 Welcome to DL MOOC, everyone. I am Karen Fassman-Power, and it is March 17th where I am, but today with our international panel, I'm reminded that it is already tomorrow in other places, so we will hear about that. This is our last official week of DL MOOC, and it's been a really fun weekend hearing from those of you who are at ASCD conference and the connections you're making between content there and the deeper learning ideas we've been talking about here, so keep those tweets and comments coming. We've reserved this week for final reflections about deeper learning and about our experiences in DL MOOC together, and we think that reflection is a really important part of deeper learning, so we wanted to keep a week to talk about that and do some reflection together. On the website, we've suggested several ways you might want to reflect, including writing a post or making a video or contributing a story to our deeper learning story bank. We also have a survey that we would really appreciate if you would take a couple minutes to complete to tell us about your DL MOOC experiences. Tonight's panel, we are going to talk to a variety of participants in DL MOOC about their experiences, and we'd like all of you to participate in this conversation as well, so if you are not watching on the chat page, you can go to dlmooc.net slash live, and we have a chat there where all of you can participate in answering the same questions that we're going to be talking about on the panel, and for those of you who are watching the archive, we're going to take that chat and move it over to a Google document so we can continue to have that conversation throughout the week. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Rob Reardon to introduce our panel and get us started. Thank you, Karen, and welcome everyone. It's really exciting to have a panel of people from all over the world at different times and places. So this is our reflection panel, and for those of you who are just join-ins who have just tuned in a couple of times, I just want to review quickly the elements of deeper learning, which is what this whole session, this whole MOOC has been about, but the elements of deeper learning, according to the Hewlett Foundation, and involve content mastery and critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. The last two, self-directed learning and academic mindsets are what the Rakes Foundation groups together as agency, student agency. So I think it's time for us now to introduce, to meet the panel. I'll ask each of our panelists to say a word about who we are, our affiliation, how we're connected or came to be connected to MOOC, and I think it'll be interesting to hear also where you are now and what time it is where you are. I'm Rob Reardon, I'm the co-founder of High Tech High and the president of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, where we're just entering the world of MOOCs in hopes that they can incubate a powerful community of practice focused on deeper learning. I'm in San Diego at the moment, and the time here is about four o'clock in the afternoon on Monday, March 17th. Tim, let's hear from you. Hi, I'm Tim Flanagan. I'm a seventh grade language arts teacher at Polkrup Middle School in Stonyton, Connecticut, and I am new to MOOCs. This was my first MOOC that I've joined. I'm joining it as part of a class that I'm taking through a sixth year graduate degree program at the University of New Haven in instructional technologies and digital media literacies. I'm currently at my house in West Virginia, Rhode Island, and it is about seven o'clock here. Great. Thank you so much, Tim. Simon, let's hear from you. You're in London, I believe. No, that's close. I'm in a place called Preston in the north of England. I live in Bradford, in Yorkshire, currently in a hotel room at 11 o'clock at night. I'm an IT professional working for an IT services company. I'm also part of a church leadership team. I'm doing this particular MOOC following on from MIT's Creative Learning. I'm not particularly an educator, but I got hooked on education and learning things about education. Great. Thank you, Simon. And we have Emma and Summer from Australia. Hi. Hi. We are from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. So we provide leadership to the Commonwealth states and territories of Australia in promoting excellence in the teaching profession. And we've initiated a program entitled Learning Frontiers that seeks to develop professional practices and increase engagement in learning. And so that's how we really find ourselves at the Deep Learning MOOC, where they're at a place to start. And we're in Melbourne and it is 10 a.m. morning. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. We're in the future. We're in the future. Thank you both. And Celeste. Hi. I am a grade seven English teacher in Toronto, Ontario at the Bishopstron School, which is an all girls independent school. But presently, I'm in New York City right now on my March break, which is very exciting. It's 7.06 p.m. on Monday. And I am with a group of people at my school all doing the MOOC, and then we're all coming down to San Diego for the deeper learning conference at the end of the month. And I originally got interested in deeper learning through this incredible group that I'm part of called Cohort 21, which is a network of independent school teachers, and we all do action research based off of what's going on in our classrooms, and blog about it, and tweet about it, and share it with other teachers to try to become better, more reflective practitioners. So that's why I started to do the MOOC, is to deepen that part of my practice. Great. Thank you, Celeste. And let's hear from Bart. Hi. It's a little after 8 o'clock here in Tokyo. I'm a grade six teacher at an international school. And my students are currently doing their first exhibition. So it's been exciting. Very interesting. Thank you, Bart. And finally, Alec. Hi there. I'm Alec Patton. I am an 11th grade humanities teacher at High Tech High North County, which is about 40 miles north of where Ryan and Rob currently are down in Point Loma. We're in San Marcos, and it's 4.07 p.m. now. Time marches on. And I started doing the MOOC because this is the kind of thing I've been interested in since before I was a teacher. And I really enjoy, and I also wanted something, I wanted something that my students get involved with that had to do with progressive education and thinking about education and how they learn and what they're learning that wasn't just me saying, hey, you know you guys, this is really important, trust me. And this provided that adult world connection really powerfully. Thank you, Alec. So panelists, I think that our audience is going to want to know more about the work that you're doing and the connections that you've been making on Reflection to this DL MOOC. Bart, I'd like to start with you. What are you working on in your own context there in Tokyo in terms of deeper learning and what connections of any are you making in that work to the DL MOOC? Well, I've been facilitating my students' first exhibition and it's supposed to be self-directed, collaborative