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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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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Working with Sue Alcock and Müge Durusu at Brown University on the Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets (ADLS) course on the Coursera platform, and chairing a recent session with the ADLS team at the Annual Meeting of Computer Applications in Archaeology in Paris this past April, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of institutions tackling the same issues we encountered during our MOOC adventure. At ADLS we were overwhelmed with the dynamic and exciting discussions emerging in our forums amongst a truly international student body. Connecting the ideas of the various archaeological MOOC offerings has the potential to maintain and expand this community of online learners across courses, and I’m happy to write briefly here on some of the ways the content and themes of ADLS and Portus are linked.

Graeme and I are both really excited about the possibilities of courses that interlink, whether at the level of course content, via shared publications, or linking research data and we are going to explore these more in the future. We also think that the two courses work well together, with Portus providing an archaeological overview and also detailed examples relating to Roman archaeology and one site in particular, complementing the broader approach taken in ADSL. I know that Graeme is hoping to develop these links further with other courses including Newcastle University and FutureLearn’s Hadrian’s Wall, and there have also been links made on the Portus course to the Yale and Coursera Roman Architecture course. Graeme also told me that the Classical elements from the Warwick University and FutureLearn Shakespeare and his World Course are being compared to the Roman material on the Portus course and the nature of different kinds of evidence analysed. This really sums up the kinds of connections MOOCs are making across areas of study.

In terms of specific links, there are a number of direct relationships between methods discussed in ADLS and the Portus MOOC. The first Units of ADLS introduce some of the basics of archaeological practice – what is archaeology, what is not archaeology, how do archaeologists work in the field – and many of the same concepts and techniques emerge in the first weeks of Portus. For example, Unit 3 of ADLS (How do you find things?) introduces site prospection practices such as geophysical survey, aerial photography, remote sensing, and fieldwalking. The Portus MOOC also covers these topics, through direct application at the site of Portus itself, particularly in the Week 3 activities on geophysical survey, the palaeoenvironment, and finds in the landscape. Excavation techniques and stratigraphic analysis we covered in Unit 4 (How do you get a date?) of ADLS are also included in Portus Week 4 activities on Documenting the Excavation, and Objects in Context.

The importance of objects to archaeologists is also central to both courses. In ADLS, different object types were explored in a series of ‘Demonstrations’, particularly in Unit 5 (What do you do with what you find?)  – ceramics, metals, human remains, animal remains. We see some of the same object types appearing at Portus, and effectively applied to the specific historic questions of the site, for example in the discussion of the Portus burials. Moving from the more general introductions of ADLS to the specifics of a single site is a great way to apply and expand on the archaeological knowledge of participants of both courses. I was excited to see how ADLS’ broad questions – “What can we ask of pottery?” or “How do we use finds to date things?” – were applied and narrowed within the context of Portus, such as in the Week 2 questions “Why are brickstamps so useful? What do the brickstamps of Portus tell us?”

There are also a number of related themes across the two courses, moving beyond particular content to the overarching questions of archaeologists everywhere. In ADLS, these questions often emerged in discussions between Sue and archaeologists working at other Brown University projects. The later Units of ADLS in particular focussed on some larger archaeological debates: What is involved in the archaeology of people (Unit 6)? Where does archaeology happen (Unit 7)? Who owns the past (Unit 8)? The team working at Portus is dealing with these issues on the ground, and activities such as ‘The People of Portus‘ (Week 5) show some of the practical implications of ethical questions. These same issues are at the forefront of independent archaeological projects, and have also emerged as central questions to two independently developed MOOC offerings. The insights of the students of both ADLS and the Portus MOOC can help us as archaeologists understand these issues, and the ADLS team is excited for ongoing collaboration and connections between the growing number of archaeological MOOCs as we move toward an open and engaged online archaeological community.

You can find me on the Archaeology of Portus course via my FutureLearn profile and on ADLS via my Coursera profile. You can find Graeme on Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets via his Coursera profile.

(Note from Graeme: As with the other Archaeology of Portus links on this blog the above links will cross-reference to the first version of the course i.e. May 2014. If you were enrolled on this course you should continue to be able to follow these links indefinitely after the course officially finished on 29 June 2014. You can still enrol on the course until this date. If you were enrolled on the first version of ADLS the links above will work. If you were enrolled on the second iteration change “secrets-001” in the URL to “secrets-002”. As the Portus course re-runs we will provide updated cross-references between the various MOOCs in a more consistent format.)

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