Ask HN: What makes an online course amazing?

In my formal education days, I was perma-frustrated that none of my teachers had achieved anything impressive with their work (apart from being published), and I often felt like I was being handed out second-hand knowledge to regurgitate during the exams... and I had to get a job to pay for that level of education!

To me what's really good about MOOCs is that I can have access to some of the best content and teachers from MIT, etc all from the comfort of my living room.

Dan Ariely's MOOC on Irrational Behavior (coursera) remains my favorite online course and one of the best overall.

The content was engaging. It included guest talks. The course didn't shy from hard work, including dozens of required and recommended papers. The curated papers were my favorite part. The course exposed me to an entire ecosystem that I was unaware of. Too many MOOCs are watered down but this one was just right.

My best advice is to create a course that management will resent open sourcing because it is so valuable. Demand autonomy and use it create a legacy.

In work and learning I keep getting back to an analogy with a trainer and an athlete. People have been training for a long time. The goal is to excel, constantly improve and ideally become the best. The job of the trainer is to monitor if the athlete is working hard enough to improve while not overdoing it. If recovery takes to long the gains will be smaller. One might even get injured. Every type of training has clear goals one of which is the duration of the challenge. A work day is usually 8 hours not a 30 min race to the end. It seems to me a huge challenge to do this remotely. It seems the camera shouldn't be pointed at the teacher but at the student.

Having taken a number of MOOCs, I would say, for the videos:

- the speaker must be standing

- the tone should be light, not necessarily funny, but definitely not always the same

- there should be illustrations

- anecdotes, personal notes, interviews: maybe not at every video but at least one per chapter.

- videos should last less than 15min.

The talk must not aim to be exhaustive. Students will master the material through provided readings, exercises or quizzes. Some may only watch the videos, others will do the full course.

You will probably not have the time to prepare quality videos before the COVID-19 outbreak, so you may limit yourself to an introductory video for every chapter. You may also provide the solution for a couple of exercises in a video on the model of Kahn academy.

You should watch the making-of at the end of "Mindshift" on Coursera, by Barbara Oakley.

Note that "Introduction to logic" on Coursera has no videos but provides great tools and both funny and serious exercises.

Bad videos may spoil the course by making your students bored before they even start learning. So insist on quality, not quantity.

Standing uses body language to convey authority and confidence when presenting. I’d theorize this helps the consumer of educational content in being engaged, which is more difficult when watching videos versus being present during an in person lecture.