It was a success, for the first run 38.000 people registered and 2.200 people finished; meaning they made quizzes and assignments for 8 weeks in a row. In the second run another 22.000 people participated. I learned lots of things from my MOOC experiment, and now we are getting ready for the third run, I felt it was time to share my experiences, starting with the why.
Why on earth did you want to make a MOOC?
Seriously, already you busy enough?! Why would you want to make an online course? For me there are I several reasons that made it worthwhile.
Impact
When we started the development of the MOOC, it was the first MOOC on data analysis with Excel. That means lot of people learnt how to be more efficient in their daily lives. We got people from all over the world to participate, which was really an amazing feeling:
Research
Having an impact on the world is nice, but impact is not going to get me tenure 🙂 But luckily, the MOOC provided us with a great opportunity to gather some research data. We are developing an algorithm that can attach meaning to spreadsheet cells (like this is the profit of the month January) and for this, we needed a large set of user-generated data, to benchmark against. We asked people in the MOOC to click labels in an online game (still live, feel free to try!) and we got 160.000 answers to test with. Isn’t that cool?! No one in the world has a dataset like that.We also pitched Expector, the spreadsheet test tool developed in the MOOC and asked people to install it. So far 211 installs for us to get feedback from.And of course just observing what students think is hard and what is easy is useful input.So one tip I would give to aspiring MOOC teachers is to think how your research can benefit, what are problems you want to explore, and where you need data. Having thousands of people just fill out a few questions could give you so much insight!
Making yourself the best teacher you can be
No one enjoys watching videos of themselves I guess. Do I move like that? Do I SOUND like that? But ultimately it really makes you a better teacher. I also really liked the brevity, having to chop up your material in little 5 minute snippets puts you in a really different mindset than just having the freedom of rambling for 2 x 45 minutes. I like what our university’s vice president said about this:“We believe that … you are developing your own education online for the world to see it, it will automatically lead to even better educational materials.” – Anka MulderI could not agree more! Of course you do your best when you prepare for a lecture, but if you known thousands of people are going to watch, things get more real.
Encore: Why does your university support the creation of free online content?
1) Idealism. “We have very good education and we want to teach as many people as we can. We can’t do that on our campus for everyone, hence it is really great that other people, who are not on campus, can use what we have developed as well.”
2) Reputation. Of course having thousands of people worldwide watch your videos is a good way for people to know your institute, it might be cheaper and easier than advertising in lots of countries.
3) Innovation. “We believe that innovation is not only what you do in research”
4) Quality. “We believe that when you use materials from other top universities or when you are developing your own education online for the world to see it, it will automatically lead to even better educational materials.”
I would hope “impact is not going to get me tenure” is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Maybe talk to the new dept chair!
Yes a bit tongue in cheek (hence the smiley) but also a bit serious. In my tenure review which included said department chair I was told to focus _less_ on outreach…