A short evaluation of the SME 2.0 course

SME 2.0  "Web tools in the  SMS’s " course did not set the goal to offer an integrated business information curriculum. The course intended to teach basic Web 2.0 tools as well as provided background material to all participants to create your own business solutions. The central communication forum (called Agora) supported the technical implementation of web 2.0 tools. However, the participants' comments are very useful  as a supplementary professional curriculum. In the Agora we have a lot of best practicies, e.g. professional website and blogs.  The good examples enriched the course contents itself. Thus, the participants had the opportunity to use a peer-to-peer connectivistic learning method.

The organizers of the course have had a great dilemma of whether to limit the number of participants. The interest has been very high, logged a total of 68 registered students. The organizers eventually had not the heart to limit the number of partitipation rate. Excluding the "inner" persons the course enrolled 60 students. All this had to be perform so that during 5 weeks only one professional tutor was working with all of the participants.

36 participants filled out a questionnaire based on the first survey.

Female: 29, male: 7 teacher: 6, entrepreneurs 15, 12 of them wanted to start own businesses, 3 students. The core of course: mostly female informatics teachers, mostly female entrepreneurs and female start-ups. This combination is an ideal way to organize a more intensive knowledge exchange network for future.

In the agora (central forum) 402 subject entries were submitted, in 16 different, partially overlapping topics. About a quarter of the entries were posted by the tutor (showing a very intensive tutoring job), and the entries were mostly very detailed curriculum-level remarks.

At the same time formed the core of the 12-20 people who've had their own websites, their own experience. Some of them were extremely enthusiastic in helping with records for the knowledge exchange process, so the Agora formed a spontaneously form of connectivistic network experience.