Thank you everyone for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

I thought I would share some additional comments about the course and the community that I observed.

Early on in the course you learn that song writing is all about making choices – what idea do you want to convey and how do you do it? Ideally you have one central idea and everything else supports that central idea while the buildup of the song adds more heft to the central idea – you go from the general to the specific. Since I couldn’t pack nearly as much information as I wanted into the song without breaking its structure and flow I will add some details here that I found out about the MOOC’s community.

The MOOC uses Coursera’s internal discussion forum system and no attempt is being done by the course organisers to move it to other social networks. The forums itself, however, are highly organised. There are four main forums (General Discussions, Study Groups, Video Lectures and Assignments) and each of these main forums itself has 6 subforums, one for every week of the course. Including the “Signature Track” forum this adds to 29 forums in total. As a result each forum is frequented only rarely as people move from one subforum to the next as the weeks progress.

As mentioned in my song, the songs we have to analyse as part of our quizzes are available on YouTube (independently uploaded from the course) and it’s interesting to see that in the video comments it’s almost guaranteed that there is at least one mention of “Coursera” to the tune of “Hi from Coursera” or “Coursera brought me here”. These shout outs to fellow course members show a sense of identification with the community within the course. Futhermore, while Coursera is mentioned, I did not see the answers to the questions related to the songs spoiled in the YouTube comments which shows relatively high maturity (for YouTube standards) and a willingness to learn (and letting others learn). The students are mostly novice songwriters with little to no experience in writing songs but many play at least some type of instrument. People were in general very helpful and honest with each other on the forums.

Analysing the discussion forums on Coursera and other sources like MOOC review sites reveals a major issue that generates a lot of sentiments and reactions: The peer review grading process is under heavy criticism. 40% of the total grade is received from completing multiple choice quizzes while 60% come from peers. Since songwriting is an artform after all people don’t take criticism of their work all too lightly and many showed signs of frustration, especially since feedback is given anonymously and in case a lower grade has been awarded it often lacks proper reasoning. As a result the most discussed forum threads, aside from the one asking students to introduce themselves, are either about expressing discontent with the peer review in general or people asking for higher quality peer feedback that more specifically addresses the issues we are focusing on in our weekly assignments. Overall it looks as though many people are open to sharing their work in the forums and inviting constructive feedback.

Writing the song was much more challenging than I thought but it was definitely a fun experience. We are now getting into the sections where we are learning how to compose melodies to go with our lyrics and I am looking forward to finding out what software tools are recommended to assist with that.

I hope this gives a little better insight into the MOOC’s community than the song ever could and I’ll be happy to answer any further questions!

from Comments for Mihael’s EDC blog http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/mkiseloski/2015/02/27/songwriting-mooc-an-ethnographic-song/#comment-421
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