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On the Italian version of this post I have provide a brief summary of the activities for week two. Feel free to post any queries in Italian to me via twitter.

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I have been looking at the comments from across all University of Southampton FutureLearn courses in an attempt to understand the place that the Archaeology of Portus learners fit within the wider community of learners on other University of Southampton FutureLearn courses.

As a first step I have aggregated the comments from all of the UoS courses that have run to date and then produced a simple network visualisation using the wonderfully easy to use NodeXL. The network diagram above shows connections between pairs of courses on the basis of a single learner having commented on both courses. I have excluded learner enrolement (i.e. learners who are enrolled on both courses but may not have commented on either) and concentrated on those learners who have posted comments. This will also allow me to look at the types of comments posted and the learner demographics in the hope that we can in turn improve courses better to reflect the needs of the UoS learner community. For example, what cross-references would it help to put in place (as we have with Hadrian’s Wall)? Should we provide specific advice or areas of further study based on potential previous courses?

The edge symbology in the network is based on a comparison between the number of unique authors posted on both courses in any pair, and the maximum possible unique authors who could have posted (in this case based on the lower of the two total numbers of learners who posted comments). I then scaled this percentage to match the symbology requirements of NodeXL with respect to line width and opacity.

The network shows a clear cluster of learners, not surprisingly, around the topics of maritime archaeology (Shipwrecks), the archaeology of ports (Portus, Rome, Ostia etc.) and Oceanography (Oceans). It is also interesting to note that the other courses are proportionally much less likely to share learners, including learners moving from one “run” of a course to another.

Drilling down into the statistics demonstrates that of those learners who have commented on more than one course, nearly a fifth had commented on at least three. Looking at the raw figures this is far more than one would expect were these members of the UoS teams. If you look at these learners in terms of the courses on which they are commenting Shipwrecks emerges again as the key bridging course. You can then go on to look at the behaviour of these learners in comparison to others. For example, we have already looked at the distribution of comments in terms of the proportion of liked comments or proportion of comments which are responses to others, as a coarse reflection of the kinds of behaviour seen on each course. Learners who have posted on three or more courses are considerably more likely to have their comment “liked” and so perhaps these learners are playing a role as intermediaries? This is supported by the fact that these learners are more than twice as likely to post a comment in response to a previous comment, than learners who are involved in only one or two courses.

We will certainly be using these simple analyses as part of the continuing design of the Archaeology of Portus course. For example, how can we harness this behaviour to encourage rapid spread of updated information?

As ever it is wonderful to be able to thank so many learners who are contributing their thoughts, suggestions (and criticisms!) so generously. Now that I have nearly completed a second run of Portus the power of analytics to improve learning is, not surprisingly, obvious.

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The post Week Five – Your Questions Answered appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.

Here is the video addressing some of the questions from Week Four.

The post Week Four – Your Questions Answered appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.

We have now uploaded the video addressing some of the questions raised about Week Three. As ever, we will continue to answer questions raised on the platform.

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Here is the video addressing some of the questions you have raised about Week Two. Keep them coming!

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As part of Week Six we are today concentrating on answering questions raised on Week One. As a starting point Simon and I have created a video.

We have also added a video by Katherine where she introduces her research at Ostia and how it relates to Portus.

We have also added some additional cross-references to Hadrian’s Wall course both on the platform and on the blog for those of you who are registered on both. We appreciate that this makes it possible to become lost between the two so we have made sure that the links are reciprocal and we are also analysing movement between the courses to make it better in time for the summer when we hope that the courses may overlap.

We will continue to update this post as more information is added. As ever please comment on the FutureLearn platform so that all learners there can see. We are also going to provide another way of augmenting these videos. Watch this space!

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On the last run of the course we cross-referenced it to the Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets course and also to the Roman Architecture course. This time we have provided some suggested links between the Portus and Hadrian’s Wall courses. These links are reciprocal so, for example, if you are learning about Geophysical Prospection on the Portus course there is a link at the bottom that takes you to the Seeing beneath the soil step on Hadrian’s Wall. At the bottom of that step there is a link back to Portus. We added this in order to minimise the chance of people getting lost between multiple courses and we will be analysing the movement between them in order to get a sense of how well it is working. Please do post your comments on either course or on this blog to let us know of problems, or positives!

In the future I think it would be excellent if cross-references were only visible to learners who were registered on the other course. And perhaps FutureLearn could even consider these links being a different kind, separated from the See Also and Downloads sections?

We will update this page as we create additional cross-references. Many thanks to all the learners on the Archaeology of Portus course who also studied on the Hadrian’s Wall course and who have helped in making these study connections. There are many more conceptual and thematic links that we will explore in a later blog post.

*Edit – we have now added links to the latest running of the courses in June 2015 (Portus-3) and (Hadrian’s Wall-2).

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I have become fascinated with the ways in which we all imagine the site of Portus today and as it was in the past. When we have time we are going to undertake some rigorous formal analyses of the language uses on the Archaeology of Portus course – it provides an extraordinary insight into the prevailing understanding of the Roman past, at least as represented by our learners, and also of the impact of particular learning materials on this. We hope that such analyses will enable us to provide an ever-improving sense of the place to those people studying on the course.

So far though, I have undertaken a very simple analysis of references to different senses during the first run (May-July 2014). I started with smell!

The smell of fish (fresh and rotting) was the most commonly stated, equalling references to the smell of the sea (including its saltiness, freshness and the sea air) and to spices. Next most common were the smells of sweat or perspiration – carried by working people, rowers, the throng of the crowd, and so on. Food and cooking came next (with baked bread being quite common), and then less appetisingly, animals and sewage. Other wonderfully emotive smells such as sawdust, frankincense, grain, the smell of damp, herbs, tar, smoke and fruit along with dozens more provided a richly layered imagined and described impression of Portus.

We have seen equal creativity in this run of the course. Perhaps surprisingly however there were only a couple of hundred references to smell in the comments from the whole of the first dataset. Sight, viewing and related words occur more than eight hundred times. If you include “see” it goes into the thousands, although it is rather harder to separate the different uses of this word automatically and hence will require rather more sophisticated analyses. Still, it seems that topics pertaining to vision outnumber the other senses combined by an order of magnitude. Hear and hearing are about as commonly referred to as smells. Touch literally in the sense of physical contact occurs barely ten times.

We will report back as these analyses progress a little further. We have also in this version of the course added in some suggested items that learners might bring together in order to provide a sense of the smell of the port. We have other plans in the pipeline, so watch, hear, smell, taste and touch this space.

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