MOOC Review

In the past several weeks, I took a course on Coursera—Chinese Ancient Historical figure-The First Emperor of Qin, taught by Dr. Lv, a famous professor of Taiwan University. It is a very interesting course because the professor’s fabulous lectures and the new way of learning (MOOC, a massive open online course, whichemphasizes unlimited participation and open access through the web). When I had to take a course from MOOCs, I searched on the Internet and browsed the lists of the courses. I was attracted by this course firstly for its topic, the great famous figure in Chinese history, and secondly is the prestige of Dr. Lv.  Before I signed up this course, what was in the prominent place in the course introduction page is the introduction of the professor. I think for this course and also for many courses on MOOCs would put the professors’ prestige into a very important place in their marketing strategies. That is also can explain why the most of teachers on MOOCs come from famous universities. Certainly I have to admit that Dr. Lv is really the most knowledgeable and instructive history teacher I have ever met, who provided me a lot of new perspectives and also vivid stories for studying history.

The course can be categorized into XMOOCs which adopts a more traditional way of teaching and learning. In this course the main study material is the professor’s taped lectures. There are nearly 7 lectures per week, and each one is about ten minutes long interspersed with some quizzes which are not accounted into final scores. Students would finish the assignment for every week and their performances will be graded for their final grades. Because the assignments were writing articles or making projects, the teacher had no time to read all of them. He used the peer assessment to grade students’ work. Every student had to grade other people’s work for three times. If you didn’t finish peer assessment task when it was your turn to be a grader, you will get punished—the grades of your assignment for that week will be reduced by 20%. Grading classmates’ work was an interesting experience, which gave me an opportunity to see a lot of interesting opinions, and creative thoughts. It was helpful for opening my mind. Furthermore, I found the students’ correctness or comments on my work were also interesting and helpful. Of course, there existed some problems, for example, their correctness is not always right or helpful.

In this course, the way of teaching and learning was really more traditional, and there were not too many technological tools for study. We didn’t use blog, twitter, or anything the like to build our students’ relationship. We just talk on the discussion board. However, I thought it was so amazing. I was beneficial from it. At the beginning, I guessed less people would discuss on it, because it was not required and also this course had no credit. What made me so surprised is that till today the list of discussion topics had 29 pages, and some topics have more than 50 replies. Moreover, many students proposed some very great ideas which are very inspirational. Meanwhile, they openly questioned some opinions of the professor, and I found many of their positions were so reasonable and creative. I thought I saw an obvious advantage of humanity courses on this kind of open learning platform. Because for many problems and topics in these areas have no exact right answer, and what we need is diverse voices. And then MOOC provide the free discussion environment. Meanwhile, I did see that people who choose a course for interest more than credit bring more passions and creativities. On the discussion board, the professor also participated into our discussion, and he gave us some directions when our discussion met confusions.

In this course, even I had no opportunities to talk with our teacher and classmates face to face, but the professors often contacted us through email and reminded us the deadline for the assignments and recommended us some studying materials. He divided one week teaching videos into 7 short taped lectures, and students could just spent 10 minutes per day for watching the lecture. The assignment of every week he gave us would take our one to five hours to finish it. It is not long. In my opinion, these assignments are very constructive, I can see how he wanted us to improve and what he wanted us to get through the assignments. To be short, I saw the value of the assignments.

After the course, the professor invited us to do a poll for this course which he will use it to improve this course. All in all, it is an interesting and beneficial experience for me. I am sure I will sign up other courses on MOOCs in the future.

 

Click here to take survey