and the DL MOOC and the deeper learning criteria have been a perfect frame for me to use to balance how much I facilitate and in what ways I facilitate. We watched as a class the student panel and we got a question of ours answered there that my students were curious about and that was right at the beginning of our process. So now they're about halfway in and it's been wonderful to have all of the deeper learning MOOC resources to kind of bring to bear on their processes and I really appreciate the timing because this is also my first time facilitating such an event. Yeah, well that's great timing We often say to people if you want to get engaged in deeper learning a good way to start is to schedule an exhibition at your school. Well, it sounds like you're starting that way. It kind of puts, it raises, it ups the ante a little bit. So, all right. Thanks, Bob. Does anybody else want to follow up? What are you working on in your own context and what are your connections to the MOOC in that work? Yeah, I can go next. Good. I would just finish up this debate project that I did with my social studies teacher where we tried to get the students to debate a resolution that connected Canadian history with the Book Thief. And while doing the MOOC, so this whole project was kind of going in tandem with the deeper learning MOOC. I started to realize that there's all these little pieces of the puzzle that I had included in different projects before but I hadn't necessarily put them all together into the same project. So there was really fantastic moments in this last project I did, but there was these terrible things that just fell on their faces. And I started realizing that I wanted to take what I've learned in the MOOC and turn that into one assessment document so that I could actually plan for exhibitions at the onset, like the way that you were talking about last week. It just was like, oh, that makes total sense that I should be planning for this from the very get-go. So I feel like by going through that project and it was decent, it wasn't a terrible disaster, but then going through it with the lens of deeper learning, I reflected on it in a totally different way than I would have in previous years. And I'm actually, I need to start planning my next projects after the March break, but to do it now that I've actually gone through the whole MOOC, I feel like I can put all the different ingredients together in a completely different way now. Yeah. So you found that you found there was a framework that you were able to pull from it to bring back to your own work? Yeah, I think I actually had to develop the framework though because I was looking at different assessment planners and there wasn't necessarily a way for me to put down how I was going to be collaborating with other people or how I was going to give my students voice and choice. And I think I'm just a planner and until that structure is more internalized for me, I have to just put it down on paper. Yeah. And then going through the deeper MOOC, I was able to see, oh, this didn't work because there wasn't enough student voice and choice or there wasn't a clear tie to the adult world. So it was almost like I could give my feedback and anchor in something else. Great. Thanks, Salish. Tim, how about you? Yeah, as I mentioned, I'm currently in a program on Instructional Technology and Digital Media Literacies. So I have been taking two graduate courses while I'm doing the MOOC and my head is just overflowing with ideas. I've been using the MOOC as a way to curate and gather ideas for changing practice in my classroom and in my school. For example, one of the things that I discovered while working on the MOOC and my other classes too is the idea of genius hour, which fits very nicely into deeper learning and the traits of deeper learning. I've been gathering all kinds of resources on Twitter. I just joined Twitter about a few months ago and so I'm actively getting involved in Twitter and learning a lot about building a professional learning network. And I like what Celeste said about using the MOOC as a way to sort of, as you're in the classroom, you reflect and you look back on how would this be different if I embedded some of those aspects of deeper learning. One thing I'm focusing on also is making the work that I'm doing with my students more authentic. I feel like I've been doing a fair amount of voice and choice with my students, but not a lot of making the work being something for other than a grade. So I'm really focusing on that. So the MOOC is really helping me to, as Celeste said, kind of look at what I'm doing through the lens of deeper learning. Great, great. Thank you, Tim. And I think Emma and Summer, are you ready to say a few words here? Sure, sure. So we have initiated Learning Frontiers as a kind of large-scale collaborative inquiry with the teaching profession in Australia. So we, as an organisation, don't work directly with students. We work with teachers and school leaders. So we were really interested in the deeper learning MOOC on, I suppose, a programme level rather than at a classroom level. So we've been really excited to really connect our work strongly back to improving student outcomes through the development of teachers and their practice. So we've been really interested in the way that the deeper learning MOOC has kind of provided a really wide audience with access to the meta-language of deeper learning and giving us a kind of common language and a common purpose, I suppose, around what we call 21st-century education. So we're finding that it's really important that if we want to get the wider community on board some shifts in education and to really value the role of teachers and to build efficacy of the profession, that we need that common language and we need everybody to really understand what 21st-century learning is. So what's been great with the deeper learning MOOC I think is a real connection of that narrative so that we can understand what changes in learning look like if we've talked about it in the same, continue to talk about it in the same ways we always have, then we'll do what we always have done. And thinking about Celeste, you were talking about this concept of reframing and almost like rapid prototyping. That's really what a process of our teachers will be going through in consultation with our students and our parents as well. So the student panel was really powerful for us as well. Yeah, and we've been through learning frontiers. We'll be forming clusters of schools that we're calling design hubs. We will work on a kind of collaborative inquiry around what professional practices really deeply engage students in learning. And so we've found a lot of the materials that are coming out of Deeper Learning MOOC and that the panels and the lens in the classroom to be some really great provocative material for those participants to start really thinking about what Deeper Learning looks, sounds, and feels like. So they are kind of adequately prepared when we start our program in April. I'm glad you brought up the, made the point that Deeper Learning is not just an issue for the classroom. It's not