Last year – for some reason that I can no longer remember – I became interested in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). MOOCs are the latest computer- and web-based panacea proposed for solving crises in education. Among the prominent institutions offering MOOCs are two companies (Udacity and Coursera) and the edX consortium established by Harvard and MIT.
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
