2,382 research outputs found

    Increasing the Interactivity in Software Engineering MOOCs - A Case Study

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    MOOCs differ from traditional university courses: instructors do not know the learners who have a diverse background and cannot talk to them in person due to the worldwide distribution. This has a decisive influence on the interactivity of teaching and the learning success in online courses. While typical online exercises such as multiple choice quizzes are interactive, they only stimulate basic cognitive skills and do not reflect software engineering working practices such as programming or testing. However, the application of knowledge in practical and realistic exercises is especially important in software engineering education. In this paper, we present an approach to increase the interactivity in software engineering MOOCs. Our interactive learning approach focuses on a variety of practical and realistic exercises, such as analyzing, designing, modeling, programming, testing, and delivering software stimulating all cognitive skills. Semi-automatic feedback provides guidance and allows reflection on the learned theory. We applied this approach in the MOOC software engineering essentials SEECx on the edX platform. Since the beginning of the course, more than 15,000 learners from more than 160 countries have enrolled. We describe the design of the course and explain how its interactivity affects the learning success

    Music Learning with Massive Open Online Courses

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    Steels, Luc et al.-- Editors: Luc SteelsMassive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, have arisen as the logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. MOOCs were confidently predicted by advanced thinkers decades ago. They are undoubtedly here to stay, and provide a valuable resource for learners and teachers alike. This book focuses on music as a domain of knowledge, and has three objectives: to introduce the phenomenon of MOOCs; to present ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and better adapted to the needs of teachers and learners; and finally to present the first steps towards 'social MOOCs’, which support the creation of learning communities in which interactions between learners go beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning, such as workshops, small choirs, or groups participating in a Hackathon, in which students aided by somebody acting as a tutor learn by solving problems and helping each other. The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs; their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback and concrete experiments. These papers are organized into five sections: background; the role of feedback; platforms for learning communities; experiences with social MOOCs; and looking backwards and looking forward. Technology is not a panacea for the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, but this book will be of interest to all those striving to find more effective and humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.Funded by the European Commission's OpenAIRE2020 project.Peer reviewe

    Introducing control in an open online course

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    Begin Robotics is a successful open online course developed at the University of Reading, run on the FutureLearn platform, for which around 25,000 participants have enrolled in its first three runs. Whilst it is aimed at introducing robotics and the associated subjects of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, control and haptics to Key Stage 3 pupils, it has been taken by other groups from around the world. This paper discusses how Control Engineering is introduced in an accessible way, and how it has been used in undergraduate degrees

    A case study of introductory programming with MOOCS

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    Computational thinking has become a crucial skill for the 21st Century learners in all disciplines. Research suggests that the best and fastest approach to understand the concepts of computational thinking is through developing programming skills. However, finding effective and affordable learning environments to introduce programming skills to a massive scale of students remains a challenge. Currently, the unprecedented utilization of MOOCs represent an opportunity to achieve this goal. But, existing introductory programming MOOCs have failed to provide instructionally-sound experience for learners. The purpose of this descriptive research is two-fold: (1) Identify the affordances of fifteen MOOC\u27s platforms that are best suited to design and implement basic programming skills courses based on the community of inquiry (CoI) framework, and (2) Describe and compare how CoI framework-based instructional strategies were implemented in six basic programming skills MOOCs
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