M O O C

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M O O C

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Courses may consists of up to 100.000 and more students.

M O O C

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Access is open to everyone having a device with an internet connection.

M O O C

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Lectures and assignments are taken completely online.

M O O C

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Similar to college courses with instructor, lectures, exercises, assignments and finally a statement of accomplishment.

Providers

• Usually provided as web site

• Some providers also offer mobile apps

• Most courses are without charge – Extra fees only for a statement of accomplishment for

which your identity is acknowledged (without acknowledgment, its without costs)

– Some courses charge a participation fee ($ 50 up to $300)

• Courses mostly provided by US universities, but there are also some other from different countries

• a courses takes 6 up to 11 weeks

7

www.coursera.org

8

www.udacity.com

9

www.edx.org

10

www.openlearning.com

11

www.udemy.com

Searching courses

• Using Class Central that crawls courses of multiple MOOC providers

• Using search catalog of MOOC provider that provides diverse search criteria

– by instruction language (e.g. English, German)

– by topics and sub topics(e.g. computer science (algorithms, mobile, web), social science, business)

– by availability (e.g. course starts next month)

– by provider (e.g. certain university like Stanford)

Search engine for MOOCs: www.class-central.com

Example courses

Common structure

• Syllabus (= course topics outline)

• Announcements / Dead line notifications

• Video lectures

• Learning resources / tutorials

• Discussion forums

• Quizzes

• Assignments

Video lecture catalog

• usually 5 up to 10 videos are put online at the start of each week

• each video take 3 minutes up to 30 minutes, average is around 12 minutes, so there‘s 1.5 to 3 hours video content to watch per week

• videos can be watched online (web or in mobile app), can be downloaded

• if slides were used in videos, these are mostly provided as extra download

• sometimes even a transcription of the video audio is provided

Lecture videos

• slides combined with instructor voice • sometimes you see the instructor only talking without

slides • instructor emphasises things on slides by using text

markers, writing into the slides or even developing diagrams step by step

• Some instructors use in-video videos for illustration • in programming courses source code is shown • videos are sometimes interrupted by quizzes to check your

understanding so far (but they aren‘t used for assessment here)

• you can control the playback velocity of the videos (without ending up with Mickey Mouse voices)

Quizzes

• checking your understanding of the current week‘s video lecture content

• designed as multiple choice question catalog consisting of 10 items in average

• quiz score used as part of your course grading • deadline of completing a quiz is usually the end of the

week, extended deadline penalizes your score for each overdue day until hard deadline is reached

• Some quizzes grant unlimited attempts, some only allow 2 or 3 retries

• quizzes sometimes vary in follow up attempts by using different answer ordering, different answer sets or even different questions

Assignments

• in programming courses you have to implement something by – filling gaps in given code files

– passing given tests

• in non-programming courses you usually have to write an abstract to a given question / problem description to – outline a concept how to solve the problem

– discussing pro‘s and con‘s

Assignments (2)

• completing an assignments takes sometime (some hours up to some days), so there are only 3 or 4 assignments within a course for which you got up to two weeks to complete

• offically you aren‘t allowed to cooperate with other course students but you can ask question in the forum and answer questions but then without provide (complete) solutions

• assignments solutions can either be provided directly in the web forms or uploaded as zip files containing files following a given name sheme

Assignment assessment

• in programming courses grading is sometimes automated at server side by using – code style checkers – a server side test suite executing your code

• when automation is used most courses allow submitting solutions multiple times so you can try to improve your solution by taken the feedback for your former submission in consideration (exceptions thrown, failed tests)

• As for quizzes there are dead lines for submitting the (final) solution for an assignment

Assignment assessment (2)

• Non automated assignment assessments are using peer reviews

• after the assignment submission deadline has passed there is another deadline (usually a week) to review at least 5 solutions of other (anonymous) students

• to help you there are some criteria provided to judge the correctness

• some instructors take their time to outline possible correct solutions and which common mistakes should be valued with a lower score

• so the crowd intelligence should lead to a justified scoring of each student

Assignment assessment (3)

• having seen some solutions of your peers and the instructor hints how a correct solution should have looked like you‘re now able to assess your own provided solution

• the average of your peer score plus your own assessment is then used to grade your assignment

Discussion forum

• in the forum you can answer questions related to – the video lectures

– the quizzes and assignment

• sometimes the instructor himself will answer your questions but at least one of his personnel will likely help you as long as even another course participant was able to provide a sufficient answer before

• but you can also use the forum to organize study groups were you can meet your co-students in your region in person

Statement of accomplishment

• some courses requires you to take additionally a final exam: this is like a quiz but with much more multiple-choice questions about the hole course content, without re-attempts and under time-restriction (so when you start you have 4 hours to complete the exam)

• your final grade is calculated out of the scores you have achieved in the course quizzes, assignments, and a possible final exam, where assignment scores and the exam score got a heigher weight in relation to the quizzes

Statement of accomplishment (2)

• some weeks after the course ended you can download your statement of accomplishment as PDF document containing your name, the name and the autograph of your course instructor

• at Coursera you only get a statement if you have achieved at least 70% of maximum score, if you‘ve got more 90% your statement will contain the phrase „with distinction“

• only if you have joined the signature track, you can get a verfied certificate

MOOC opportunities

• MOOCs are

– relatively easy to organize (MOOC platform is in place)

– have a very high reach (up to 100.000 students)

– potentially repeatable (without re-recording of videos, if content isn‘t outdated)

• independence of time and location

• for provider / instructor

• for students (when, where, how fast, how often)

• sharing of contents

• interactivity

• feedback to provider (which maybe can incluence the process of the course )

• enable discussions between participants

• feedback about learning progress (by quizzes, assignment and their assessment)

• no organisational and content related boundaries (cooperation between universities

interdisciplinary)

• reflection about your own learning and study habits

MOOC risks

- for the participant

- requires self-discipline, setting realistic goals

- MOOCs keep alive only by the engagement their participants (discussion forum)

- can be very time consuming, especially when you do the course while being a full time worker (watching videos, solving assignments, doing peer-reviews)

- varying course quality (regarding content preparation, presentation style, instructor engagement)

- for the host

- very high (initial) effort for creating and also updating the contents (preparing videos, slides, exercises) (especially videos are hard to maintain)

- Answering questions in discussion forum and providing virtual office hours

- (Fear of) losing control

- potential techninal problems regarding the MOOC platform (e.g. out times)

Links

- Providers - https://www.coursera.org/ - https://www.udacity.com/ - https://www.edx.org/ - https://www.udemy.com/ - https://iversity.org/

- Comparison: The Best MOOC Provider: A Review of Coursera, Udacity and Edx

- MOOC meta search engine: https://www.class-central.com/ - Resources

- MOOC Guide: http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/ - MOOC Magazine: http://moocia.de/