catches their eye, take some action in relation to the course, such as reading something, watching a video, replying to an email or tweet, or commenting on a blog. My last post about CCK08SL generated messages from 16 people from the cohort (most saying they were in the same boat as me, sorry they didn’t have more time, but felt enriched by what time they had spent on it). Some other numbers from my post in case it might be useful info:
Here are some stats on the results, as of November 20, 2008:
- 133 people initially signed up for the Second Life cohort on the web form.
- 94 of those people responded to the very first email inviting them to join the SL Cohort Googlegroup (email list)
- 46 people responded to an email and expressed a time preference for synchronous meetings on Doodle
- There were 72 messages posted to the email list (only members could post, 69 web views of the discussion (anyone/public could view)
- 16 people responded to the invitation to create an account on the wiki to edit it, and 4 people took the time to make any edits.
- It generated 88 emails, IMs, tweets, or messages from Second Life that I would classify as “support requests” – these were not on one of the lists, they were personal messages to me asking for assistance. (I think I answered all of them, though sometimes not as quickly as I would have liked.)
- In Second Life, a total of 808 unique avatars visited the Connectivism Village. These 808 visitors spent a total 14,652 minutes there. (244 hours total, a half an hour per person averaged across all 808 unique visitors, but my intuitive sense from getting a daily traffic report is that about 30 people spent the vast majority of time there, coming back repeatedly week over week. I have the data if anyone is crazy to do more analysis, but it’s in plain text form, a separate text file for each date.)
- The highest number of visitors together at the Connectivism village at the same time, throughout the whole period, was a max of 14 simultaneous avatars.
- 7 people in the “experienced SL’er” category created a kiosk to share info about their other SL projects.
- 5 people in the “new to SL” category took advantage of the free home/office and personalized their space.
- 8 people contributed some kind of object, build, or project in the cohort sandbox.
Full post and reflection at http://fleeep.net/blog/2008/11/21/cck08-off-the-wagon-but-not-off-my-mind/
=)
Ken Anderson Nov 25th 2008 at 10:02 pm 9
I have to confess that when reading some of the above I am reminded of things that Catherine said in the early forums about some small percentage of the people providing the bulk of the sharing/posts/ideas etc., and while I am very happy that the ‘lurkers’ got something out of it for themselves, I am also disappointed that they contributed little or nothing to the rest of us. In some sense, this course may be a microcosm of other aspects of human interaction: a lot of takers, few givers.
DolorsCapdet Nov 25th 2008 at 10:24 pm 10
Hi, George,
You asked what were the details of participation in Second Life. Fleep has already given the data from the Anglo-Saxon. Allow me, therefore, to show you the part of the Hispanic sector, incidentally, very active.
An important part of the activity of Connectivitas, working group set up last June 27, by Esperanza Roman and myself to study the effects of Connectivism in the Spanish-speaking world, has been developed within Second Life.
Since mid-July we have visited a total of 804 people (204 in the headquarters of Connectivitas and 600 in the auditorium of Uni-Hispana, including those attending the conferences of George Siemens and Stephen Downes).
In Second Life, we have made nine formal synchronous meetings (seven of the group and two conferences). The largest number of avatars has been collected synchronously is 90.
The duration of these sessions has never been less than an hour while some have long exceeded the two hours.
Best regards,
Sia Vogel Nov 26th 2008 at 11:22 am 11
Hello George and others here. I am still in this course. Sometimes during the past weeks I was a bit absent, but never gone. It was a great pleasure to do this. A have discovered many web-logs, friends in Facebook, Twitter contacts and I read so much interesting stuff about knowledge, connectivism, e-learning, future of education. I was involved in this matters mostly since marsh this year and now I am so much further in knowing!! Most of the time it was to difficult to talk during the Elluminate and Ustream Sessions, but regularly I used the chat to join. My work for this course was for sure every week 4 to 6 hours. Tonight, wednesday 26/11 will be my last contact in a life-session. Friday I have to care for a very old and very ill friend. My learning was and is very important, but there are still things more important. Thank you George, thank you via this way Stephen, Thank you all participants to share all your knowledge and power. Great!! Just great it was.
