My Big MOOC Adventure

MOOCs have been a hot topic for a little while now; I've read a lot about MOOCs and I have friends who have taken several MOOCs for personal enrichment and just loved them. As a person who would become a professional student if I could, I've been curious about the MOOC experience, so I decided to give one a try.

I started off by Googling "MOOC" and checking out the course offerings on various sites, like Coursera, edX, and Udacity. Fortunately for me, I'm particularly interested in STEM topics - MOOC offerings seem to be heavy on the math and science. I wanted to find a course that would be interesting and self-paced, as I wasn't sure that I'd be able to stick to a regular schedule of study. (Some MOOCs are more like traditional classes, in that they have set schedules and require submissions of work at certain times.) For this initial experiment, the ability to work independently was a higher priority than the possibility of interaction with other students.

I eventually ended up looking at courses on iTunes U, Apple's "store" for educational materials. I settled on a Calculus course [Calculus I (MA005)] offered by Saylor via iTunes U. I chose this mainly for ease - because of the Apple connection, I'd be able to easily download all of the materials onto my iPad, so I'd have them with me all the time. I've been interested in reviewing Calculus for a while now (since it's been years since I've studied or taught it), so that seemed like as good a subject as any to start with.

I was pretty excited to get started. I bought myself a new grid paper notebook, got out my favorite pencil, and set up a schedule for completing lessons. The materials provided for this course included textbook sections, practice exercises (with answer key), and a link to a graphing calculator app. This was a truly self-paced, self-study course, and I was ready to go...

Until I got incredibly bored. Several lessons in, I lost my enthusiasm entirely, and I knew exactly why. The text was pretty good, and the exercises were interesting enough, but there was no human element to the course. In addition to being self-study, this particular course did not even include any kind of video instruction or messages from the instructor. One thing that I know about myself is that I'm very much a visual learner, and I really missed watching an instructor explain concepts and draw out supporting charts and graphics. The text was not very visually engaging, either, so it was even difficult to do the reading.  I missed the interaction with other students and the opportunity to ask questions or listen to the questions asked by others. Wow, I thought - if I can't stay motivated to do this, how could students ever stay motivated through a course like this? I've heard people advocate MOOCs as an option for developmental students, and based on my experience, I'm just not sure I can see that working.

So, my intitial experiment with MOOCs was an utter failure in terms of reviewing Calculus, but I did learn some important lessons about virtual classrooms and independent study. I've since downloaded another Calculus course (also from iTunes U) from Ohio State, which is much more engaging - in addition to a text, dozens of videos are provided, and they're well-produced and fun to watch. The instructor, Jim Fowler is animated and has clearly thought about how to keep students engaged online. I'll post more on this course when I get further into it - stay tuned.