[T]he following are types of uses that Udacity expressly defines as falling outside of the definition of “non-commercial”: … (e) the use of Educational Content by a college, university, school, or other educational institution for instruction where tuition is charged.

You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera … as part of any tuition-based … program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera.

This seems to forbid the use of a MOOC in a “flipped classroom,” where frontal lectures are replaced by listening to the recorded lectures, and class time is devoted to discussion and problem solving (perhaps of the homework problems posed within the MOOC). Many people consider the flipped classroom to be an effective use of MOOCs, so it is amazing that both companies are putting up obstacles.

At least with Coursera, all the students can write them a letter asking for permission :-).

Assessment in a MOOC is extremely difficult. Automatic assessment can check the output of a program but is useless to evaluate design, the topic of this course. The original intention was to use peer assessment for two projects, and a system of rubrics and training was laid out. This was abandoned in favor of self-assessment (!) because people take vacations in August and peer-assessment must be synchronous.

Aside from the usual problems with the forum (lack of civility), this course faced a problem caused by the openness of the MOOC. The course targets true novices but experienced people also take the course. Kiczales had to request: “Please, please, please don’t reply to beginner requests for help with advanced comments.”

There are eight (!) TAs who have experience with the (in-house version of the) course. Kiczales promises: “There are TAs monitoring the forums nearly 24 hours a day, and our goal is to respond to errors you point out within a few hours.” Clearly, MOOCs don’t come for free.

There was some problem with the compatibility of videos (html5 vs. flash?) which shows that running a MOOC requires technical expertise and support.

Turning to educational aspects: In my Inroads article, I complained about the lack of textbooks for the MOOCs I studied. This course is based on a freely available textbook, How to Design Programs 2/e by Felleisen (winner of the 2011 SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions Award), Findler, Flatt and Krishnamurthi. Similarly, programming is done in a educational development environment (DrRacket) which is far superior to using a bare-bones compiler.

I was pleased to see that the first week included introductory lectures on stepping through a program using DrRacket and on using Help. I believe that such “meta-aspects” of programming important and should be explicitly taught.

Next week I’ll write on the homework assignments and quizzes.

Moti

My initiation was innocent enough: studying a course in introductory CS from Udacity. When I finished the course I wrote up my impressions and then I convinced myself to study a similar course from Coursera. My analysis of this experience has just been published in ACM Inroads: MOOCs on Introductory Programming: A Travelogue. ACM Inroads 4(2), 2013, 58–61.

Such a hot educational topic deserves a blog and I’ve decided to start one. While everyone has an opinion, I would prefer that comments and posts be based on experience: people who studied a MOOC, used a MOOC in their teaching or developed learning materials used in MOOCs. I’d even be happy to hear from those who teach MOOCs :-).

Next week, I plan to start studying another MOOC from Coursera: Introduction to Systematic Program Design – Part 1 by Gregor Kiczales. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Moti