just an instructional issue. It's an issue of program and context, that the broader context. There was so much in the academic mindsets of discussions that we had about the importance of context, about the school being a place where students feel that they belong to a community of learners and so on. And in the student panel too, the ample testimony that it's the broader context is really critically important as well. So thank you for bringing us there. So, and I think Alec, you wanted to add something. Yeah, so I, it's been an exceptionally strange few weeks that the MOOCs just happened to coincide with that I was in the last stages of my pact, which California teachers will be familiar with and no one else will be. The fight to say I have a PhD in the pact, I thought was harder. That kind of, and less fun from my perspective. It was really, really challenging. And actually had this course come sort of three months earlier, it would have been absolutely perfect. And as it was, it was kind of like, oh my goodness. And I decided. That's always the case though. Yeah, exactly. The, I think, and I decided we do honors. This is, I thought I'm gonna talk so fast. And actually there's a little bit of explanation that's required. We do honors sort of an unusual way in High Tech High where we do it in 11th grade. But it happens, honors kids go to the same classes. You choose to take honors and you go to the same class and you do additional work. And so I often describe it as kind of like an online course. Because you meet as just honors students sometimes, but not that often, maybe once every two weeks. And there's not that long to do that. And so I thought, well this is actually perfect. Like, there's this online course that's being, you know, run by people who I really respect. And it'll be really interesting to see what happens if I'm taking part in that as a student and they are as well. And I think actually, looking back on it, I'd actually say, I think Michelle Clark who also did this, I think did it better than I did. She had, she really set up a framework in a way that I never felt like I really did for like kids do an action research task and then they debrief and talk about it in class and there's a structured time that happens. And I just felt like, wow, that's what I'm gonna do next time when I do it again. But the sort of engagement that the kids did and really sort of did on their own was I found it really, really interesting to see. And I always felt whether it was my students or other students, the MOOC really came alive for me when students were involved as well as teachers. And so that was really cool. Excellent. And Simon, I wondered if you wanted to add anything into what folks have been saying about your, you're here, you've attended the MOOC as a person who's not directly involved day-to-day in education but very interested in those issues. So how has the MOOC connected with the work that you're engaged in? Well, as you say, I'm not really involved in deeper learning in my day job. What I would say is it was interesting reading about protocols as a workshop facilitator in my day job. Always important to have a structure. Always important to have a structure, especially when there are sensitive things being discussed. So I think that the structure of numbers of the protocols are really helpful. But they reminded me actually of Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hat, which talks about what's the blackest thing that can happen with this and being really negative and critical about it versus what's the most optimistic thing that can happen about the situation and then like emotional responses with the red hat and so on. So that was a good reminder about workshop facilitation. I would also say at the start of the MOOC before we started, I stumbled over that book, The Smartest Kids in the World. It was interesting reading about students from America in other parts of the world and vice versa. Actually reading about people's experiences of schools all over the world. And that actually set me off on a bit of a rabbit trail understanding more about why Finland is at the top of the league tables. And I'm still struggling to understand a bit how deeper learning helps scores basically because I know that deeper learning isn't in every school and that's one of the agendas presumably of propagating deeper learning as a good educational way of doing things. Also we're saying that I saw that YouTube video by the guy that started the PISA test and it was interesting and encouraging actually just seeing how even over a few years significant changes can be made in the league tables. So I'll be taking the bigger picture if you like. I've also been posting quite a few things in the Google Plus community and responding to people on there and also on the Twitter. Early days though in terms of applying it into my job in the commercial world. Yeah, it's interesting though to learn that you found the emphasis on protocols as something that in fact would be directly applicable to your day job, to your work with adults in the world. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you Simon. Aaron Maurer has joined us. Aaron, I wonder if you would introduce yourself as yourself to our audience. Just your name, you know, name, affiliation, where you are now and what time it is where you are now and then just say a word about what brought you to the deeper learning MOOC and how it connects with your work. Sure, so I'm glad I was able to get here and join in at least for the second half of this. My name is Aaron Maurer. Online, most people know me as Coffee Chug or Coffee Chug Books. This seems to be the name that people recognize me the most. I am a instructional coach at a middle school in Benton, Iowa. And so time zone wise, it is 6.23 in my time. It's a recent time change and all that good stuff. I would say the deeper learning MOOC here for me where I was excited and got connected was I had the opportunity of visiting High Tech High a few years ago as my school's now converted completely to project-based learning. So anytime I see anything with the opportunity to learn from that network, let alone all the other networks that are associated with them, I jump on it and try to absorb as much as I can. And I would say just for me, the deeper learning experience of where I really started to really dig in deep and then try to make sense of the stuff in my school where I worked is definitely the student voice platform. And so all the things that I was reading and going through each week was really powerful. But to me, what really struck a chord was the student voice piece. And that's kind of become, I've become somewhat infatuated with it, this school year, especially with this MOOC and just really, really try to push the threshold and the comfort levels of student voice and education and not just the fluff stuff, but real voice and having them have a say and making sure that people are listening to all so that we can make our education and in our case, our school that much stronger. And it's really come along pretty well, we got a long way to go, but that's probably my biggest piece through