Third time isn’t necessarily the charm for massive open online course instructors, but through a process of trial and error, some faculty members at Stanford University say their MOOCs are living up to (some of) the potential promised two years ago.
(More on MOOCS: Panel outlines online learning priorities: 'The world is watching Stanford' Why we should Go easy on MOOCs.)
As many instructors are finding out, teaching a MOOC is not that different from teaching a face-to-face course -- at least the kind where you stand in front of a large auditorium, said Scott Klemmer, associate professor of cognitive science and computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego. And since MOOCs have for more than a year commanded such a large part of the conversation about online education in general, instructors can more easily see what other instructors are experimenting with, he said.
(Plethora of data helps Lytics Lab to analyze MOOCs )
“As we run these classes multiple times, a major question is: What is the role of the instructor?” said Klemmer, who is also a visiting associate professor of computer science at Stanford. “When you run it for the 10th time, how do you have it so you can be involved in the class at the level you want without you feeling like ‘Groundhog Day,’ where you’re doing the same thing over and over again?”
Keith Devlin, a Stanford researcher who is spending a semester as a visiting professor of mathematics at Princeton University, recently launched the fourth iteration of his Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC. He said the number of students who persist through the first and second weeks has grown with every new version of the course. He declined to provide any numbers, since enrollment varies between the fall and spring semesters, but said the results mean he has finally reached a point where he has moved from “crude-tuning to fine-tuning.”
Yet through those four versions, Devlin said, the course’s content has remained more or less constant. Some of the lectures have been tweaked or edited, but the structure of the MOOC and the experience of taking it have become “radically different.” Devlin said he was inspired by massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as “World of Warcraft,” which have enthralled millions of players -- himself included -- to the point where they grind through repetitious tasks on the road to a reward.
“I’ve played hours of ‘World of Warcraft’ -- in part because I saw [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] as a vehicle for education,” Devlin said. “They’ve made it virtually impossible to get the cool stuff unless you enter into at least temporary collaborations. MOOCs offer the opportunity to do the same thing -- not in the fictional world of Azeroth -- but in the real world of Stanford courses.”
The success of MMORPGs, Devlin said, is that they have managed to simultaneously be massive while encouraging players to form smaller social groups, or guilds. “It’s about communities, and so all of the changes I’ve been making have been about putting students in a position where they feel comf forming communities,” he said.
Read the full story in Inside Higher Ed.
Read more about the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (HSTAR) at Stanford.
Read more about Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
