Socrates Badge, by @merryspaniel

It's a bit hard to believe, but two years ago - around this time of year - I was scurrying to get my application into Athabasca University to have my application considered for Cohort 7.  The deadline for Athabasca's program is at the same time as the deadline for my department (January 15th), so I was trying to make sure that my recommendations were all in order.  I had applied to another program prior to Athabasca (surprisingly enough I never heard back from them...) so I had tapped into my referee base already and I didn't want to burn them out (again).

Well, things worked out, my application went in, and I made the short list (#woot!).  Now, with a year-and-a-half under my belt, I am about to begin EDDE 804 (Leadership and Project Management in Distance Education).  The Moodle course isn't available yet (darn!) so I can't yet tell much of the actual mechanics and slant that the course will take.  I am wondering how much overlap there will be with my MBA and through what lenses the MBA background and knowledge can (and will) be filtered, interpreted, and applied through. It should be an interesting course.  I started reading one of the texts, Higher education and the new society, but between holidays, a winter cold, and pending home improvement projects, I think I'll wait until I get back to work and use my commute time as my book-reading time.  The other text, Leadership for 21st century learning: Global perspectives from educational innovators, seems more like cases and specific examples, so since I don't retain much in terms of long term memory for these things, I might just wait until the semester starts and tackle those on a week-by-week basis.  As a learner I've re-discovered (many, many, times) that the fall semester is probably my favorite semester.  I have four (or five) months between semesters and I am able to sit down and read - at my own pace - and explore readings in depth before I have to discuss them in the course.  While I can work under the time pressure, it's definitely not the way I prefer to consume and process information.

In any case, seeing as it is two years since I started applying to Athabasca - and I had to write about my dissertation plans in my statement - I thought I would revisit where I am on that front.  While I don't have to make up my mind until comprehensive exam time about my dissertation, I think it helps to keep an eye on the ball.

Before I applied to AU, I was thinking of doing something something that dealt with language learning through MOOCs.  An initial idea was this one here, where I made some proposals on how to look at language learning through MOOCs, and in specific I was thinking cMOOCs. This was a potential plan if I were to apply to the University of Athens (Greece) at one of their language and linguistics departments.  Due to strikes that didn't work out, but I kept the idea alive.  When I applied to AU, another idea I was thinking about was learner motivation in MOOCs, both xMOOC and cMOOC.  I was interested in seeing what spurred learners to sign up for MOOCs to begin with, and what made them 'complete' MOOCs - and of course did they meet their goals by 'completing' the MOOC.  The notion of completion was something that I also wanted to explore.  While that was an interesting topic, I sort of lost steam on it as my own interests grew, and as others started exploring this territory.

I also wanted to be more pragmatic with my dissertation.  Dissertations don't really get cited in research much, and I feel as though they are one last run through the park with the training wheels on to make sure that an institution is unleashing a capable and ethical researcher into the world; thus a dissertation isn't necessarily some sort of magnum opus that will get you loads of citations (not that I care a ton about citations, but it is a metric that academia seems to use).

So, as I am writing this post and staring at my blackboard, here are some other ideas that came up during 2015 for a dissertation (most of which are rejects at this point for dissertation purposes):

• Study of lurking in MOOCs
• Effects of a learner's social network graph in 'completion' of a MOOC
• Meta-analysis of MOOC research literature: Finding and major trends
• Barriers to learning in open online courses
• Motivations in open online courses (not "massive"  so a refinement of the original idea)
• MOOC Pedagogy evolution (more of a historical analysis thing)
• Corpus Analysis of  cMOOC or xMOOC Forum activity
• Digital Badges study --> design + learning outcomes
• Comparison of improvement of learner motivation in traditional online courses when using digital badges in lieu of graded (0-100%) assignments. While this is an interesting action-research project, the data collection is dependent on me teaching, and at the moment I have to wait one year between teaching cycles.