COOCs is back …
Welcome…
Welcome to COOCs – Reimagined! After a decade of creating this platform offering free spaces to create and host courses, we have decided it was time for a refit. We keep the same belief, building and caring for a platform that recognises all of us have something to share and that learning comes from everywhere in our world. We have learned a lot after ten years of working with community groups, small groups, micro-sized interest collectives, academics, enthusiasts of many kinds, activists, artists, businesses and individuals that want to share learning with others. Now we think it is time to redesign a few key elements of the COOCs offer to respond to the world as it is today (and hopefully tomorrow and onward too!).
Our ethos of accessible, exciting, inclusive and engaging spaces to teach and learn remains. We maintain the desire to have all those coming to learn to have free access wherever possible, and to make the site strong and sustainable. We believe it is important we are here, in a world dominated by increasing costs, we want to keep learning affordable and open to all.
What we want our reimagined platform to offer is a place where you, and anyone, can create courses, places to discuss, talk and share, and a teaching and learning environment that supports diverse groups to come together and teach each other. These do not need to be in courses that only a select few institutions get to develop – we all have things others can benefit from. These can be in-house training for charities, business, organisations. They could be small, specialised interest groups hoping to share their expertise. It might be your own business or organisation hoping to share the way you work to encourage others to join you. In short, it can be anything.
As a small team of expert educators, we are excited to make things accessible to people that find the institutional spaces of education frustrating, expensive and often designed with someone else in mind. Maybe you want to vary course length, include nuanced details and localised knowledge, whatever it is, you can design the choices if you design the programme for your own users.
The Community Open Online Courses platform offers you a range of ways of getting involved. What we can promise you is our own expertise (several of the team have PhDs in education and technology based learning), masses of experience in technology enhanced learning, course design and loads of experience in community and formal education at levels between Entry and Post Graduate. Most of all, we are excited by learning and teaching, we love being educators, and want to help others feel that excitement too, becoming educators, sharing your knowledge. We know learning looks different for everyone, and your course design will be something you can either do yourself, ask us to get involved with in an advisory way, or ask us to design completely. We will be supportive, encouraging and work hard to make your courses a reality. We realised that ‘free’ was not always the best route as it meant things could be precarious. We have funded the first ten years and that has been invaluable. Now we know we have a platform worth being part of more established plans (charities, businesses, community groups) and also offering a home to emergent and new ideas. We can make this happen for people like you and us, with a keen eye on budget and a need to get value for money.
There is nothing we cannot consider, so get in touch. We promise creative, enthusiastic and supportive discussion and a genuine desire to make the course you have in mind happen.