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Maru del Campo Nov 27th 2008 at 02:55 am 13
Hi George!
I have expressed my gratitude is several venues and here it comes again. My deepest thanks to you, Stephen, Dave and all the participants. Knowing the number of hours you spend in the course, makes me admire you even more. To have done so much in the middle of your travelling is awesome.
I came totally illiterate on the online academic side. I invest on average 5 hours a day on working days and 10 or more during weekends to barely cope with the course. Once a week I stay up all night.
This has a downside that I have to take care of, my peers get the impression that to teach online requires more hours and more effort than to do so f2f. Even when I ask them to look back to when they started teaching f2f, when they spent 3 hours to prepare a one hour lesson, the learning curve still seems too steep.
On the other hand they see me happy and truly engaged in my learning, as a result they are curious. I hope to find a way to engage them.
The language barrier is another issue I have to deal with. My online material is in English. I started the SLexperiments meetings in English and now I have started them in Spanish. My cooperation has been with the Hispanic community, doing translations and slide shows in both languages. I will continue on that path, as Sia expresses, change will come about eventually.
Best Regards. Maru :X
Ramiro Arias Nov 27th 2008 at 11:42 am 14
If “still participating” means: read quite a few discussions, quite a few blogs, listening SB and GS streamigns and learning everyday things that are important to me and to those who listening to me.
I AM STILL PARTICIPATING
Regards
mind my bad english writting
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Shirley Williams Nov 28th 2008 at 08:01 am 16
I originally wasn’t going to sign up for the course because I knew it was a busy time of the year.
But as it started I saw lots of people talking about it and felt I was missing out, one of my colleagues told me I didn’t need to commit much time to participate. So I signed up. For the first few weeks this was ok – but then the really busy time started in all the other aspects of my life and CCK08 got put on the back burner.
So I’m sorry to say I became a drop out.
However from those first few weeks I gained a lot and I am grateful for the fact I was able to participate.
Bob Bell (b-ob) Nov 28th 2008 at 09:33 pm 17
George,
I assume at some point the Moodle course will be taken down and I will lose access to all the discussions in the forum – a shame.
Would it be possible to do a download/back-up of the Moodle course and make the file available for download? I think it would be informative to re-instate it in my own (local) Moodle application and read through the the forum posts at my leisure.
Please let me know. Perhaps others would be interested in having this resource too?
Bob
Heli Nurmi Dec 3rd 2008 at 10:09 am 18
Hi all,
I try if it’s still possible to answer.
It is the feeling of emptyness that is going on after the course. I hope that all is kept open during Christmas Holiday .. to read again and understand deeper.
I begun a little late but then I did every week something. I have used 145 hours for studies in 12 weeks, varying from 2 to 20h/week: Weekends and evenings often. I am wondering why I don’t know what I have learnt but perhaps it comes later, time will tell. I have learnt to use English, anyway. I enjoyed the journey, I am sure about it!
Thanks to all co-learners and facilitators!
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Mary Dec 4th 2008 at 02:46 pm 20
Dear Colleagues,
This is my first experience with an online course, and there are many things that I have learned through participation.
I participated regularly in the course, doing the readings, attending illuminate lectures, viewing slideshows and presentations on Blip TV and You Tube. I probably spent between ten hours each week doing the readings, attending a variety of sessions, and writing. I spent another five to ten hours each week innovating the online components and examining the pedagogy and the entire structure of the four hybrid courses that I am currently teaching. I discussed what I was learning as I engaged in the MOOCA with teachers, as we explored ways to educate children and youth in the new literacies, and as they developed online components for their K12 classrooms, parent workshops, and professional development.
