Written by Tahitia McCabe, Univeristy of Strathclyde
Hosted by our partners, FutureLearn, the
Postgraduate Programme in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies at
the University of Strathclyde runs a MOOC called Genealogy: Researching Your
Family Tree. To date, we’ve had just over 48,000 people register for the
course!
I am the Lead Educator on the MOOC and the
course director of the Postgraduate Programme and though I’ve worked on the
Programme developing course content for a number of years, I’d not developed
this type of course before. The University and FutureLearn were very happy to
give me and my colleague, Graham Holton, Principal Tutor on the Programme, free
rein to consider audience, content, level and length which was freeing but also
a bit terrifying. There were very few
guidelines but also constraints aside from the considerations of the platform
the course would be hosted upon so it was really down to us to shape the entire
thing.
We quickly decided that the course would be
primarily aimed at beginners and we wanted to make it useful to family history
researchers around the world no matter the records they used. This meant we
would focus on genealogical research techniques rather than a specific
country’s records, though given our personal family backgrounds, many of the
examples we use are British and American. The Postgraduate Programme has a
strong element of genetic genealogy and we feel it’s important that everyone
understand at least the basics of what DNA testing can offer to the family
historian so we included a segment on this.
We started working on course development in
October of 2015, with filming largely accomplished by December and I then spent
a large part of the holiday break writing the accompanying articles. We had
content development help from some lovely folks in the genealogy community
(Marie Dougan (http://ancestralconsultants.com/), Biff and Nan Barnes of
Stories to Tell (http://www.storiestotellbooks.com/)
and Alasdair Macdonald (http://www.yourscottishancestry.com)
and as with most projects working around everyone’s schedule was a challenge
though everything came together swimmingly in the end.
Genealogy: Researching Your Family Tree is
the 5th MOOC created by Strathclyde and the University’s MOOCs are
known for including a storyline. As soon as I was told we’d need an idea for
this, Chris popped into my head. She took an on-campus beginner’s course with
me in the Autumn of 2014 and was a total novice at that time. Her end project
discussed some intriguing findings she’d made with her family tree (I don’t
want to give the details away here!) and her methodical approach really
impressed me. Thankfully, she was willing to share her story with us and we
ended up spending many hours in filming. The storyline develops each week and
is the true story of her research journey; I am so thankful for her generosity
and her passion for genealogy. A true star!
Though the first run started in March of
2016, FutureLearn and the University’s MOOC support team needed about 2 months
to create transcriptions of all the filmed lectures and to make sure what we’d
placed on the platform actually worked with the software. It was a nerve
wracking time waiting for the quality check report to come back but thankfully,
there were just a few tweaks to be done and then it was a case of publicizing
the course. Over a month and a half, we saw the enrolment figures grow and
finally by the time of the first week of the run, we had 26,000 people signed
up. A staggering amount of discussions were generated over the six weeks of the
course and it proved impossible to read them all but the willingness to share
ideas and help fellow classmates was infectious!
The course has run a further two times and
is actually currently running and in its fourth week. If you want to join in,
it’s not too late, you can enrol at https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/genealogy.
We’ll also be running it again in the summer though exact dates are still to be
decided upon. It’s free and open to everyone!
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