By MaryCate Most, Daily Illini
Massive open online courses have unveiled a gold mine of data to University faculty and staff. Typically, instructors evaluating the effectiveness of their teaching styles can only gather data from relatively small classes. But with the help of data from massive open online courses, or MOOCs, an instructor’s sample size expands from 50 to 50,000 participants. Each class costs about $30,000 to $50,000 to produce, not including the faculty members’ time spent on its development. In addition to faculty members’ curricula, the MOOCs require a staff of instructional designers, who in turn design the MOOC presentation; audio and video producers to nail down technical details; and copywriters to ensure that the material is in the public domain. The MOOC Strategy Advisory Committee has already made a commitment to hire six more staff members in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, which produces the MOOCs. The team estimated that it will need to make three or four more hires in the near future, all with salaries of about $50,000 a year.
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