I enrolled myself in two MOOCs through Coursera.org., one on gamification and one on statistics. I wanted to experience a  MOOC. I wanted to see how it compared to the self-directed exploration and research I do regularly; specifically, I wanted to see if following a structured approach with 70,000 other people could be beneficial.

These two courses ran at roughly the same time, with Gamification starting a week earlier. Gamification demanded about three hours of time each week, more later when some of the assignments got longer. Statistics demanded more than double (triple?)  that from the first week. The lectures were longer, the concepts more difficult, and the assignments required working with some rather non-intuitive open-source software called R. I found it impossible to continue both courses at the same time. I stopped trying to stay current with the syllabus and just downloaded the Statistics videos and assignments, planning to return to them when Gamification is finished. And that’s what I’m doing. It feels strange, like starting a marathon a few hours late, but it still works.

Which brings me to my first point: MOOCs are as course-like as you make them. If you want the experience of an online course, there are boards for discussion, meet-up groups, wikis, and Facebook groups you can get really active in. You can also just follow along with the videos and the assignments at your own pace. There is actually a lot of flexibility. Professor Werbach who taught the Gamification course  mentioned that only about 12% of the enrolled students were actually handing in the assignments. There are a lot of lurkers. There are a lot of participation options. And that’s not a bad thing, I think.

Next, I really didn’t have high expectations for the courses as e-learning experiences, as courses. But the ones I took were much more interactive and responsive to students than I thought they would be. I thought they would be more canned. I thought they would be finished products produced months before the actual delivery. But instead I realized that they we being constructed–and adjusted–as the course went on. There were very real changes made in response to technical problems (system outages, for example) and content challenges (extra instructional support added on the fly when learners found some things especially difficult). There were e-mail updates and previews, messages of encouragement, bits of behind-the-scenes information, and  Facebook and Twitter participation by instructors.

But were they worthwhile? I have to say yes. They were more challenging than I expected. The lectures were video-based and re-created the feel of a professor and a powerpoint (some room for improvement there, I think, but not a problem), and the assignments were well designed in that they really required application of course content. Gamification relied on quizzes and multiple peer assessments of assignments–a logistically ambitious and mostly successful idea. Statistics relied on quizzes, and assignments that generated a lot of engagement and interaction as learners scrambled to complete them and help each other. But there were things that I knew and couldn’t skip, and things that I wanted to look at more in depth but had to move on from. Course forums and wikis helped a little with this, but an extended reading/resource list would have been helpful. Gamification provided one but it was at little shallow. the biggest “problem” was perhaps the focus of the course. There was a small difference in focus between the courses and my own interests. I wasn’t in Gamification to learn about business, for example, and I would have preferred a more educational focus. But that’s a minor point.

Compared with online courses I’ve taken before, I felt more like I was going through it alone because there weren’t as many regular discussions/assignments with interaction among a group of people you get to know virtually. That was obviously missing. But as I said earlier, there were forums and Facebook, etc. interactions that I chose to not get active in. The MOOCs were more limited in the range of interaction, but they did not compare that unfavorably.

Bottom line: these MOOCs were a great resource and I plan to take more. I’ve been recommending them to everyone. I think they represent something potentially very exciting. A recent presentation by John Daniels (via Tony Bates) lists up some of the potential effects MOOCs could have. I recommend the report and trying a MOOC yourself.