it all as I've been digging deep through these last nine weeks here. Great, thank you, Aaron. I'm wondering for the rest of our panel, we've offered a mix of panel discussions and protocol-based discussions. Some of you have mentioned those, dilemmas about practice, looking at student work. And of course, we've had the online Google Plus community, too, with posting and responding and so forth. So I'm just wondering if you would share a little bit of this with us, what has worked for you in this MOOC and what hasn't worked so well. In other words, help us out here. What suggestions might you make for a round as we do the MOOC? I don't know if other people noticed this or not or thought this, but during the looking at student work protocols, I was always amazed at how amazing the projects were. I always felt like they were unbelievable pieces of work that were mind-blowing and awesome. I feel like it obviously takes a lot of vulnerability to showcase your practice like that, but I think it would have been so fantastic because I feel like those are the moments that I learned the most in when I was actually looking at real projects, how it looks like in practice. But I wanted to see more projects that just sucked, like things that were just awful. And I don't know if maybe those things just don't exist at high tech high, because things are just really refined and have gone through a lot of fine-tuning over the years. But I was always sort of hungry to see something that was messier or something that people actually were really gritty and struggling with that really just didn't work. Yeah, or perhaps a magnificent failure. Yeah, I think as a teacher though, you have to be really brave to share that, and I don't know if I'd be ready for that either, but I would like to see more sucking, I think, in general. Yeah, that's good. A couple of our student panelists did talk about things that didn't go so well, but it might have been nice to actually see some samples of work that didn't go so well. Yeah. Okay, thanks, Celeste. Yeah. I would definitely agree with Celeste in the way that it's really, really difficult to get teachers to share that while it's happening in practice, or those monumental failures. And one thing that that does really well is it brings together kind of an empathy for projects going forward, and we know that that's a really important part of sort of an innovation cycle. And a great thing that this DL MOOC did do was to surface stories and to surface the narrative of the process. And that's a really critical thing that teachers want to share the, oh, me too moment, both in success and otherwise. And a great thing that Emma and I think the working one with this project is how to get people in on a range of scales and working with our colleagues at the innovation unit on some letters of participation. And we found that the DL MOOC did that really well in the way of you can tweet this out, you can get involved in watching a panel, you can trial this out with your students. So it invited people in on a range of scales. And something that we sort of chatted about for next time was some different stakeholders. Yeah, we really like the idea, it would be great to hear a bit more of Simon's story, I suppose later on, but the idea that something like DL MOOC can bring in members of the community into that conversation about what an education worth having really looks like in 2014 and onwards. So we're really interested in the idea of bringing in potentially the parent voice. We really enjoyed the panel on students in the real world and in the workplace. And so having some of that, I suppose that narrative from the other education stakeholders outside of the teaching profession I think would be something to look forward to in the future. Yeah, those stories are so important. Not so much prescriptions, but our stories and an invitation to jump in. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Great, thank you, the two of you. Anybody else wanna weigh in on that? What works for you in the MOOC and what didn't work so well? What might we be thinking about next time around? Yeah, I enjoyed the short videos. Obviously, you get the weekly videos that are an hour long, which are quite long to listen to if you're working. But the short videos interspersed with the articles and the readings were good. I think with MOOCs as well, I sometimes wonder, am I supposed to read the week's content before the video? Or do you do the video first and then the readings? And I never get the balance right, and I never get which way is right, this idea. I think that might work differently for different people as well. Some need to read first and then read, and others need to read first and so on too. So I'm wondering if any of you submitted anything for a DL badge. And if so, what did you submit? Well, if you don't mind, I just want to make a quick comment about the last question, Rob. Oh, please, go ahead, Tim. Yeah. I wanted to say what worked for me was, when I first joined the MOOC, I said this was my first MOOC and I saw there were, I think, 700 people in the Google Plus community. And I was immediately overwhelmed and intimidated. And it grew to over 1,800. But the funny thing is that the larger the MOOC grew, the smaller it got for me. Because the more involved I became, the more connections I made with other people within the MOOC, I began to see certain people in the same circles, either on Twitter or on the Google Plus community. So that was a real advantage for me. It was a learning experience for me. It was a new way of learning for me. So that was great. Cool. And let's see. I think who wanted to be, Aaron, I think you wanted to jump in. Yeah, and actually, I'm glad I'm asking Tim here to piggyback off that. I think I had the same thing as the MOOC grew. I feel I felt, too, that it became smaller. And what I had found that I was doing myself personally was I started having these conversations and little cohorts, but not directly in the Google Plus community. They were through email. Or maybe it was a separate group or own little Twitter chat, or whatever it might be. And one of the things that I didn't do personally was bring that back to the MOOC. And I wonder how many other people were having these really powerful conversations, but yet didn't bring it back for the other 700 or 1,000. I don't know what the number's up to now to learn from. And I mean, I'm guilty of that myself. And so I guess as I reflected on it was, how do we get people at those conversations to happen to get them the report back? Because there's obviously nothing to force them to do so. But I felt as the weeks went on, I went there as a resource to grab an article or two. But then I had kind of created my own group. And I've in some ways feel guilty that I didn't do justice by getting more of that shared back into everybody. And I guess the only other thing I had was, as people were sharing all these articles, the resources that you guys created was awesome. But people kept pinging in articles and links and this and that. And it'd be nice to have, whether it's a Wiki or I don't know what the answer would be, like a solid database