A real-time chronicle of a seasoned professor embarking on his first massively open online course.

A few days ago, I went into our campus TV studio with the two course assistants for my upcoming MOOC, to record a short video introducing them to the students.  The students will see a lot of me, but my two TAs will be working behind the scenes, and the students will encounter them only through their contributions to the forum discussions. The videos were intended to compensate for that lack of human contact.

During the course of recording that video, the three of us got into a discussion about our backgrounds, our motives in giving the MOOC, and our views on mathematics, science, education, and our expectations for the MOOC format. The camera was rolling all the time, and we were able to select a few parts of that discussion and create a second video that I think will help our students understand some of our thinking in putting this course together.  I posted copies of both videos on YouTube.  (They are much lower resolution than the videos the registered students will see on the course website when it goes live on September 17 — the “first day of classes”.) I think the two videos provide an insight into our thinking as we designed this course.

The fact that the current round of MOOCs have a “first day of class” at all has been a matter of some debate. The C in MOOC stands for “course”, but is this the best way to go?  For example, see this blogpost from a graduate student at Berkeley, who argues for a more open framework of learning resources. He makes some good points that all of us involved in this initiative have thought about and discussed, but I’m not sure the kind of thing he advocates can work for disciplines and subjects that depend heavily on student-faculty and student-student interaction, as mine does.

In fact, I’m not sure the MOOC will work sufficiently well at all in such cases; this is very much an experiment that I anticipate will continue for several years before we get good answers either way. For the first iteration, it makes sense to start with a model we know does work. And important (we think!) elements of that model are, to repeat Sebastian Thrun’s list, as quoted in the Berkeley student’s blog: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. To use the mnemonic I coined earlier in this series, our basic design principle is WYSIWOSG: What You See Is What Our Students Get.

Since these courses are free, we can, of course, do a lot of A/B testing in future years, to see which of these truly are crucial, which can be changed and how, and which can be dropped. I suspect the answers we get will vary from discipline to discipline, and possibly from course to course.

All of us involved in this MOOC movement are trying to find out the best way that works for our particular discipline and is consistent with our own style as instructors. As I indicated in Part 4 of this diary, I think it makes sense to begin by trying to implement in a MOOC as much of our tried-and-trusted classroom-based teaching as we can (as Thrun did with Udacity), and then iterating in the light of what we learn.

This is why, instead of hiring a mathematics graduate student to TA my course, which is what I would have done for an on campus class, I brought onto my team two graduate students from Stanford’s School of Education with several years of experience in learning design and the use of technology in education. In addition to helping me with the design and running of the course, they will conduct research into the course’s efficacy and try to understand how learning occurs in a MOOC. (Other than a brief, non-compulsory questionnaire at the start and finish of the course, all their research will be based on data gathered on the Coursera course platform and human monitoring of the forum discussions. One huge benefit of MOOCs is that they facilitate Big Data research.)

It’s live beta, folks.

To be continued …