This morning i received my certificate of completion and submitted my post-course survey so my first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is officially over.
This was a quick four-week class on a revised view of Chinese history based on analysis of local-level (village and province) data. We looked at three specific areas – education, housing and ‘struggle’ during land reform. For those of you not into Chinese history, don’t worry, that’s as specific as I’m going to get.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been blogging about the process of the class – online lectures, discussion groups, quizzes. Now that I’m done, I thought I’d share some overall impressions.
While I found the information and the research methods fascinating, assessment was the weak component of this course. In fact, more than once students lobbied to either have questions thrown out or to have multiple answers counted as correct. These adjustments ultimately gave me 100% (though I must admit I did get one wrong on the final). As I was taking this course for ‘fun’ I wasn’t particularly interested in my grade (aside from hitting the 60% ‘pass’ mark) but I could sense the concern and even panic among some students. I think in the future I’d prefer a course with more than a multiple choice grading scheme.
The workload seemed very reasonable. I spent about 3 hours a week on the class – usually in a 90-minute block to watch the lectures and take the quiz and another 90 minutes in short spurts throughout the week reading the discussion boards. I still have a couple of books on my reading list that I didn’t get to during the class that I would still like to read so actually the time could have been higher.
I found Coursera very easy to use. The dashboard for the class was easy to navigate and, once I learned all of the tricks on the videos (being able to download a transcript or just the powerpoint slides, etc) it made reviewing the information quite simple.
So, overall it was a good experience. I’m interested to see how the MOOC concept continues to evolve and look forward to taking additional classes in the future!