Presented by Brandon Muramatsu and M.S. Vijay Kumar at KFUPM on August 27, 2014

1. Workshop: Lessons from Online and edX /
MITx Courses
M.S. Vijay Kumar, vkumar@mit.edu
Brandon Muramatsu, mura@mit.edu
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Cite as: Kumar, V. & Muramatsu, B. (2014c, August). Lessons from online courses and edX / MITx
courses. Workshop presented at KFUPM. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Unless otherwise specified this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 1

2. Agenda
 Part 1: Introduction
 Part 2: What are your online course experiences?
 Part 3: A Brief History of MOOCs
 Break
 Part 4: Highlights of Online Courses and MOOCs
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3. Part 1: Introduction
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4. Vijay’s Background
 B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering, M.S. in Industrial
Management & Ed.D. in Future Studies in Education
 Research in educational technology innovation diffusion
 Taught courses in introductory programming, data
communications, instructional computing, future
studies, and teacher education
 30+ years in EdTech – Developing, managing, &
innovating educational uses of information
technologies
 10+ years in Open Education: Open Educational Resources and
OpenCourseWare
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5. Brandon’s Background
 B.S. & M.S. in Mechanical Engineering
 Taught multimedia design and open education
 20+ years in EdTech
 ~10 years in educational digital libraries: Collections, nationwide
collaborations, quality and peer review
 10+ years in Open Education: Open Educational Resources and
OpenCourseWare
 “Been There, Done That”
 Multimedia courseware design and course support, course design,
video production software design, digital libraries, metadata,
learning objects, open educational resources/OpenCourseWare,
…
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6. Goals & Objectives for the Workshops
 Help you understand how we think about
educational technologies, and how they support
pedagogy and learning
 See some examples of educational technologies, to
help you understand a range of possibilities
 Identify how KFUPM can implement online/digital
learning
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7. Goals for this Morning
 Understand your experiences with online courses
and MOOC courses
 Understand some of the highlights from online /
digital courses and our edX / MITx experiences
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8. Part 2: What are your online course
experiences?
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Image on this slide licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 License.
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9. What are your online course experiences?
 Have you designed an online course?
 What were your experiences?
 Have you taken…
 an online course?
 a MOOC?
 What were your experiences?
 (Have you designed a MOOC?)
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10. Group Activity – Plus / Delta
Worked Well Could be Improved
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10

11. A Brief History of MOOCs
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12. Day of the MOOC is licensed CC BY 3.0. No attribution requested by the author.
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13. A Brief History of MOOCs
 The Canadians and cMOOCs
 Artificial Intelligence course with 150,000+
registrants
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
 xMOOCs and a number of players
 edX, Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn, etc., etc.
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X
2.0/
MOOC Timeline by Phil Hill is licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0

14. What are key characteristics of a MOOC?
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15. Which of these features of MOOCs do you
have now (in Blackboard)?
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16. What we find interesting about MOOCs
 It is their scale!
 Potential reach
 Engaged users, varied backgrounds and needs
 It is their departure from “traditional” online
courses
 Interleaving of content and varied parameterized assessment
 Infinite formative assessment
 Potential to radically change what we think of as an online
course, and how we teach online / offline
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17. Break
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17

18. Part 3: Highlights of Online
Courses and MOOCs
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19. Key Themes
 Experimentation and validation
 Learning outcomes/objectives and assessments
 Modularity
 Design of the experience
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20. Why MOOCs at MIT?
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21. Why did MIT start offering MOOCs / Online?
 Advances our institutional mission
 Builds upon MIT OpenCourseWare sharing of course materials
 Increasing opportunity to use online to significantly
impact learning at MIT
 Enables us to focus on updating our teaching methods
 Breaks down barriers of time and space (i2.002)
 Enables us to rethink “courses” via modularity (i2.002)
 Improve learning outcomes (3.091, Chemistry Bridge, 16.90)
 Enable hands-on learning, and other “valuable” teaching / learning
methods (3.091)
 Future of Education at MIT
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22. 3.091 / 3.091x
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Image courtesy of MIT/Prof. Michael Cima
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23. 3.091 Introduction to Solid State Chemistry
 One of two chemistry classes fulfilling MIT’s
general education requirements in chemistry
 Prof. Michael Cima developed 3.091x
(MITx version of the course)
 Course has learning objectives for each module,
and assessments linked to those learning
objectives
 Originally skeptical of the approaches used in of
3.091x would be comparable to the residential
course
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24. 3.091x Assessments
 Originally skeptical of the approaches used in of
3.091x would be comparable to the residential
course
 Analyzing Fall 2012 data convinced the faculty that
the online assessments were effective
 3.091x learners did well on the final exam when
compared with residential learners
 Final exam questions were the same as those used with
residential students
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25. 3.091x Assessments – Fall 2012
 3.091x learners did well on the final
exam when compared with residential
learners
 Final exam questions were the same as those
used with residential students
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class: numerically correct answer; closed book (no
partial credit)
edx: first attempt to answer numerically correct score;
open book
Chart courtesy of MIT/Prof. Michael Cima

26. Impacting 3.091 at MIT
 Experiment to see if replacing traditional homework
assignments and in-class quizzes, with entirely
online assessments would lead to same learning
outcomes with MIT students
 The secret? The answer is yes!
 New Format—Proctored weekly quizzes
 Created testing center proctored by TAs
 Students come in and take online assessments every week;
they can take the assessments multiple times but must wait 24
hours between attempts
 In Class—More experiments and examples
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27. Comparing 3.091 in 2012 and 2013
 Students scored significantly better on
assessments (by learning outcome) using online
assessments derived from 3.091x and no
homework or quizzes.
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28. Workshop: Lessons from Online and edX /
MITx Courses
M.S. Vijay Kumar, vkumar@mit.edu
Brandon Muramatsu, mura@mit.edu
Cite as: Kumar, V. & Muramatsu, B. (2014c, August). Lessons from online courses and edX / MITx
courses. Workshop presented at KFUPM. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Unless otherwise specified this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 28