ds106: Not a Course, Not Like Any MOOC
ds106 is neither a product nor a magic bullet to "fix" education. But within ds106 are applicable attributes that can be used elsewhere:
The Assignment Collection includes over 500 creative activities, all contributed by participants. Rather than being assigned specific tasks, UMW students are assigned, say, 15 stars of Audio Assignments (stars being a crowdsourced difficulty rating). Students are free to choose the challenges that appeal to them. Via tags, the work that students publish for a particular assignment are linked from the original assignment as an example for others to see.
The Daily Create provides a regular dose of creative challenges in the areas of photography, drawing, audio, video, or writing. Designed to take 20 minutes or less, responses are shared via Flickr, YouTube, or SoundCloud with specific tags that allow them to be syndicated back to the main site.
Participants in ds106 nominate work of others as "inspiring" to a "best of ds106" collection called in[SPIRE], itself a project designed by Spring 2012 UMW students Linda McKenna and Rachel McGuirk.
Many advised us that for ds106 to be an open course, we needed to hold synchronous events in a webinar environment—to us, a space that has not evolved significantly since the 1990s. But ds106 came up with something different: an open, free-form Internet radio station. The class uses the radio station for live broadcasts of audio projects and for bringing in guest experts. However, as a resource, it is open for other educators to explore the potential of live audio streams. Open participants created tutorials for each other, and the power of live audio has been elevated by mobile apps that allow live broadcasts.
