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