Going Undercover as a MOOC Student: What They Can Teach Us about Online-Course Design

  Reading time 4 minutes

In her post, A Rectangle is Not a Square, Melissa Koenig describes some of the differences between what most universities consider online courses and the newer model of MOOCs (massive open online courses). While I know it’s important to understand these differences when looking at the big picture of online education today, I’m also curious about the similarities. What can those of us developing and teaching online courses learn from MOOC design and delivery?

To get an inside look I enrolled in Model Thinking, offered on the Coursera platform. I almost couldn’t believe how easy it was to sign up and jump right into a University of Michigan course from my living room. As a course designer it is always a treat to peek into other institutions’ online courses. Typically you have to go to conference presentations to do this; I only had to provide a username and password. Imagine the shared learning that can take place when online course designers and instructors have such open access to one another’s materials. Of course there are intellectual-property and financial considerations, but ignoring these for a moment, it’s an opportunity to build on the success and innovation of others.

Coursera courses are built on a pedagogical foundation that is research based and consistent with the design philosophy espoused in DePaul’s DOTS program.  Some features I enjoyed as a MOOC student:

  • Mastery Learning supported by multi-attempt quizzes
  • Peer assessment of short writing assignments
  • Video lectures broken into 10–15 minutes sections, with a couple quick check questions built in, and a speed up/speed down option
  • Organized website with a logical and consistent flow to the weekly activities
  • Clear expectations for learning and assignment completion
  • Four “free” late days to apply as I wished to the weekly quizzes or exams

Despite the high quality of the course, I dropped out. Then I signed up for another Coursera course, Gamification, and enjoyed that course as well until I dropped out again.

While there is a small minority of hardcore MOOC students who complete courses, I’m not alone in my tendency to drop out. The average completion rate for a MOOC is less than 10 percent. This recent post from Open Culture lists the Top 10 Reasons their readers didn’t finish a MOOC.

Just about every one of these reasons rang true for my own experience. More importantly, all of these teach us what not to do when designing and teaching an online course. The amazing thing about MOOCs is the amount of student-experience data they can provide. Until now all of this data was siloed away inside individual courses across multiple schools behind password-protected learning-management systems. Professors and instructional designers at these institutions have probably been making parallel discoveries about online student learning, but with mostly anecdotal or small-scale research to support their ideas. By removing the curtain, those of us interested in online and blended delivery can peek into hundreds or thousands of “classrooms” to see what others are doing. How exciting!


A screenshot from one of the video lectures in Model Thinking. The instructor, Scott E. Page, used a talking head, along with screen sharing and whiteboard capabilities to deliver engaging lectures with embedded quick check questions.

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