LeaderMOOC Behind the scenes: platform choice and registrations

The launch date of LeaderMOOC is approaching very soon: in about a month we are starting the most exciting project I'm involved in this year. So I thought I started with a 'behind the scenes' blog series and share the "making of" with you all.

Spreading the passion

What happened before was that we had a long discovery and design phase in the project and talked with many internal and external people. That resulted in 'golden MOOC design advice' I've shared over not one or two but three previous posts. We are making a new MOOC here, we are not transforming an existing course into a MOOC format. So the time we took to get all this advice was also time we got buy in from a lot of people and get their support. And that paid of: I'm so amazed by the many many enthusiastic colleague in our different campuses around the world that have stepped up and put some of their otherwise 'hidden' skills into practice for this project.

Image: enthusiastic CCL colleagues busy making a video

The platform choice

One of the big choices we had to make over the past months was the platform choice. Are we going for one of the dominant xMOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX or Udacity? Will we be using one of the MOOC startups like Eliademy? Or are we using social cloud platforms such as Oxwall, or open source such as Moodle? Will we be making our own mash-up with free tools such as Google Sites? Will we be hosting ourselves or relying on cloud services?

The last question was clear to us from the start: as a MOOC is supposed to be massive by design, don't jeopardize the good relationships with your internal IT department by hosting it yourself. So we looked at about five different alternatives that were hosted and supported. The criteria of course included the functionality of the platform compared to what we wanted to do, the ease of use, legal terms (involving our legal department), price if applicable, support, etc. One of the benefits of using an established MOOC platform is the reach of your MOOC: if you use your own mash-up you need to do your own marketing and reach everyone yourself. The MOOC platforms already have thousands of potential students. Very soon our option A was to use one of the main MOOC platforms, with option B to make a mash-up of the best-of-breed free cloud platforms.  Also the reputation of the platform was important to us. We have a stellar brand name to defend as CCL, so in the end we wanted to go with a platform that selected and managed its courses well and did QA on them instead of allowing just any MOOC attempt. Some MOOC providers like Coursera only work with a list of Ivy league universities and aren't interested in "lone MOOCs".

In the end we went for canvas.net, a platform run by Instructure.

Image: Enrollment page for LeaderMOOC on the Canvas platform

We are very happy with this choice. To get on canvas.net, you need to fill in a form and accept the terms. After that, a Canvas employee will talk you through the acceptance process and everything you need to provide. The process involves a review on their side on the kind of course as they don't accept all submissions, but also two reviews by their instructional designers who will give you tips on making the most out of the platform and creating a course that works across devices. For the first review they will typically ask you to create one full week. We have found the people at Canvas to be very responsive and supportive and a great help. One particularity with Canvas is that they only have two dates a month to start up new courses as they want to control the load on their servers. So we had to bring our intended start date of Sept. 14 to Sept. 8. Actually, the schedule is the same, but now we will open up with an 'Week 0 - Orientation Week' and open up Week 1 on the 14th.

We are open for enrollment now

So if you want to join us, feel free!
Link: www.leadermooc.net for all information and FAQ.