There was substantive content in the course, thus, I learned a great deal. I was already familiar with George Seimens’ theorizing about connectivism and connected learning, but I did not realize the extent to which that theorizing was influenced by his background in technology. I first located his work through a website that categorized his work as an instructional design model, under the general rubric of constructivism. I am not young, therefore, I have experienced the development, implementation, and transformation of instructional design models and have a clear sense of when, why, and how to use ID to promote learning. I have a clear understanding of the limitations and merits of various ID models and their application to education in general and literacy education in particular. What was intriguing to me was experiencing the shift that is happening as we move from face-to-face to online environments for learning. I was after all experiencing the shift… learning about my learning… thinking about my thinking… and interacting with a variety of people in a variety of virtual settings.
Through the course, I have developed a deeper understanding of the development of this line of thinking and its impact on teaching and learning. I have deep knowledge and considerable expertise in the area of literacy education and related fields, which has been an asset to me during the course. I neither felt overwhelmed by the volume of the reading nor the concepts being introduced. I did feel inhibited as a participant in the course because I lacked adequate orientation to the technical aspects of participation. For example, I did not understand how to set up Google Reader, a Blog, or any of the other sharing formats in the course, thus, I limited my communication to contributions during Illuminate sessions, most of which I attended on Wednesdays at ll, and to the Moodle Forum, which I visited fairly regularly. I was able to become a more frequent contributer to discussions and to locate resources better after I discovered how to access the Google Reader feature.
I have to admit that I directed my attention first to understanding the content that was available on the course wiki. I put my energy and limited time into doing the readings so that I could understand the concepts being discussed. I was less aware that in an online course, one aspect of the learning is setting up the personal learning network, using all of those wonderful open source resources (Wordpress, Slideshare, Flickr, Blip TV) I know that the wiki made it clear that these features were available, but I did not know if they required me to pay for the services or not. I could have been set up prior to the course, if I had understood the features better and if I had been able to access technical assistance ( a teenager in the household, a technology specialist at work).
In retrospect, I am not sure that I would have established a blog and put myself out there in cyberspace as any kind of authority on connectivism and connected knowledge at the beginning of the course. I am a neophyte when it comes to online learning of this type.
Some of the bloggers in the course communicate sadness that the contributions of lurkers were not shared socially. It might be important to understand why people did not participate in the social aspects of the course more fully.
How could I participate in a socially-appropriate way in this discourse community? I could not even set myself up as a learner! I was grateful to the bloggers for helping me to visualize how to set up a blog and how to interact within the blogosphere. Perhaps in the future, when I take an online course, I would establish a blog. Moreover, I think that I may build blogging into my courses. However, I do think that many people are very, very busy, and it would be difficult to maintain the blog over time.
Again…. there are barriers to joining an online community. I wanted to participate in the Chilbo Community and did apply for it, but I never could get there. That was a big disappointment for me… Either my password did not work, or I could not find the community. Fleep discussed some of the issues in her post. She understands how to use the technology, and might have felt frustrated. I was just confused.
Thus in response to those barriers, I established a personal learning space on my own computer. I hope to be able to communicate about this experience in more conventional ways. I tried to connect through the Moodle, but I did not establish a presence within the Blogosphere. I must note that Nancy Whyte’s presentation and the link to the resources and training on her blog facilitated my participation in the course, but that occurred late in the game. I did feel very appreciative of the social network and I did feel as if I could become a part of that network that was being formed. I not feel as if I was viewed as a participant in the social network, which was not surprising to me. I was not a credit student in the course and I did not have a presence in the blogospere. I had some regrets. I learned about the next course, the one offered by Dave Cormier, after it had begun. I would have enrolled in that course as a credit student. I feel I learned so much in the course. I learned content and I learned that there are many people in the network who are working to harness the power of the Internet, leading interesting lives, and doing some interesting work/research/teaching and learning. I learned as much from the critics as I did from the converts. Thank you all.
As importantly, I developed a deeper understanding of connectivism and its impact on teaching and learning, thanks to Stephen and George’s wonderful facilitation, which enabled me the opportunity to experience… to discover… and to understand concepts… in an intelligent, conceptually-integrated, and socially-engaging manner, while I was developing expertise…. and technical skills…necessary for learning and teaching in online networks.
Sincerely,
Mary