TITLE: The Reach of a MOOC AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 30, 2014 1:04 PM DESC: ----- BODY:
Doug Schmidt
Distributed computing, OOP, and patterns guru Doug Schmidt recently posted on Facebook a statistical recap of his summer MOOC on pattern-oriented software architectures for mobile devices and cloud computing. Approximately 80,000 people signed up for the course, 40,000 people showed up, and 4,000 people completed the course in a meaningful way (taking automated quizzes and possibly doing peer-graded programming assignments). So that's either a 5% completion rate for the course, or 10%, depending on which standard you prefer. A lot of folks complain that the reach of MOOCs is muted by their notoriously low completing rates. But Schmidt puts the numbers into perspective:
... I've taught ~1,000 students at Wash U., UC Irvine, and Vanderbilt in the past 20 years, so regardless of the completion *rate* the opportunity to reach > 4,000 students and teach them about patterns and frameworks for concurrent programming in Java and Android is pretty cool!
Schmidt has a lot of knowledge and experience to share. His MOOC shared it with an awful lot of people in one offering. My department has not attempted a "massive" on-line course yet, though a few of our faculty did take a small first step last month. As Mark Guzdial lamented a few months ago, Google required that all of its CS4HS summer workshops be offered on-line. A few of my colleagues, led by Ben Schafer, have taught CS4HS workshops for the last five years, reaching in the ballpark of 20-25 teachers from northeast Iowa in each of the first four. As reported in the department's own Facebook post, this year the course enrolled 245 teachers from thirty-nine states and Puerto Rico. I haven't seen final numbers for the workshop yet, but just after it ended Ben reported good participation and positive evaluations from the teachers in the course. I don't know yet what I think about MOOCs. The trade-offs are numerous, and most of my teaching experience is in smaller, more intimate settings that thrive on individual relationships with students. But I can't deny the potential reach for MOOCs to reach so many people and to provide access to valuable courses to people who otherwise likely could never attend them. On a lighter note, the first comment in response to Schmidt's Facebook post is my favorite in a while:
I just loaded the dishwasher. Our jobs are so similar! Crazy, eh?
Don't worry, Kristie. Sometimes, I look at all the amazing thing Doug does and feel exactly the same. -----