LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Orientation Week design

Setting the stage

This morning LeaderMOOC opened its doors and the 8 week pilot experience has started. As Hannibal used to say in 'The A-team' TV-show when I was a kid : "I love it when a plan comes together!"

I wanted to share some thoughts that went in the design of Week 0 or Orientation Week as we call it. Because we are starting 'softly' with an orientation week to get participants familiar:

• with the concept of a MOOC and what to expect and make the most out of it, 
• with the flow of the course and the topics we have lined up, including the RoadMap metaphor and LeaderMOOC badge
• with our 2 hosts and with each other - we want people to start connecting with others in the course or bring their friends in
• with the canvas.net platform - especially the peer reviewed assignments are a more tricky piece for people to get the hang of but it is also an essential piece. We also include a few discussions to get people familiar with the forums. 
• with the repeated module structure. We made Week 0 compatible with the repeated structure we'll have in the rest of the modules. We introduce the topic, have 4-5 subtopics that go into the theme with for each video and extra recommended readings and assignment/discussions, a summary page to bring it all together, a roadmap assignment to transfer to their own context and a 'where to go from here' ending page with a sneak preview video of the next week.
• with the topic of leadership. We hit people rather hard on this first week with a question even seasoned leaders have great difficulty answering: why would anyone want to be led by you?
• and of course we want enought people to fill in our intake survey so we know what to start designing for Week 6 - Mystery Week. The topic of that week can be voted on by participants.

We always had the idea to open up the platform before our Week 1 on The Leader Mindset to get people familiar with MOOCs as they can get quite 'messy' and overwhelming. We expect this to be the first MOOC experience for a lot of participants, so we want them to expect an overload in information, insights and discussions. Noone can drink from a fire hose (it is quite lethal), so making up your mind on what you follow and what not is crucial.
But it is only since June we settled on the idea of making this pre-MOOC phase a separate week, that we numbered week 0. The direct reason for that is that our platform Canvas.net only starts new courses twice a month on fixed dates and that we had earlier communicated a start date of Sept 14. So adding week 0 in front of that made a lot of sense. And actually, I'm very proud of the week 0 we got together now: it gives a good introduction in all the topics above. We'll see how it turns out. The benefit of starting like this is that people get familiar with the topic, the platform, the MOOC concept and each other prior to plunging into content. The risk is that in the week where we will have most people (the infamous dropout rates, you know!) we tell least about leadership.

MOOC dropout ratios from the e-Literate blog: Will we have people better orientated with a Week 0 Orientation Week to get more dropouts in week 0 and less later on? We'll see...

From a designer's perspective, I'm very curious to see the answers to the very difficult question 'why would anyone want to be led by you?'. We titled that section 'why are you here?' to have people think of why they joined this MOOC.

Some eyeball statistics at opening:

• We have 3440 people enrolled.
• 720 people watched our promo video we launched last week on YouTube.

We (Ron, Sandrine, me) spend a lot of time ironing out the content in the past weeks, of course now we need to keep doing that as we make the MOOC week by week, but also pay attention to the interactions and the community forming. As the advice of Canvas.net goes at the opening of a course: If you ignore your course, so will your students.