Getting Started
Technology integration experience for educators
The Open Online Experience (OOE13) was a year-long professional development program for K-16 educators, running from June 2013 to June 2014. This page walks through the three first steps of joining the community: registering, connecting with other participants, and setting up the social media profiles used throughout the program.
Three steps to begin
- Register. Registration for the 2013-2014 cohort was open to any teacher or faculty member with internet access. Follow the Registration instructions to complete your sign-up.
- Connect. Join the rest of the cohort through the platforms the program ran on — Twitter with the #ooe13 hashtag, Diigo groups, and Google+ communities. See Connecting for the full list.
- Set up your profiles. Once registered and connected, update your Twitter, Diigo, and blog details so your contributions are visible to the group and appear in the shared collections.
Joining a professional learning community usually begins with a simple registration step, and that is how the Open Online Experience approached it. Teachers and faculty members from across K-16 settings signed up for a year-long program that ran through two school years, joining colleagues who were equally curious about how technology fits into real classroom practice. Registration was open to anyone with internet access, so the entry point was intentionally low: follow the instructions, complete the form, and you were in. From there, the community unfolded through blog posts, chat conversations, live sessions, and shared resources, with each participant encouraged to contribute rather than simply consume.
Once registered, the next steps were about connection rather than content. Participants were prompted to set up social media accounts so that the conversation could continue between the scheduled synchronous sessions and the asynchronous exchanges that filled the weeks in between. Posting short reflections, replying to peers, and curating links became the everyday rhythm of the community, and a shared hashtag helped tie the scattered threads together. The wider goal was openness: educators sharing examples, remixing resources, and discussing technology integration in terms of students, curriculum, and classroom context rather than tools in isolation.
Where the program took place
The Open Online Experience ran from June 2013 to June 2014, with sessions beginning in September 2013. Learning was organised around monthly topics and a network of connections rather than a fixed classroom — the connectivist model, in which knowledge is distributed across the network of participants.
Posts and reflections from the year were gathered in the Blog Collections.
Tools used during the year
| Platform | How it was used |
|---|---|
| Conversation and sharing under the #ooe13 hashtag. | |
| Diigo | Group bookmarking and resource curation for the topics. |
| Google+ | An Open Online Experience community space for discussion. |
| Blogs | Participant posts and reflections on each monthly topic. |
Related programs
Participants often arrived from, or carried their experience into, related open courses and programs such as DNLE (Stanford) and ETMOOC.
Next
Ready to take part? Register for the program, then head to Connecting to meet the other participants and set up your profiles.
On to new beginnings
The Open Online Experience concluded in June 2014, with final posts appearing in May and June 2014. The community pages and collected reflections remain available for browsing.