of all those resources. So you're not always scrolling through the MOOC. But OK, I know in week three somebody posted something. And maybe that's just because I'm not the most organized of people. But if there was someone there that just kept citing all those sources we went through because now I'm at the end going, OK, there was something that this guy posted and I don't, I can't remember where it's at. So it's just part of the journey. But those are two things that kind of stood out to me. That's a great idea to put together a database of the resources that people have been feeding in to the MOOC. Alec, I think you're maybe next. Alec, talk to us about badges. Oh man, that is so harsh. I want to help dispel this kind of Superman impression about high tech high. That's what I get trotted out for. So I completely missed the boat on badges because they came. I was getting emails from Ryan, among other people, kind of saying, hey, you and your students should totally apply for a badge. And I was planning a 72 mile hike that I did with about half our group of students who were the first people ever to do this hike and finishing my pack. And so it wasn't really a great time for me and badges. But what I kind of, and so that's kind of a missed boat and something I'm a little bit embarrassed about. But it sort of speaks more widely to my experience of the MOOC, I think. Because what I found like, careful observers will have noted that there was a stretch where there were these students who were the really excited articulate students who were in my honors group commenting. And suddenly they were all gone. And I was all gone. And we kind of disappeared together. And really the reason for that was that most of them were going hiking. And we were all gearing up for this thing. And it just, I took my half the ball. And unsurprisingly, without me kind of saying, hey, we should all be doing this. There wasn't this sudden upsurge of everybody kind of going, hey, even though the teacher is not telling us to do this, we're just going to keep talking to our international teacher buddies. Which in one part of my mind, I imagine it was totally going to happen. But it would have been great. But it wasn't particularly likely. But I think what really was exciting for me about the MOOC was before I was a teacher, I actually worked for the Innovation Unit. And I was following Twitter. And I had all these blogs that I followed the teachers and was reading about all this exciting stuff. And then once I became a teacher, I pretty much stopped looking at all of it. Because I just didn't have time. And it was overwhelming. And it wasn't, nothing filtered it. So it was kind of like, I had very specific needs at very specific moments for what I needed in order to kind of keep my head above water. And just random, whereas as a researcher, Twitter's great. You just sort of stick the bucket in. And something comes out that's brilliant. As a teacher with actual real-life students, you want to be a little more precise. And I found that having a kind of a thematic aggregator of content from people who were like-minded in certain ways was amazing. And so my favorite thing for me about the MOOC was that I could go on and find this thing that had kind of filtered the stuff that would just sort of come in waves from my feedly or from my Twitter feed, would just kind of be all this stuff that I would have this kind of, hey, we've got this theme. And it's a theme I'm interested in. And here's stuff from that. It was kind of a semi-curated, really cool way. And I found that, I mean, I loved the stuff that was put to get this kind of official stuff. But my favorite stuff definitely was the unofficial curriculum that developed. Great. Great. And of course, as you were going out on your hike and so forth, the MOOC was working the way it was supposed to, because it was supposed to be dropped in when you can, and drop away when you can't be there, and then come back when you're ready, and so on. Yeah. It was working OK, Alec? Yeah, and I'm back. I'm back. OK, Celeste, I think you know, were you going to say a little something about the badges? Yeah, and just actually to tack on to what you're just saying, Rob, I feel like it's a bit of a mind shift to be doing some sort of course where you can just jump in and jump out. Like I feel like when I wasn't super involved in one week, I would have this weird scholarly guilt around not doing enough. And then the badges were kind of like the assignment at the end to show what I had gotten out of it. But I think that this is personalized learning at its best, because you get out what you put into it. And if there's a topic that I wasn't that interested in, I just wasn't doing as much reading in that area. But I wanted to submit something for a badge, just I think because I have this idea of being a good student and that I wanted to show that I was doing something in relation to deeper learning. But just like around the guilt around not participating that I kind of picked up on Erin saying, I think that our students might grapple with this too. If we don't lay out you have to do this, this, this, this, this. If we make learning more open ended, like learning is in general outside of school, maybe we could take some of the guilt away and just let students learn what they're interested in learning in and show what they feel inspired to show. And then that maybe just takes out some of that pressure to complete X, Y, and Z. OK, Alec, you're back in on this. Yeah, I just wanted to quickly say that something with what Celeste was just saying that I really grappled with was because I was doing it with students, this kind of thing of going, so they're all saying that you just do whatever you want. But that's not true in your case. In your case, you do have to do this, because it's part of your honors course. It was kind of awkward. And then I sort of thought, well, maybe it shouldn't be, but then I kind of felt like, well, but if it's not, then what is it for an honors course? If it's actual work within a existing kind of structure, and then it's not sort of drop in, drop out in the same way, which is a weird thing for me to grapple with. I liked the panel, not the panel, the portfolio. I can't remember which week that came up in where students had a standard that they had to meet. And then they defend, this is what I learned, and this is how it meets that standard. So maybe, for example, with the honors kids, that they would actually be able to show or prove, defend, that what they learned can meet that standard. If they did 80% of the work, maybe they did 80% of the work. But ultimately, when you think about what we learned in high school, I don't remember anything from chemistry. And I got a credit for that, and it didn't matter to me. So I guess no matter what, we get out what we put in. That's very interesting. Thanks, Celeste. Tim, you've made a comment that Celeste, a moment ago, just defined genius hour. Would you say a little bit more about that? Yes, it's the way I understand it. So like I said, through the MOOC, I learned about genius hour through other people that are in the MOOC, particularly a