SMS Management & Technology : Six Ways To Gain The Most From Your Online Learning Experience

But firstly, what about the platform? It was actually pretty easy to use - it seemed to work with all browsers and devices I used. I haven't tried other platforms but my experience with Coursera was hassle free. And what about the content? My sampling is that these courses are not gimmicks - you can find really inspiring content by excellent professors and educators. You can also do non-credit courses online direct from other universities such as Harvard. See: http://ht.ly/kLNVb However, be aware that the MOOC courses are not as yet recognised by educational institutions or as yet by many employers so you should not expect a big professional boost by undertaking one. But you can certainly expect to be inspired, informed, educated and engaged - and to have some fun.

So now for my learnings:

1. CHOOSE YOUR COURSE WISELY - AND LIMIT YOUR DESIRE!

I searched online for a bit of background about the professor before I did my course and also found a past student who raved about it. That got me settled into my choice. Then I started to search the catalogue and signed up for another couple out of interest. But be careful with this - it's easy to get carried away and take on too much. In the end I only stayed engaged with the first course although I did keep browsing across the course material for the others.

2. THERE IS PLENTY OF ONLINE SUPPORT - MAKE USE OF IT

I didn't need too much support in the end from fellow course participants because I had other colleagues with some knowledge in the space, but you can readily find a community of students online and the Coursera folk and lecturers did a good job of helping the formation of communities of like-minded students (e.g. they facilitated grouping Spanish speaking students into an online forum cohorts, English speakers into another one etc.)

3. GET ORGANISED - REALLY ORGANISED!

OK - we have all studied as students and probably haphazardly with hormones out of control and all that - but since you may well be doing a MOOC on top of a day job, you need to be clear that it will involve lectures, assignments and an exam. So you need to commit. I used a tagging approach with Evernote to group all of my homework, my reading and other online resources and downloaded the video lessons for additional review. But there are a few traps: while the video lessons could easily be downloaded and watched offline, taking this approach prevented a useful feature from operating, namely the quiz function. The quiz enables the lecturer to test your learning while you are watching the video. However, downloading loses that feature - so what I did was watch online and then download and watch the vids for revision while at the gym. The online version of the vids had another great feature - you could incrementally speed them up or slow them down which was wonderful. This didn't seem to work with the offline versions.

So now we are all organised, we have our PDFs of the lectures in our nice eFolders, we have followed the links to the recommended reading and loaded them as PDFs or online reference links so we are all set. What then?

4. CHECK OUT THE COURSE WIKI THOROUGHLY

I found a few tips and tricks buried deep in the wiki and the syllabus outline which I dug out then shared with other folk doing the course. For example, in my course the graphical software required some plug-ins to work and these extensions were not obviously easy to find. Make sure you don't get frustrated hunting around - almost certainly someone in the course has done the hard yards and shared a link like I did. If not on the wiki, then the course forums are a good place to ask.

5. REMEMBER YOUR STUDY TECHNIQUES - AND USE THEM!

We all know that Recognition seems powerful, but is actually superficial, while Recall is deeper but harder i.e. really recalling the key points you have been learning about. But actually it's Understanding that is what learning is all about - and this needs to be built up step by step. Just idly perusing the lecture slides is unlikely to be enough to get to Understanding. In my case, I found that revising my homework and writing up my key learnings was useful - I put them onto Evernote so that I could revise easily when I was mobile. Plus talking with others and gaining insights.

6. GET INVOLVED WITH THE COMMUNITY - AND DON'T FORGET TO HAVE FUN

The community of other students can be engaged via the forums and the Google Hangouts or similar which get organised. All good fun - check them out and see if you can participate with other students. I hooked up with a couple of colleagues so the online forums weren't so important to me but I think they are a blessing to many. The online Google hangouts looked to be a bit of fun but I was always in a bad time zone difference so I only watched the video recordings of the sessions. Of course, learning is both a fun thing, but also a hard thing. There are always conflicts for your time, there is the feeling of initial incompetence to overcome step by step, and there is the challenge of being open to new thoughts. The MOOC is not a substitute for a University experience, so it's best to think of it as like a primer or summer school, but without the on-campus social experience. However, there is a community experience, it just has to be distance and virtual-oriented.

So it can be fun - my MOOC experience was and I can highly recommend it. The next one I do will be for a really creative outlet of mine and will not involve software tools (at least that's my current promise to myself!)

Final tip - try to find a course that aligns to your interests and / or your work (ideally that's both right?) In my case the real-time media engagement work we do as consultants at SMS aligned nicely to the social network analysis and bigdata analytic techniques we find useful. Check out some of our blogs at: http://ht.ly/kLNLr Also for an example of a network graph in the eHealth space (which is my area of interest) look at: http://ht.ly/kLNmE

Happy e-learning!