MOOCS

“I don’t see the MOOC that I teach as a threat to traditional universities or to the discipline, rather just the opposite. It’s the sort of thing a public university should be doing: broadcasting its knowledge.” – Dr. Matt McGarrity

The democratization of information would stand to benefit the world. However, does the variety of ideas in the university environment might be an unfortunate casualty of the MOOC revolution?

How would you like a Master’s degree in a growing field, from a well-regarded university, all for less than $7,000? On first glance, that doesn’t sound too bad at all.

Through the final weeks of my Harvard MOOC experience, I learned a few things about setting rigorous expectation in a course, the value of competency-based grading (or “badges,” to fit the trending lingo), and how to plan for a final project that is valuable to students. 

MOOC (massive open online courses) become popular more and more. Lots of people are involved in a discussion about MOOC. E-Learning portals publish news and press releases related to MOOC every day. Millions of students learn courses and leave their feedback. One of most popular discussions related to MOOCs is about if is this possible MOOCs replace traditional higher education. 

As I work through Harvard's CS50 MOOC to distill out the best design practices for online courses and MOOCS, this edition dives into the realm of online testing.

This latest installment of my quest to find online best practice from inside Harvard’s CS50x MOOC took a slightly different direction than previous weeks. Now that I’m in the groove of the course, I have been able to reflect less on working with the content and more on working with my peers in the class. And I’ve realized that I’m not a very strong asset to them.

A lot of students. Taking the classes are free. No attendance necessary. MOOCs emphasize key features of a class. Would you be interested to review The Rise and History of MOOCs?

Viewing Harvard's CS50x MOOC from the inside to sort out teaching tips from the student perspective. Here's what this week taught me...

Continuing my elaborate plan to take CS50x, the introductory computer programming MOOC from Harvard, and to share what I’m learning about quality online course design from the student perspective, this week began some real programming, complete with cryptic coding commands, and lots of time spent staring and/or cursing at the computer screen while trying to figure out exactly why the program wasn't working.  (As such, you may notice a more negative batch of comments this time around).  Let’s see what this week had to offer…

Taking a bit of my own advice, I recently started working through a computer programming MOOC from Harvard, with the goal of distilling out teaching tips and online course ideas from a student’s perspective.  While learning some useful job skills, I will share my experience to help designers of MOOCs and traditional online classes think about best practices in their course design.

Last month, the NY Times declared 2012 as the year of the MOOC. With so many educators and students involved in these courses, we should think about how we can best convert the university course experience to this new, scalable online experience. For simplicity, let's break the process of transferring knowledge into three parts: instruction, coaching, and assessment / feedback.