teacher who I found in the Google Plus community and on Twitter, Joy Kerr. And then by following her, there were lots of other genius hour posts that I was following on Twitter. And the idea that allowing students to pursue an area of interest in depth, to plan a project, to present it and defend it, which goes along with the exhibition portion, and how we were, I guess, some of us were speaking to how we were experiencing a little bit of that ourselves through the MOOC, because it is open-ended. I was in a little bit of a different position because I was taking the MOOC as part of a graduate course, of a larger course. So I was on a schedule, and I did sort of have deadlines. But I really liked the flexibility of being able to pick and choose where I wanted to go with the learning. And I did apply for a badge, actually, partly out of some guilt, Celeste, that I just felt like I needed to show my professors in the world. I guess I'm really doing something. But also because I was just intrigued, I want to learn more about badges. And I thought, well, if I earn a badge, maybe I'll know what that feels like to earn a badge. And so another thing that I did, and this was part of the class, but also, I think relevant here, was that I documented my learning each week on a Storify. Storify was something that I didn't know about eight weeks ago. My professor introduced it to me. And each week on Storify, we documented what we were learning through the MOOC and through our course. And I love the opportunity, and this is what I wrote about in my blog post here in the badge. I love the opportunity to be able to follow my interests where they took me. I had this broad topic. I had some materials. But I could go off the curriculum. I could delve deeper into certain areas. I could connect with other people and document all of that. And I'm glad that I have all that documentation now, because it's something that I can look back on. Wait, just one more note on badges. And then we'll move to other subject. But Simon, on our little chat here, you've posted a very interesting reference to Jane McGonagall. We don't need no stinking badges. One of my favorite lines. I think on treasures of the Sierra Madre. Yes, I wasn't being provocative particularly. I was just reminded of that, because Jane McGonagall's a bit of a leading thinker expert on the power of games to change the world rather than wasting time. I haven't got a big issue about badges, but I wasn't sure what the purpose of the badges was. Was that like a merit, a reward? Was it a badge of honor? What was it, really? It was interesting, because in the presentation that she actually did, she actually gave out badges at the end to anybody who was brave enough to go forward for one. So I just found that quite amusing. Great, great. Thank you, Simon. So let's go over a little bit to the question of scale. Here we are, panelists who have taken this MOOC together. What about in a back on our own context? Do people that you work with share your emerging vision? And what do you share with them about deeper learning? Anybody want to weigh in on that? I can jump in real quick. I would just say that from this MOOC, I'm not going to say I created a MOOC, but I created a Google community for three teachers that I'm working with for the professional development and then not having the answers. I became inspired to this MOOC to create this community and open it and expand it and see what would happen. But what I have found is that the teachers that I'm working with in my building never use it. And nobody else, I post on our school bulletin board every time we have a podcast or a blog post or someone shared something, I just bombard the staff. And nobody really looks at it, because they say that they don't have time. And maybe that's justified in some cases. But I guess this comes to whatever you learn best. And for me, I'm an online social media junkie. And so maybe this is just my comfort level. But it's not. I would honestly say that I don't mean to say tooting my own horn, because people are obviously learning in their own ways. But I'm probably the only person in my building that utilizes these things. And so the answer or the question that I try to find is why is that? Because you see so many people benefiting or sampling with it and trying to figure out the best reasons for it. And whether it works or not, you're still learning. And people are wanting to learn more. I want to know this. They come to me, I have all these questions. And I'm like, well, have you done this? Well, no. And so I think some of it is taking the learning in your own hands, as opposed to maybe just getting the answer, which drives us nuts with our own students. We don't want to do it ourselves. So that was a really long answer to say. I don't know what the answer is, except for, I feel alone in my local community. Yeah. OK. Emma, in summary, I think you might have something to say about that in terms of building a case for change. Yeah, it's definitely really struck us in two ways of getting some buy-in, not only to the narrative around the DL MOOC, but we find that it locks in really well with what we're doing. So thinking about Simon Sinek and starting with the why, we started the project with really looking at some baseline data as to why we need to actually be having these conversations around student engagement and around deeper learning. Using the voices of the profession, we went out to the profession and we got them to help us co-create a case for why and a case for change that underpins all of the conversations that we have. From there, we've made it very clear that we kind of come to any conversation face-to-face to try and diffuse anything that we're doing online with a, this is our idea, your idea is together, let's make the best idea. So we always come to conversations around sort of 70% formed idea. And we've found that showing that progression and making that quite public in our own learning through DL MOOC and not coming with a wholly formed kind of response has been really great. And Emma's going to talk about the sort of diffusion piece that I'll be able to get. She's an expert in that. Well, I suppose Australia is like any other country. We have so many schools who are doing incredible things in terms of innovation and really deep engagement. But there is a project of scaling. They become trapped on site as we like to say. So we are trying to not rectify that, but try and find ways to spread that practice out of schools first by creating an audience that is receptive to new ideas. So I think it's tough when you are in a classroom for most hours of the day, you become trapped by the walls around you. And so I think it's really important sometimes to pull the profession outside of the classroom and ask that big question of why are we doing this. One of our colleagues at the Innovation Unit made it a comment the other day that when you train to be a teacher, you're not training to be a teacher of a set group of students. You want to teach all students. So we're trying to plug in this idea of all teachers working on behalf of the system. And that is developing new professional