About loneliness, time management and the challenges of MOOCs

Here I am again! It seems it's been a long time since I last wrote here. I've just been posting in the course forums and commenting in the Facebook and G+ groups lately (a four-day holiday abroad and a very busy week at work certainly did not help). But, hey, there are just so many ways of participating in a MOOC and they are all valid. And, most importantly, there's no one watching, no one's assessing what you are doing, no teacher controlling your learning experience. So what or who I am doing this for? Certainly not for the teachers, but for myself I guess? MOOCs are quite a different way of learning and it does feel funny, mainly because you're not getting any teacher's feedback(and sometimes not even the other students'). So sometimes it does feel like a monologue. But I must admit that I do feel I'm learning and I find the course content most interesting.

Time management is another challenge. Yes, you could expend only 3-5 hours a week in this course if you just go through the weekly resources and limit yourself to leave one or two comments in the forums, and write a simple entry on your blog. But web 2.0 is absorbing and in the end you realize that you've maybe spent a whole day surfing the net. There are no time boundaries, there's so much to read and see. But, of course, the time you devote the MOOC is also competing with the time you devote to your friends, boyfriend, family, full-time job or your thesis writing process. Nobody said this would be easy, of course, but also nobody could have predicted how intriguing and interesting the experience could be (even when it feels confusing, lonely or overwhelming sometimes.)