Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Implementing a massive open online course (MOOC)

2013; Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges; Volume: 28; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5555/2460156.2460182

1937-4771

David J. Malan,

Online Learning and Analytics

Distance education is by no means new. Indeed, long before the Internet came along were universities making educational content available to students off campus via VHS, CD-ROM, and other media. But what is new is the scale on which universities and, in some cases, individual faculty are now operating. Massive open online courses (otherwise known as MOOCs) from non-profits like edX and for-profits like Coursera and Udacity have repeatedly drawn upwards of 100,000 registrants from all over the world. How to teach so many students effectively, though, is non-obvious. How to disseminate content to so many students, particularly large videos, is technically challenging (if not expensive). And how to collect, evaluate, and return work to so many students is a feat unto itself. Even so, we set out in Fall 2012 to tackle each of those challenges and more. We present in this tutorial how to implement (and how not to implement) a MOOC, based on lessons learned while designing and implementing CS50x: Harvard University's Introduction to Computer Science I, edX's largest fall course with 120,000 registered students. We present what we did, how we did it, why we did it, and what we would and wouldn't do again so that others might build upon our own experience. In particular, • we present how to capture and encode content (e.g., faculty on video) using commodity hardware and open-source tools like FFmpeg; • we present how to choose among YouTube, iTunes U, Amazon Web Services, and the like for delivery of content; • we present CS50 Check, an open-source autograding framework that we developed for CS50x (with other courses in mind) that supports behavioral testing of programs written in any interpreted or compiled language; • we present CS50 Run, an open-source, web-based code editor that we developed for CS50x (with other courses in mind) that enables students to write, within a browser, code in any language, execution of which happens server-side; • and we present the pedagogy behind CS50x itself and the accompanying challenges of scale, among them logistics discussions among students, issues of academic dishonesty, and hidden costs in time. In addition, we explore in this tutorial the research potential that MOOCs' scale offers, including opportunities for A/B testing and more. Ultimately, this tutorial's attendees will exit with an understanding of the time, costs, opportunities, and challenges involved in offering a course on scale.