Guest Post: Report on a CS MOOC from a CS Lecturer

That students don’t finish a CS MOOC isn’t news.  That a CS Lecturer from a research intensive university (an expert in CS teaching) couldn’t stand to finish a CS MOOC is interesting.  Bettina Bair is a Senior Lecturer in CS at Ohio State University.  I’m posting her note to me as a guest post, with her permission.

Recently I enrolled in (and did not complete) a MOOC class from University of Maryland, delivered by Coursera. Since you’ve done some blogging on the idea of distance learning, I thought I would share the enrollment statistics and my experience with you.

The final enrollment for the course was over 220,000 students.  Then about 5000 students completed the course; they will receive a certificate.  About 40% of the students came from developing countries.  And the gender split was 85/15, about the same as for our courses.

The course was presented with canned videos of the professor standing in front of a powerpoint.  There was about an hour of video to watch each week.  The videos had questions to answer every ten minutes or so.  There were also weekly homeworks, quizzes and projects to complete.  There was an online forum for discussion.

Even though I was very interested in the subject, I found the format to be unappealing, and I probably would have learned more from reading a book. The online forum was especially hard to navigate. Imagine 220,000 vying for attention and everyone names their posts, “Help!”.

That said, 5000 people did finish the course.  And good for them.

Let me know if you’re interested in talking more about this course or seeing examples of the coursework.