MOOCs helping Brown expand online offerings

In the summer of 2013, Brown University stepped confidently, but cautiously, into the burgeoning world of Internet education known as Massive Open Online Courses.
Partnering with for-profit technology startup Coursera, Brown created three MOOCs – units made up of video lectures, interactive projects and digital assignments – accessible to anyone in the world with a broadband connection.
At the time, Brown President Christina Paxson, less than a year into her tenure at the school, said online higher education remained experimental and the university would move carefully to guarantee high standards.
Now 14 months later, Brown appears pleased with the early results of its MOOCs and is steadily refining, enhancing and expanding its free online offerings.
“The first three courses were great successes,” said Kathy Takayama, a professor of molecular biology and executive director of Brown’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. “The feedback from Coursera was they were impressed with the thoughtfulness and quality. What we are interested in is bringing out to the world what could happen in online education and every possible country engaging in discussions.”
The three initial Brown MOOCs – on human relationships in literature, the archeological mindset and application of algebra in computer science – all returned for another semester.
And to those three, Brown has added a fourth this fall, on data analysis in neuroscience.
It’s hardly a headlong leap away from the traditional campus experience. Ivy League counterparts Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University all have more Coursera offerings.
And Brown has yet to dabble in the controversial world of offering credit toward a degree for a MOOC.
Still, it’s clear that after a year of experience Brown is invested in MOOCs and sees them as an avenue with potential to enhance the brand.
“We will be building more MOOCs,” Takayama said. “We haven’t identified the topics yet, but there will be a call out to faculty [for proposals].” MOOCs have attracted significant attention because of their scale and potential to reach many more people than any traditional college course could.
The 193,000 people who registered for the first round of three Brown MOOCs, for example, dwarfed how many could ever hear the professors teaching the classes in person.
Of course, registering for a MOOC doesn’t mean you will complete it, including all of the assignments, or even make it through more than the first video lecture.
Even among undergraduates on campus, the first week of a semester is often thought of as a “shopping” period for students, who often enroll in a class and then switch to something else after getting a taste of it.
For MOOCs, where student retention has been an ongoing issue, the low bar to register and inherent novelty of the concept encourage people to take a look even if they have no intention of pushing through to completion.
And that’s OK. Takayama said completion is not a major focus of the professors and administrators working on MOOCs at Brown.
Among the Brown MOOCs, the share of registrants who completed the course averaged 7 percent, Takayama said, somewhat better than the industry standard for the courses, which hovers in the 5 percent range.
Although 7 percent completion may not sound high, it would equate to about 13,500 people, some on far-flung continents, finishing a Brown University class.
That stronger-than-average completion rate owes a lot to one class that finished with 12 percent completion, Takayama said, although she wouldn’t say which class that was.
Registration for the second year was not available yet because enrollment for some of the courses has not closed, she said.
With a year of MOOC experience under their belts, the participating professors are experimenting with the format.
Professor of comparative literature Arnold Weinstein approached the MOOC for his Brown class “The Fiction of Relationship,” looking to understand whether the format works for the humanities as well as more empirical subjects. In the first year, Weinstein was encouraged by the level of interaction and analysis coming from his MOOC students, even if only a small number of them actually completed the course and all its assignments.
As a result, this year Weinstein took it a step further and is requiring his Brown students to enroll in the MOOC and participate in the online discussions while they take the brick-and-mortar class.
“The online discussion forums blew me away,” Weinstein said. “They were extremely interesting and it occurred to me in some ways it rivals and outruns what happens in brick and mortar classrooms. There you are constrained by time and space.”
While he’s enthusiastic about teaching the humanities online, Weinstein said his experience with a MOOC did not resolve any of the questions about how to grade or offer credit for online learning.
In the sciences, professors are able to create exams that can be taken and graded digitally, making a class of 100,000 no more of a challenge than one of 100.
For classes where essays form the basis of graded assignments, Coursera has developed a peer grading system, but Weinstein said he wouldn’t feel comfortable using something like that to award credit.
Takayama said Brown is less focused on working out how to award MOOC credit than seeing how lessons can be applied to other kinds of classes, such as “hybrids” or “flipped” classes where the lecture piece of the class happens online.
“What we are working on is not online courses for credit per se, but thinking about how to make the best of both worlds,” Takayama said. “If we have an opportunity to replace passive lectures with an opportunity to collaboratively learn and problem-solve, those are the opportunities that add to Brown’s on-campus experience.”

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