31–40 of 52 posts
I think the internet is the best way to distribute information, but for me one of the worst places to learn.
If the learning is solely done via the computer I will fail to even get near to completing the course (self-study, no pressure). But by using pens, paper, books etc, my ability gets to a normal level.
So, encourage them to behave close to the way they do in your classes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it feel important to you that the speaker be standing?
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.
Authority seems to come in part from the actual height difference, so that could be lost if the student watches a video... But standing still gives other benefits, see https://www.genardmethod.com/blog/bid/161977/Sitting-or-Stan...
One of the keys for me is how I get feedback. Multiple choice quizzes can be well-designed. Most are not. But they scale well.
Personally I like very challenging assignments, but with very lenient grading and partial credit, with lots of detailed feedback from the grader.
If you’re teaching a college course, maybe you have enough TAs to make that happen. You’ll see some of Dr. Joyner’s work is on scaling grading systems and feedback.
- Discrete Optimization (Coursera/Melbourne university, Pascal van Hentenryck): had competitive optimization assignments and course leaderboards. The professor oozed enthousiasm and the nature of the assignments was great for the competitive setup (many different approaches possible, and there were always problems which you would not be able to solve to optimality).
- Microeconomics (EdX/MIT, Jonathan Gruber): very good assignments that made you discover things yourself. Professor presented with a lot of humor and this course was clearly refined over many iterations on campus. Lectures were actually recorded in a classroom setting so not tuned for MOOC delivery at all.
Honorable mentions for Computer Graphics (EdX/UC San Diego, Ravi Ramamoorthi, perfect pacing and balanced, broad set of assignments) and Underactuated Robotics (EdX/MIT, Russ Tedrake, fascinating material and challenging, elegant assignments).
If you have control over the courseware platform used for your course, make sure it uses a compatible video player based on html5 video and not some custom implementation (very rare).
In case video speed controls is not available on your courseware, you can pre-process videos to speed them up to 1.5x using this script (save as `fastervid.sh` and run on video lectures before uploading)
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z $1 ]; then
echo "usage $0 input_video.mp4"
exit -1
fi
echo "Converting $1 to 1.5x speed..."
ffmpeg -i "$1" -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=0.6666666666666*PTS[v];[0:a]atempo=1.5[a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]" "tmp-$1"
echo "Delaying audio of $1 by 60ms"
ffmpeg -i "tmp-$1" -itsoffset 0.06 -i "tmp-$1" -map "0:0" -map "1:1" -acodec copy -vcodec copy "faster-$1"
# cleanup temp file
rm "tmp-$1"I really hope somone builds a mooc on top of something like leetcode.com . Start with easy problems see how far you get, get a hint, if you can't then watch a video of concept you are missing and so on.
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) programmi…
What MOOC did you take where you had to write an interpreter?
This is Part B, but there's also parts A and C. While I recommend the whole course, you don't need to take it all if you just want the interpreter project.
The networking course was discontinued, but these are the videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEAYkSg4uSQ2dr0XO_Nwa...
The videos aren't terrible, but the homework was worthless.
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) programmi…
Although it's a step on the right direction, I'm not a fan of Coursera's "upload a zip file and wait 10 minutes" approach: even that much delay means you've lost your mental "working set" by the time feedback comes. My college professors would give those to us as Make targets in the project scaffolds, which made it closer to "TDD."
In a similar vein, thoughtfully designed interactive environments with good difficulty progression, like Micro-corruption [0]. It's easy to imagine something like this for data science (here's an RStudio workbench and a dataset, go find the needle in the haystack, etc).
Courses I've gotten a lot out of: Andrew Ng's ML course and Yaser Abu-Mostafa's learning from data course.
In both courses I really felt like I was learning something meaningful. I very clearly remember how mind blowing it was to me that you could turn complex high level tasks into curve fitting. I excitedly told a colleague of this thing I had learned about called linear regression who turned out to be surprised I had not taken a statistics class. Same thing for generalization bounds & VC dimension in Yaser's class.
I don't know if this can really be generalized to all courses since it might just be matching students to courses that make sense to them, but the worst line in a MOOC is "Well, this is boring, but you're just going to have to grind through it so that we can solve problems later". Shout out to the Convex Optimization MOOC I dropped.
For Data Science 101 this should be easy. Find some problems that students could imagine wanting to work on and use those problems to drive what you talk about.
Also, a pet peeve of mine is courses trying to make me do math by hand. I am 100% going to ask a math package to do an integral for me every time this happens. Sure, somebody has to know all the math deeply, but it's not me.
So I guess the main takeaway here is that you need to understand your audience. What is appropriate for me is probably not appropriate for 1st semester college kids.