Land Restoration & Afforestation by Alison & Ann:

Structure: Undergraduate level course covering a broad range of environmental issues, from the history of deforestation to restoration techniques. Members were given a large syllabus of suggested readings and asked to discuss topics on one central blog.

Design Lessons Learned: Academic/journal articles were unpopular and difficult to read considering the workload was supposed to be small. Although conversations were lively at the beginning, the dryness of material and technological difficulties, and more importantly the lack of community building, led the course to dissolve. Community building is essential. Syllabus materials need to be engaging and entertaining, and some sort of synchronous communication should be formed. We will switch to a project based format for the new semester!

Neuroethics course lead by Ana Rosa:

Participation: students abandoned the course after a good beginning. Some of them were students attending college, with papers to write and exams to study for. Some others were college teachers, also involved in their teaching activities.

Course load and design: I have included several articles to read. I should have required just a few articles and indicate supplementary reading.

Interactivity: Course lacked interactivity. Synchronous communication is really, really necessary to provide a sense of community.

Course theme: I think of the course I organized as some sort of college seminar. I am not sure if that model works well. Maybe focusing on more basic, not so specialized courses are a better idea to increase the number of students enrolled in our courses. A basic Physics (or calculus I) course would attract much more attention from community. I wouldn’t completely abandon the idea of more specialized courses. Maybe in the future we could separate basic courses from more specific subjects (undergraduate courses, graduate or seminar courses, etc).

Open Creative Nonfiction by Jane:

          Assignments: The original outline required a greater workload, assigning new creative writing and critiques each week. Though this was adjusted throughout the course to alternate weeks of writing and critique, workload was still an issue. Most of the participants were full time career persons and parents, so creating new writing every other week was too much.

          Communication: The original course had a wiki, a course blogs, individual blogs, a listserv, individual emails, and weekly synchronous small group meetings. This was far too many communication channels as participants were often confused where to check for new information even when channels were clarified. Recommend two communication channels max for the next iteration of the course. Also find alternatives to requiring synchronous small group meetings as participants were from various timezones. Offer free and easy tools to organize and meet synchronously if necessary.

          Structure: The course ran for six weeks, but a few participants felt that they needed more time with less weekly involvement versus compacting the course into six weeks. Recommend a two part course spanning 12 weeks with less writing assigned each week.

          Resources: Though a number of resources were offered, a great deal were optional. A few participants felt that some resources should be mandatory, even if they were not "free" as long as an affordable version was offered. Additionally, they requested more resources in terms of actual professional writing samples.

Cyberpunk Literature by Bekka Kahn:

Assignments: Each week had a theme, which concerned either one or several of the core texts. A question was posed the week before, and participants blogged an article on the group blog which explored the question. Each particiapnt was then encouraged to comment and critique each other's blog (and grades were given by the level of interaction) and the question and responses formed the topic for discussion of the next meeting. While most participants managed the assignments really well, the amount of reading of full-lenght novels was difficult for some of them.

Communication: We used a mailing list and a blog to share information and resources, and had an embedded chat client in the blog. It worked well, mainly becuase all participants were in similar time-zones, and all were at ease with thes modes of communication.

Structure: The course ran for six weeks officially, but the group decided that it would like to stay in contact and work on other projects together. As mentioned above, the amount of reading was large, and several participants mentioned that they would like to have had more time to read, as they were rushing through the novels and films assigned.

Resources: we used novels and films that were deemed to be widely available in a non-free context (ie: books and dvds). Some participants may have located version online, but these were not uploaded to the project site. Secondary resources, however, like journal articles, websites and essays that were online were linked to and used widely by the participants. This was a traditional literature course, so the resources were traditional. Other iternations may choose to use the growing number of openly lisenced cyberpunk writing that exists.