Introduction to Massive open online courses (MOOCs) , showing examples, explaining their structure and process and finally discussing their opportunities and risks.

1. M
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assive
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ourses

2. M
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assive
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Courses may consists of
up to 100.000 and
more students.

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

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Lectures and assignments
are taken completely
online.

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

6. 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. 7
www.coursera.org

8. 8
www.udacity.com

9. 9
www.edx.org

10. 10
www.openlearning.com

11. 11
www.udemy.com

12. 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)

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

16. Example courses

22. Common structure
• Syllabus (= course topics outline)
• Announcements / Dead line notifications
• Video lectures
• Learning resources / tutorials
• Discussion forums
• Quizzes
• Assignments

25. 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

28. 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)

38. 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

42. 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

43. 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

45. 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

48. 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

54. 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

58. 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

61. 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

62. 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

64. 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

65. 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)

66. 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/