Cultivating Relationships

Cultivating Relationships

Other universities have had success with meet-ups connected to their MOOCs, such as the University of Pennsylvania and its popular "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry."⁷ The new part of UW–Madison's approach, however, is combining MOOCs with this kind of targeted statewide engagement.

Though the six MOOCs in phase two are all designed and scheduled, the related events have yet to take shape for the last four courses. We're planning them as we go, based on the

target audiences defined by the faculty and our outreach team. Once we have a bead on the audience, we will work to find the best external and campus partners for the events. By leveraging the expertise of these partners, we'll learn what types of activities will best appeal to a given community in the state.

Creating face-to-face experiences around MOOCs involves cultivating relationships—in other words, going out to find an audience instead of waiting for an audience to come to us. Given that we've redefined our primary audience as state residents, we've taken more ownership of the marketing in phase two, rather than ceding it to Coursera. That meant building our own MOOCs website to help connect Wisconsinites with our courses. The website makes it clearer that these courses originate at UW-Madison rather than at a globally oriented educational technology company. Indeed, for phase one, surveys showed that nearly 50 percent of participants attributed the MOOCs in whole or in part to Coursera.

Where does this regional focus leave our worldwide audience? There are many interesting possibilities for bringing them into the conversation. As Howard Rheingold points out, "Millions of people on every continent…participate in the computer-mediated social groups known as virtual communities, and this population is growing fast."⁸ In the communities that form around our MOOCs, perhaps participants from Spain will make a virtual appearance during a meeting on climate change in the northern Wisconsin city of Rhinelander. Perhaps they will plan their own meeting at a Spanish library and invite MOOC participants from Rhinelander to make a virtual appearance there. Through technology, we can help bring Wisconsin into the global village, showcasing what our state has to offer the world.