Week 3 – Signs of Climate Change

Ships of the desert

Do the 'discussions' work for you?
Okay, so one of the core ideas on this course is that we watch a video, or read something off the web then enter into a discussion via posts on the course forum.

Trouble is you end up with literally hundreds of posts to trawl through for each discussion. It just doesn't work.

The problem is the sheer number of people on this course (and over 500 more have joined since it started). If the majority try to make contributions, the discussions become too unwieldy.

It would be better if the course organisers either limit the numbers or, run the course for everyone at once (as now) but divide them into separate groups running in parallel.

Longer videos?
I must admit I was a bit disappointed that the video 'lectures' weren't a lot longer. Instead there's more emphasis on discussions (which don't work - See above).

I think I've worked out what they wanted to do here though. The videos are just a quick heads-up on a given theme, whilst the research/discuss sections are meant to be the main method of education: You look at the data and you work out what it means e.g. I was really surprised this week when I discovered that the UK's wettest year (2012) was part of a 40 year trend towards wetter weather. I just thought we'd had a bit of bad luck lately!