Hello, I'm Sergio Luján Mora, assistant professor at the University of Alicante, and in this video I'm going to summarize my scientific paper "Lessons learned in the organization of a MOOC" that I presented in November 2013 in the "II Congreso Internacional sobre aprendizaje, innovación y competitividad" that took place in Madrid.
In this conference, the presentation followed the format called "Pecha Kucha", which means presentations must be done with only 20 slides displayed during 20 seconds each one.
The objective of this format is to promote creativity and avoid people providing long talks.
So, in this work, I present six lessons I have learned after organizing two MOOCs and the participation in the technical development team of another MOOC.
I have learned many more lessons, but I'll just highlight that I think are most important.
During the past two years, the term MOOC, Massive Open Online Course has been the buzzword in education circles.
For some, the MOOCs represent a revolution, a tsunami, a disruptive event that will change the college education. For these people, the MOOCs are the future of university education.
For others, the MOOCs are a threat to the university. With MOOCs, new actors have appeared on the educational scene that will end the alleged privileged position that has the university.
These new actors on the educational scene are the MOOC aggregators platforms, such as Coursera, Udacity and EDX, which have erupted with great force and with thousands or millions of dollars in investment for their projects.
The MOOC phenomenon struck me from the beginning, so initially I made several MOOC courses as a student.
Once it was clear for me what a MOOC was supposed to be, I set out to organize my own MOOCs.
Specifically, so far I have organized two MOOCs. The first one, iDESWEB, Introduction to Web Development, there have been three editions and they have brought together nearly 30,000 students.
The second course, iXML, Introduction to XML, there have been two editions with nearly 2,000 students.
The student participation and completion rates in both courses is similar to that of other MOOCs, between 5 and 10% of all students enrolled.
In both cases, I have employed MOOCs in two subjects two support the teaching method "flipped classroom". In the flipped classroom, the teacher's master class are replaced by the participation of students in the MOOC. Throughout the MOOC, students gain knowledge that is traditionally transmitted through the teacher's master class, and the time spent in the classroom with the teacher, which is the most valuable resource because it is very limited, is dedicated to be a real interaction between teacher and students in order to help the assimilation of information.
From the organization of the MOOCs iDESWEB and iXML I have drawn a number of lessons. Next I will summarize the six most important lessons.
Some of the lessons I learned I knew or I planned before, but the organization of the MOOCs has reinforced that knowledge I already had.
First, expectations of students. In a MOOC course, with thousands of students, the expectations that each student has at the beginning of the course can be very diverse. However, the course is unique and can not be customized to suit each student, so not all expectations will be met.
To prevent students become disillusioned with the course or even to feel deceived, they should be well informed about of the contents of the course and how the course works.
Among other things, it should be very clear during the promotion of the course, before the course starts:
Dates of start and end of the course.
The duration of the course and the workload of the course.
The course syllabus, explained with different levels of detail.
The amount of exercises to be performed during the course and their typology.
And how to interact with the teacher.
On the other hand, we must be very careful with the duration and course structure. Demographic statistics of the MOOC students show that age is usually placed between 30 and 40 years. Although it is assumed that most of the people that is enrolled in a MOOC has a real interest in learning, the commitments of everyday life, such as family or work, hinder users to complete a MOOC successfully. The profile of a student in a MOOC is different from students' who normally attend a classroom at a university.
Therefore, the duration of a MOOC should not be excessive, it must be less than the duration of a traditional course or subject.
For example, when analyzing 20 randomly-chosen courses on Coursera platform, an average of seven-weeks long is obtained, with a workload of 4 to 6 hours per week.
Furthermore, the content and the difficulty of the course.
Some experts believe that MOOCs are closer to being textbooks courses. From this point of view, the learning experience that most people expect to get is similar to that achieved when reading a book: In general, people do not look for deep learning, do not seek to know why the things are, but seek a superficial learning with some details, know some implications of the learning for their work or life. Typically, people seek concrete solutions to a problem of knowledge they have.
Therefore, you should be very careful in the approach of the contents of a MOOC if you really want it to be massive with thousands of students. If the course is very difficult, even if it is a good course, it will not probably have a great success.
What can you do for a course not to be too difficult? You can do several things.
For example, if a course is very difficult, it may be better to divide it in several related courses in order to make it easier to complete each of them.
The length of videos is a critical issue. We are used to teach one hour, two hours or even more hours in a row.
An educational video can not have that time, most people have difficulties sustaining attention in front of a video for a long time. We have to fight against a powerful enemy, the computer itself, which is a weapon of mass distraction.
The recommended duration of an educational video is between 3 and 6 minutes, reaching a maximum of 10 minutes in cases of very complex issues.
In addition, short videos allow students to watch the videos when they have little moments of spare time.
The penultimate advice is the interaction with students.
Actually, it would be better to say "interaction with users", since a MOOC can be understood as an online business, where there are a number of users who you need to provide a service. Therefore, all good practices that exist to operate an online business are good advices for the development of a MOOC.
One issue that should be clearly explained to students are the different ways to interact with the teacher. Can students write directly to the teacher? What can they expect the teacher to answer them?
Although from the point of view of the teacher it can be clear that in a massive course with thousands of students it is impossible to address each one individually, from the point of view of a student only two people are in the course: the student and the teacher. Therefore, to avoid problems, you should clarify the forms of interaction between students and the teacher from the beginning of the course.
Finally, most unpleasant, "trolls", which is related to the interaction with students. A troll is a user who publishes provocative, irrelevant or off-topic messages. The "troll" only seeks disturbing and upseting, so it is usually impossible to have a dialogue with them. What a "troll" wants to achieve is to draw attention of others.
The most common advice that is often given to deal with trolls is "do not feed the troll", ie, ignore the trolls, don't pay attention to them.
And to finish, a MOOC is a new teaching method you have to adapt to, you can not make a MOOC trying to apply traditional teaching methods. As it is something new, you can face some unpleasant surprises, like trolls, but also some pleasant as receiving emails from grateful students.
Go ahead and participate in a MOOC, either as a student or as an organizer.
Thank you very much for your attention.