MOOCs, Enrolling a Massive Open Online Courses in parallel with one's own cursus

1. Centrale-Beihang workshop, 11/12/2012, updated 20/01/2013
Testing out Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs) at Centrale
Lille : feedback and issues for the future
Rémi Bachelet
Laboratoire de de modélisation et de management des
organisations (LM2O)

2. Intro : experience of online courses
1. What are MOOCs ?
– Impact on higher education
2. Students at école Centrale de Lille enrolled in a MOOC
course
– Feedback : motivation, dropout, course quality, Local study
groups, workload
– What is left to us locally ?
3. MOOCs are proposed by the most famous world
universities
– Should Centrale also launch MOOCs of its own and how ?
20/01/2013

3. Introduction : my experience of
online courses

4. My experience of online courses :
timeline and stats
• Timeline :
– 2000 : Open license sharing of slides
– 2008 : SEO => more traffic
– 2010 : videos, distance learning program
– 2012 : website revamp http://gestiondeprojet.pm
– Lately : enrolled in MOOCs .. Including ITyPA
– Enrollment in progress : MOOC gestion de projet (project
management)
• Web analytics :
– Website : 14k+ unique visits/month
– Videos : 1800 hours watched/month
– Online Certificate : 40 certificates/year
– My MOOC : 200-300 enrolled/week without external support
20/01/2013

5. My experience of online courses :
conclusions
• Open license : Creative Commons-by-NC-SA
• A lot of work
– Courses need to be rewritten
– Website development/maintenance
– Video recording takes time
– Not just slides,
• Interactive quizz, model documents
• Widening of topics : finance for projects, problem-solving…
• Bringing contracts to the lab
20/01/2013

6. What are MOOCs ?
Presently Coursera has the biggest offer, offering courses from big
name universities

7. Mooc learning environment (1/2)
20/01/2013

8. Mooc learning environment (2/2)
20/01/2013

9. MOOC video course
20/01/2013

10. From professor in a lecture hall to online
instructor of tens of thousands
• Huge enrollments
– Free, no tuition fee
– 10k+ students, 100.000 students is possible
• Teach in new ways : Crowdsourcing technology
– discussion forums,
• every student reading the forum vote questions and comments up or down
– peer grading :
• student must score the work of five classmates to get their own score, the
average of what their peers gave them
– Online video Q&A, wiki
– Video lessons in short segments,
• embedded quiz questions to keep the viewer engaged and provide instant
feedback
20/01/2013

11. • MOOCs are causing higher education to shift
– From a vertically integrated model to a horizontally
integrated one
– Decoupling teaching and learning from the campus on
a mass scale
There are in fact many types of MOOCs : xMOOCs,
cMOOCs, task-oriented… and within theses types many
different implementations.
20/01/2013

12. Impact on higher education
• A new business model ?
– Under Coursera’s contracts, the company gets most of
the revenue; the universities keep 6 percent to 15
percent of the revenue, and 20 percent of gross profits
• Exclusionary model called into question.
– Today a university's quality is based on the number of
students it rejects.
– MOOC enable all interested persons to take courses,
– …regardless of their qualifications.
20/01/2013

13. Competitors and consequences
• Lower-tier universities,
– In the US : costly tuition, may have trouble convincing students that their courses are
worth the price
– Tempted to drop some courses and substitute cheaper online instruction from big-
name professors
• Top universities
– every major university is thinking about what they will do online
– stand to gain, both in prestige and in their ability to refine their pedagogy;
– no fears about diluting their brand-name appeal.
• Competitors
– Coursera, 2 millions enrolled students as of 12/2012
• Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and the University of Michigan, 33+ university
partners.
• Coursera is looking for big names partners now
• Participating schools
• Udacity, edX, Canvas Network, China Open Resources for Education, Future
Learn…
20/01/2013

14. Students at école Centrale de Lille
enrolled in MOOCs :
feedback
20/01/2013

15. • First year students at ecole Centrale de Lille
– This year : suggestion to enroll a MOOC course in
addition to normal curriculum (not included in our course).
– 33 (=12%) of them decided to try out (on their own
initiative)
• 33 answers open questionnaire
• 27 answers closed questionnaire
• Centrale Lille course was the 32-hours “sociologie des
organisations” (Sociology of Organizations)
– Social Network Analysis UMich ; 8 weeks, finished
– Organizational Analysis Standford 10 weeks, exam open
20/01/2013

16. Chosen courses (19% took both and answered twice)
20/01/2013

17. Dropout rate
+6 students did not fill this
questionnaire, so
• 27% dropout from start to just
before the exam
• Volonteers only
20/01/2013

18. Course Quality
On a scale from 0 to 10
• Happy students
• More satisfaction with Umich than
Standford
20/01/2013

19. Learning system
On a scale from 0 to 10
• Happy students
• More satisfaction with Umich than
Standford
20/01/2013

20. Local study groups
Centrale Students live in same dorm
• 1 = no contacts w/ other students
• Despite encouragments, wiki page.. limited
success
20/01/2013

21. Workload
3 hours/week
• ..Except one student who took OA advanced,
with 8-10 hours per submitted essay
• One MOOC compatible with the challenging
Centrale curriculum
20/01/2013

22. Enrollment motives
Many motivations (several answers possible)
• + Practising english, discovery of another way of
learning, Certificate of completion, curious…
• - university reputation (!) , choose learning
rythm
20/01/2013

23. How can we help MOOCs locally ?
No big demands except..
• Giving recognition of success in our own cursus..
• .. but this a problem with Coursera’s MOOCs (we’ll
come back on that)
20/01/2013

24. Other questions (details on request)
• Online contacts
– Course forum mostly
– Very few contacts
• Useful to success
1. Videos, quizzes (90-80%)
2. Slides, subtitles (40-50%)
• Perceived difficulty :
– answers clustered near « average » (this is good)
20/01/2013

25. Should Centrale also launch
MOOCs of its own and how ?

26. • In french, chinese, english ?
• What platform ?
– Canvas <= in progress
– Coursera <= very busy, big name and top-down only
– Google course builder, other …
• Collective/separate action ?
– Beware :
• A lot of serious work
• Exposure : will be compared to other MOOCs
20/01/2013

27. Questions ?
• Warning : you cannot use Coursera in a curriculum
– "You may not take any Online Course offered by
Coursera or use any Letter of Completion as part of any
tuition-based or for-credit certification” (Students terms
of use)
– Always check MOOC license beforehand
20/01/2013