Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/139946
How do you manage your MOOC? Hess: I use the case method, and it works. Could I replicate the same classroom discussion that happens in my physical classroom in my MOOC? No. But can I deliver highengagement learning, promote critical thinking, and enable students to converse, debate, and learn from each other? Yes! In the discussion forums, students learned from each other and formed affinity groups that lasted beyond the course. Lucas: Each week, my assistant Danielle and I use Google Hangouts to invite up to nine people to join us for an online conversation about that week's lecture. Each person appears in a window on the screen. Danielle monitors the discussion boards and sends me the email addresses of students who have been particularly active. I then invite those students to participate, and the entire class can watch the dis28 July/August 2013 BizEd cussion. We post a Twitter hashtag, so the entire class can tweet comments and questions, which we monitor and respond to during the conversation. I record the hangout session, upload it to YouTube, and post an announcement about the video on Coursera's website. I know that sounds complicated, but it has really worked. For example, one week we compared the models of FedEx and UPS to the problems the U.S. Postal Service is facing. I asked how postal services in other countries were handling these problems, and we got a range of views, including comments from students in Germany and Australia. Terwiesch: I have to give credit to the Coursera platform. Many questions that students would typically ask the professor are answered by the community. I oversee the discussion forums each week, and if there's something the community can't resolve, I intervene. But the community is remarkably responsive. Also, I ask students to create projects based on the material that they completed in their workplaces and share their experiences. We had close to 2,000 projects in the first round of the course, and I think we're going to get about 1,000 in the second. If we post those projects online, we will have created an amazing library of projects that document how people used operations management to change their businesses. Many criticize MOOCs because of their high dropout rates. What do you say to that criticism? Hess: I think too many people are focusing on the wrong numbers. The key questions are, how many students who attended the first class finish the course, and is that number meaningful to the school? [Of more than 31,000 students in Hess' first class, 10,260 finished the course.] Lucas: If we were offering MOOCs for credit, it would be a different story. But right now, students who came to even one of my lectures took something away from it, and I know that many mastered the material. For instance, I had just over 16,000 students enroll in my course. At one point, Coursera's statistics showed that 8,000 were active. About 900 students took the midterm. How many years would it take for me to reach 900 students? Or talk to 8,000? Terwiesch: Measuring gradu- TH I N KSTOCK was the tests, which were peergraded. Once students submitted their papers, three or four of them would grade each other's work according to a rubric I provided. Many emailed me about their concerns with the grading process. But I looked at some of the exams, and by and large the grading was good. Terwiesch: I had a few students email me to ask if I could go over the material with them personally—I had 87,000 students, so email is not a good way of contact. But I actually had a very small fraction of students contact me directly. And many of them sent me wonderful messages to share how they used the tools they learned in class at work and to let me know how much more they understand.