MOOC excursions – Enterprise Shed: Making Ideas Happen

I’ve started doing the Enterprise Shed: Making Ideas Happen MOOC at FutureLearn. I’m in the happy position of knowing some of the people who are involved in creating and running the course, in particular Katie Wray and Suzanne Hardy. The course started on Monday 30th March, so things are just getting up to speed – this also means there’s plenty of time for you to get involved!

The subject matter is something I’m really interested in, for several reasons;

• in previous careers, I’ve always been looking for the innovative solution to a problem (mainly because we had to), and that always means looking at things from a new angle and coming up with ideas
• I’ve usually met the most interesting people when I’ve been working on ideas and helping to birth some of them, and many of them have turned into firm friends – no reason why that shouldn’t work on a MOOC…
• the entrepreneurial aspects of the course really attract me – I’ve been an intrapreneur within a large HE institution for something like 20 years, with varying degrees of success! It will be very interesting to see how others have coped in that area – it’s a very hard place to be with people in the organisation wondering why you’re doing it and ‘real’ entrepreneurs outside the organisation wondering why you’re trying to change things internally and not joining them…
• and finally, I’m currently reading Become an Idea Machine by Claudia Azula Altucher, which is workbook-like in that each day I have to come up with 10 ideas on a topic in the book. The topic titles are very broad, some examples;
  • Ten Cities You Would Like To Visit And One Thing You Would Like To See In Each Of Them
  • Come Up With 10 New Recipes
  • 10 Lines You Heard Recently That Left You Wondering…and Why

Becoming an Idea Machine is at the core of the Choose Yourself philosophy/movement/lifestyle? that I’m working on. To be specific, it’s one of the four legs of the stool, but more on that later.

An added bonus is that I also get to connect up with some people I know from Newcastle again, which is always good!

So far I’ve been introducing myself and making comments on some initial posts – there are a lot of people on the course already and a great amount of interaction. People are currently finding their feet and talking about what they want out of the course, so you’re seeing people that want to make connections, float an idea, keeping the brain oiled, up their MOOC count, get some form of funding/support for an idea and its also clear that some people want the course to pull them out of a rut. So, a lot of different perspectives there.

It should be fun – the people involved in building the MOOC are sincere, exceptional and committed, and I know they’ve been working really hard on this, and I wish them well!

I’ll post more as things progress.