AS I progress through this OL course (EpCop MOOC) that I have chosen to participate in, it occurs to me that it is not letting me down or throwing up hurdles to understanding what makes an online learning community, in fact it is growing my depth and breadth of knowledge. Nearly every day I have another Ah ha moment. I have networked and worked cooperatively (can’t say I have worked collaboratively yet but I think that is down the track).

I find myself regularly analysing WHAT it is about the course that I feel makes it work and how I believe I can measure the learning opportunities. How much is it about the structure of the online activities and how much is the onus on the participants to make it work.

I like to consider the types of people who are involved (based on the parts of their life that they share with me both in text and verbally) and wonder can these characteristics be developed – or even as easy as encouraged –  in participants or do they need to come to the community with these characteristics inherent? The types of characteristics I am talking about is

1. Self directed in their learning goals and needs
2. Outgoing enough to talk to people they have not met before
3. able to recognise that we all have something valuable to share (teach) others and others have valuable skills knowledge that we can learn from – NOT JUST THE EXPERTS/LEADERS/MENTORS.

Actually point 3 is a point that I want to expand upon for a quick moment. When it comes to collaboration and the tools that help us achieve this, a few in our MOOC group have gone off in somewhat of a tangent to the primary focus of Eportfolios. We have been exploring the Social Networking tools of Skype and Google+ Hangout to gather together and talk in real time about our learning. In these get together times we talk about eportfolios and answer mundane questions about how to fix small problems but we explore deeper issues around how we wish to present ourselves to the online community and how we share out information (selectively or completely.) At the same time we debate and explore how these relatively new tools could help us build learning communities both around this topic and other learning goals – most of us profess to wanting to know MORE about a LOT of topics.

So I guess if I wanted to summarise my reflection for this post it would be….MY Online Learning community is ticking all the boxes. I am learning, I am connecting with others and I am building a community that helps me learn at a deeper level on both the original topic and other related, but not focussed topics.