State of MOOCs

By -
Gary May, dean of engineering at Georgia Tech, wrote in Inside Higher Education, "The prospect of MOOCs replacing the physical college campus for undergraduates is dubious at best. Other target audiences are likely better suited for Moocs."

I wonder why the state. And what could be the target audiences of MOOCs?

My daughter took a physics course during last summer online. A lot of tears (frustration), sweats (hard-working), and cheers (rewards for persistency). I am not sure I would encourage her to take a college level course next summer. Probably the course was way too challenging for a to-be-a-seventh-grader then. However, some online courses suitable for young kids to complete during summer/winter breaks should be complementary to K12. (Think how many more days kids could learn outside their regular school terms.)

I personally have enjoyed the Moocs offered at coursera.org. I haven't completed any courses. But I followed a few courses while I was interested at any particular research/teaching subject now and then. MOOCs provide multiple multitudes for teachers to conduct professional developments nowadays.

It was reported that the completion rates of the MOOCs courses are typically low. For example, based on Keren Head's report on The Chronicle of Higher Education on the freshman-compoistion MOOC she taught, they had 21,934 students enrolled, 14,771 of whom were active in the course, 95,631 views on the 26 lecture videos, 19,571 peer assessments done for 2,942 times of student work submissions, and 238 students completed with a certificate.

The numbers are still amazing for us to see the values of MOOCs for the whole society. But the problem is also obvious.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

25 Google Interview Questions

By -
1 Prepare Before Your Interview Do you prepare before your interview at Google? Of course you will. But how and where to start? This report will provide you a list of 25 questions collected from Web provided by Google interview candidates. The list of questions is focus on CS fields. 2 Questions The question listed as follows are not ordered based on any criterion. The programming languages are required to be used are usually not specific. You can practice using Java, C++, C, C#, etc. For each problem, you need figure out at least one solution. If there are multiple solutions to the problem, make sure you understand how to analyze the efficiency (both time and space). Describe a data structure as well as operations on the data structure. What is the difference between function overloading and overriding? Given a superclass A, a subclass B of superclass A where B overrides a function foo() in A, an instance of class B, how to invoke foo() defined in class A? How to check if tw
Read more

Convert LaTeX to HTML

By -
Today I spent quite lots of time to figure out how to convert LaTeX source files to HTML documents. I was trying to install latex2html using fink . The installation of tetex-base failed quite a few times. Eventually I got latex2html installed using fink . Unfortunately, the conversion from my tex files to HTML documents again failed to read document parts. I finally gave up and remove my fink installations from my computer. I then did a few minute google search to use htlatex from TeXShop since I have TeXShop installed in my Macbook. What I did is copy the file htlatex.engine from /Applications/Tex/TeXShop.app/Contents/Resources/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/TeX4ht/ into folder /Users/ /Library/TeXShop/Engines/ Then, I am able to compile my tex files using htlatex in TeXShop . It works perfect!
Read more

Art of Software Development

By -
Image
New York City artist  Nathan Sawaya   exhibited the following art piece of Lego art.  I guess everyone knows to how to connect, manipulate lego pieces.  But only artists like Nathan Sawaya can make such art from the ordinary lego bricks.   We study software development by learning programming languages, tools, methods, ways of thinking, etc.  These topics are normally covered in computing-related curricula.  We also know that experiences are very important ingredient to master programming.  Exactly how all of them work together to upgrade software developers?  What is the journey by which a programmer can reach the mastery of programming or coding and produce art pieces of software?   
Read more