Derek Bruff of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt has posted a nice essay on the Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs. They have run three MOOCs starting with one on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software. With this one they found only 7% were awarded some sort of statement of accomplishment (which is a measure of how many finished the course in some fashion.) They had better luck with the next two MOOCs on leadership and nutrition.
The essay then discusses a number of lessons learned (which I quote):
- Teaching online is a team effort
- There’s more to MOOCs than lecture videos
- Open content is our friend
- The cognitive diversity seen in MOOCs is far greater than in closed courses
- MOOC students are well-motivated students
- Cognitive Diversity + Intrinsic Motivations = Crowdsourcing Success
- Accommodating students on different time tables can be challenging
- Instructor presence is important
They have a MOOC coming up on Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative which I think I’m going to take. This raises the question of how many students of MOOCs are other pros wondering how MOOCs work.