Online Learning Update

September 17, 2013

Astonishing MOOC Success More Complicated Than It Seemed, Raising Questions for UW

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:06 am

By Nina Shapiro, Seattle Weekly

Last fall, an engineering professor at San Jose State University named Khosrow Ghadiri tried something radical in his Introduction to Circuits course. He made a MOOC a central part of the his class curriculum. He gave two quizzes every class to see what students understood from the material. He would spend 15 minutes going over the most difficult concepts, and then break up into group work. He says students told him they got a lot out of the teamwork, and they apparently didn’t dare missing the quizzes. Hardly anyone ever skipped class, which was far from the case before. After each class, Ghardiri analyzed the quizzes and sent e-mails to students about their results. “I think you should put your effort here,” he might say. He appreciated the benefits of this careful analysis. “This is the first time in my entire life that I know my students one by one,” he says. In the past, he says, he would “go to a lecture hall and look at 86 students he didn’t recognize.”

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/948803-129/class-students-mooc-online-says-ghadiri

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