practices that are for the students in your class, for the students in the classes, in the school down the road from you, from schools in other states and territories, or students that don't go to school at all. So thinking about driving change in the profession from the ground up rather than at a policy level. And that's certainly what DL MOOC has assisted us in doing as well in helping teachers articulate that practice to share it to get those me too moments and to really start those conversations. So it's been a fantastic model of an online course and particularly important in a country like ours where we have 9,500 schools, 3.3 million students. And the average size of our schools are around sort of 350 students. But keeping in mind that we have massive, massive geographical spaces in between. So to be able to show the power of something like DL MOOC is absolutely critical. It's actually a non-negotiable in our country. Yeah, in fact, one of our colleagues just told us a statistic earlier this morning that in Western Australia, which is an incredibly huge state, there are eight schools that serve as an area that is the size of Victoria. Where we are now. And so Victoria in a comparison, I think you can fit England into the state of Victoria in Australia. So we have an incredibly diverse context of schools here. With respect to the question of why, I was at a book presentation at the Harvard grad school. Just the other night, it's Ted Sizer's latest book. It's a posthumous book, The New American High School. And it was presented by his wife, Nancy, who in speaking about Ted, just referenced the fact that Ted always said that the question, why are we doing this, is the most important question that a kid asks and that a teacher needs to attend to. That it's not an annoyance, it is an opportunity. And I think the same goes for our work with adults as well. Absolutely. Alec, did you want to weigh in a bit on the, no, I think it's Celeste's next, isn't it? I might have been volunteering Alec accidentally on the chat. I'm just tagging on to something Erin was talking about with engagement with other people at your school. I have an amazing school that I'm working with right now, and we've had a crush on high tech high for many years now. We actually are doing a lot of really interesting project based learning, and it's still really hard for people to come together and to talk about this. We have eight people in our MOOC group, and it was really just hard to find a time for all of us to sit down and talk about what we're doing online. But I feel like that actually speaks to the power of something like this, because I'm at an independent school and our work days are insane. Like we're in at 7.30, we go home at 6.30 sometimes, and actually having the flexibility and freedom with a course like this meant that I could just post something on a blog and have people read it. So you can have that asynchronous collaborative PD session. And I feel like in some ways that's like the PD of the future, where I might not be able to schedule a Saturday to go and do extra learning. But if I do an hour here or an hour there, it actually makes sense. Even with a school like mine where everybody is really excited and engaged about project based learning and is totally buying into it, we just don't have the schedule freedom to sit down and collaborate with each other in that way. Unless it gets like a protocol is scheduled for this day to talk about this project, it's hard to find that free time for it. So let's say I want to say that I and several others from High Tech Eye who have visited your school are big fans of your school. Well, that's probably what their love is. Well, a lot of it's from you, you promised. That's a good question. So here's a question. What's next in this work for us in our own work and how do we stay connected? Do we need to stay connected? Is it worth it? How might we stay connected to deeper learning or with the deeper learning MOOC community? Can I throw back another question? I want to know, will there be another MOOC? Will there be deeper learning take two? Because I feel like continuing this on a yearly basis could be a really exciting way to go deeper into deeper learning. Well, we are thinking about that and would welcome your suggestions. I would say that one thing that we're thinking about is doing a MOOC that is entirely run by students. Given that the student panel was so inspiring, we thought, hey, maybe let's try, let's do something along those lines. And then, of course- We think that's phenomenal. Then we can have students in the audience as well, many more students in the audience and really have a kind of cross-age conversation about teaching and learning. So that's one idea. Anybody else who's next about where this might go? I was going to say that that MIT Learning Creative Learning, that must have finished quarter two last year and yet there are still people posting to the Google Plus community all these months later. They're about to start their second running of that course tomorrow morning. And it'll be interesting seeing how their content and format is changing, because they are gonna redo it. But the format's changing, the platform's changing. But I would also just make a plug that it's really good that the platform's open because you can share it. I'm starting to do MOOCs now, which are behind authentication and it's just impossible to share outside of the people that are doing the MOOCs. And part of the power of MOOCs is just to get the content and the conversation outside of the people that are doing it, as well as within the walls of the people that are doing the MOOC. Yeah, great. Thank you, Scott. Bart, I see that you're back just so our audience will know Bart had to leave us to greet the students in his school over there in the morning in Tokyo. So Bart, welcome back. I wondered if you have anything you wanna just toss into the conversation here. Well, when I tuned back in, it sounded like you were all thinking the same way I've been thinking. I've been trying to use this deeper learning criteria as a way to think of my own professional learning. And looking at my school community and thinking, if I had to pick one that we need to focus on to kind of build and make our own development more deep, what would it be? And I just finished helping to organize an Ed Camp here in Tokyo last weekend. And that was, I saw somebody mentioned it, and that was awesome. And it definitely embodied everything that the MOOC promotes for students, but that's what we also need to do as teachers to facilitate their deeper learning. We have to be deeper learners too. And it's a really excellent way to be able to assess how you're doing and go from there. In terms of the MOOC, I'm sorry. Yeah, let's start with these thoughts. So we're gonna close, sadly, moving towards the close of this session, I'm gonna have time to just go around very quickly. Each member of the panel gets a chance to make a brief comment, something that they've been wanting to say. Maybe something about where we go next. Maybe something, some other reflection on the work or some response to something someone else