Ask HN: What makes an online course amazing?

It’s not easy for me to explain (and I would imagine not easy to create in lesson plans) but I think it’s something Colt Steele consistently does well in his Web Dev Bootcamp on Udemy.

Here’s my best effort at articulating his teaching style: He walks students directly into the mistakes they’re going to make and then helps guide them out. Most instructors will teach the concept and leave it to students to avoid making mistakes. I learn a lot a better when I know what mistakes to look out for and what to do when I’ve encountered one. But more importantly, I feel like I’ve really mastered the material when I’m confident that I can get myself out of any mess I can get myself into.

You should keep in mind the key difference between your offering run of the mill MOOCs--you're students have to complete your course if they want to maintain their GPAs and graduate.

This should substantially change how you teach your class. A normal MOOC has to make learning "easy" so that students keep coming back. Unfortunately, when learning is "easy" it doesn't stick very well.

Effective learning needs to be challenging and force students to dig deep and think critically about what you're teaching them. If you give out hints or shortcuts, they'll probably like you more, but they're not going to build the deep understanding they need to succeed in further courses and in their career. If you're good at making them think critically, the whole learning process will feel hard for them, possibly as if they aren't learning anything, and they might resent you for that. So it's good that they're stuck with you. Do the right thing and make sure they're really understanding the material and not just memorizing formulas and patterns.

Appropriate assignments. For me, that often makes or breaks a MOOC. I want to be stumped in an intellectual way, but not a cryptic way. I don't want to feel like I'm just trying to decode the professors cryptic problem. I want to feel like it's a genuine hurdle to learn the content well, yet still accessible, and definitely not busy work.

Good example: write an interpreter for the given (made up and simple) programming language. We had to figure out how to implement certain language features such as clojures.

Bad example: in networking course, we had to recall details about certain protocols, and do calculations. While this might be useful to know how to do in practice, it didn't contribute anything to my understanding, and it just always felt like tedious busy work, and lacked projects that contributed to the course goals.

I don't know data science, but here's a project I've heard of: Somebody's hobby was disc golf. Discs come with ratings on them (I'm assuming things like curve and distance). They created a controlled experiment to take various data points from many discs, and compare them to their stated ratings, and apply a bunch of data science-y things to the data.

Edit: I'd add some type of reference resources like a wiki, and ideally some auto-grader that gives feedback if possible (like what tests failed)

It might not be the most useful answer given the context of your question. But in my experience the thing that made the best courses stand out were the depth of understanding of the instructor and their basic didactic skills. Are they able to explain the concepts clearly to a novice student? Are they able to structure the course into a logical progression of topics?

To me, what I consider to be secondary aspects such as interactive quizzes or homework assignments never really made a difference. One thing I noticed that really did not work well for me was asking quiz questions in between that did not require understanding just memorization of what was just said 30 seconds ago. It's like you're checking if they're paying attention v.s. are grasping underlying concepts.

I would recommend you check out CS50 by David Malan (if you haven't already) as it's somewhat of a gold standard for MOOCs in my book.

Good luck with your MOOC! The world needs more of them, make sure you make them as publicly accessible as possible.

What MOOC did you take where you had to write an interpreter?