MOOC best practice

Second event I attended this week reviewed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) which has transformed the way students learn online.

Here is a summary of what was discussed and shared:

With the introduction of any disruptive technology, there will be limitations and pitfalls so it is important to understand how best use the technology. So how can teachers, course designers new to MOOC navigate designing a course and teaching a MOOC?

1. You will always find ways to improve your material, you can always revise your teaching/lecture recordings later— balance the desire to perfect the material with the need to juggle all the other commitments. Another perspective is that you need feedback from MOOC students before you can perfect it. Instead of obsessing about trying to get it right the first time, focus on sustainability: Once you’ve invested the enormous amount of work required to do a quality MOOC, what resources will you need to re-offer the MOOC between refreshes of the material?  some people attending managed to re offer their MOOC three times, with additions and refreshing the material. 

2.  Unfortunately, a small proportion of MOOC students take advantage of anonymity to engage in antisocial or antagonistic behavior on the forums, towards either their fellow students or the course staff. Managing feedback and being able to shut down destructive threads, but if the behavior persists, see if the students expelled from the course.

3. The cross-cultural, cross-time-zone reach of MOOCs obliterates the rhythm that many students and teachers  are used to, and you may find it too time-consuming to keep up with the forums. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most MOOCs don’t have formal office hours or other means for students to get direct help, so the forums are even more critical to the student experience.

4. With hundreds of students, course technology has to work perfectly. We extended the sophisticated autograders for our programming assignments is critical to success. “Dry running" new  new assignments  to fix both logic bugs and problems with the grading rubrics for new homeworks/extended learning. 

Summary
Set expectations for the students
Focus on the content
Use slide decks 
When creating content, figure out a workflow and stick to it
Keep videos short
Continuity: Avoid mentions of dates, times and content order
Interact on the forums a lot, and personally
Ideas for interaction
Think carefully about grading, especially peer review