has said on the panel. But we'll just go around with brief closing comments and then we'll turn it over to Ryan. Who is, who would like to begin? I've just got an accountability comment to say that I'm only halfway through and I'm gonna finish the course and I will continue to tweet and post in the Google Plus community until I'm done, basically. Great, thank you, Simon. I'd like to sort of close by saying I think that this medium and the work that we're doing is absolutely critical to making the work of schools and teachers visible and public. And that goes a long way to raising the efficacy of the teaching profession and it's amazing. And I hope that at the very least there, the Twitter hashtag for DLMRE could keep going off until the next time we all meet again. Okay, okay, thanks. And next? I'd like to say, you know, people have been talking about how to stay connected through the MOOC and I'm wondering how would you not stay connected? I've been just recently getting addicted to Twitter. I'm new with it. I'm still trying to learn how to manage it. I don't know how to deal with hundreds of tweets. I know what everybody says and not to read everything and all of that, but I haven't gotten to that stage yet. I'm still trying to read everything. And so I know that the MOOC will be with me forever. As long as there's a tweet with the DLMOOC hashtag, it will be there and the connections that I've made will be there and even through this panel, I've made some connections. So I'm really excited to continue this work. Great, thank you, Tim and Alec. I think this just occurred to me what I found really excited and someone who's almost more than anything else with the MOOC is to find a sort of group of progressive educators and people interested in progressive education online who aren't all about the tech. That like, I feel like whenever I get involved in online discussions, there's always someone going, well, you know, if you link your jailbroken iPad up to your magic whiteboard and or whatever and then you use that to interface with Australian educators and hackers, then you can all have a hack meet. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? No, that makes sense. And so to be involved in something that wasn't all about that was really special and I hope is like some kind of coming of age of progressive education online that now we can all have a discussion about mostly face-to-face education that happens online. And not to say that's not awesome, it is, but for me, this is really refreshing. Great. Thanks, Alec. We still need to hear if they choose to go from Aaron and Celeste before we turn it over. I'll jump in here, I guess. I can close this off. I just, yeah, tacking onto it. Go ahead, Celeste. Okay, I just wanted to say, like, tacking on with Alec was saying that it's a really exciting time to be a teacher right now. I feel like there's so many tools that are available and so easy and accessible for many schools that I feel all of these things coming together at the same time makes for really interesting learning and it's just exciting to be part of that, especially with the DL MOOC. Great. And may it be an exciting time as well for our students. Yeah, Aaron? Yeah, I would just, I guess I would just leave it with the same thing I tell my students and all the teachers that ideas are great, but ideas are also completely useless in a waste of time if you don't act upon them. And so I hope to this MOOC, as all the stuff we've gained and learned, that we all start to move into action and not just action, but continue to share it in the MOOC and on Twitter and everything else so that we can continue to learn from one another because as we start to try our own past, that's where the real learning is. And so we've had nine weeks of a platform of learning and connecting, you know, and now what are we gonna do with it all? If we just go back and say, yeah, those are really good ideas, so what? So I guess the challenge I have for myself and others is okay, so what? What are you gonna do? And go for it and see what happens. And I look forward to all the thousands of people people taking that first step forward to see what develops. And I think that's where the real power of these networks and MOOCs really lie in with it because people will help you make sure that it does go the best that we can hope for. Thank you, Aaron. You've spoken directly and pointedly to the aim of this DL MOOC, which is to create a community of practice, not simply a community of conversation, but a community of practice in which we engage in action and reflection together. Which then becomes a community of practice is collective. So that's our aim, that we will continue to move forward with action, reflection in a community of practice in that way. Thank you all for being on this panel and sharing your reflections tonight. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to, I think Ryan is going to, Bart, did we hear from you? Did we hear your last comment? My last comment echoes what Aaron said about, what are you gonna do next? And I find I learned so much by keeping track of the connections I've made, reading a few blog posts, leaving a few comments, opening all the resources that people share and just take a look at it and see what it is. It's often enough to keep the learning going just to take a little time out of a day now and then to check in with the people. Great, thanks, Bart. Sorry, I almost passed over you there. Okay, over to Ryan. Well, Rob, thank you so much. I just wanted to thank everybody that was here on our panel. I think that it's great getting to meet everybody finally and I think that's a really great experience, especially to Simon. I think he was mentioning that it's midnight there, so for staying up late, Simon, we really appreciate that. You know, I think that we look at this project for the ELMUK as a learning experience for ourselves and so we've made mistakes, we've had great successes and it's really been about the work that we've been able to share with you guys and we really appreciate that. I was joking with Alec, though, with the bumps and bruises. If we ever want to bring some disastrous projects, I'll be happy to share plenty of my mistakes next time. Next MOOC can go around. Laura McBain was also chatting me that we will be offering four MOOCs next year focused around our residencies that we have here at High Tech High, so they'll be more coming from us, so you'll be sick of us in the MOOC world out there. Also, just a reminder, we do have a survey that's out, so if you could just share your thoughts with us as we go forward in some of the MOOC stuff and we loved our student panel, which was mentioned here a couple times, that we're actually having, we're giving Rob the night off next Thursday and we're actually Paris and Trey from our first student panel are going to be facilitating their own student panel, so you'll still see my face there running tech at the bottom, I apologize to everybody out there, but it will be a student run panel and so we're really excited about that, so please join us on Thursday. All right, thanks everybody. Thank you all, goodnight. Thank you.