3 Lessons Learned about MOOC Development

Over the past year, I have worked on the development team for three different MOOCS (massive open online courses) at Google (Mapping with Google, Introduction to Web Accessibility, and Advanced Power Searching). (The opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Google, Inc.) Each MOOC was different and I learned quite a bit about online course development and instructional design. I’d like to share my top three lessons learned about MOOC development.

1. Students love recognition. Even if its just a simple pdf that says, "Congratulations!", people really like to have a tangible record of their work they can print out and hang on their refrigerator. We had a number of students sharing pictures of their certificates on our course’s Google+ community and it was great to see how excited students were about completing the course. We ensured that our instructional design focused on student recognition because there is a high correlation between positive reinforcement and academic achievement (Haydon and Musti-Rao, Diedrich). For example, in addition to earning a certificate at the end of the course, we designed our MOOC communities to be interactive so that course teaching assistants could support and cheer students on.

2. MOOCs can contribute a great deal of data about human learning behaviors that sheds light on how people think and behave. There are so many questions about how people learn that can be investigated by MOOCs and applied to online learning and instructional design. For example, how much time do students spend watching videos? Is there an ideal video length irregardless of topic? I hope that the large MOOC providers, like Udacity and Coursera, ask and answer these types of questions, given their abundance of course offerings. Edx has published one article, so far, discussing some initial data analysis from their “Circuits and Electronics” MOOC. Additionally, an instructional designer from my department at Google published an article on the Google Research blog discussing some of our findings from the first few courses we developed. Sharing knowledge gleaned about patterns of student learning will enhance the future of online education.

Fig.1 I wonder how this whole "brain" thing works

3. Keep a record of what worked and what didn't. Of course, there are things you can't learn until you experience them, but since MOOC development is a somewhat objective process, there are some elements that will stay the same. Keeping a record will help the next person understand some of the hoops that they're probably going to have to jump through and probably save some time. Document while you go, as much as you can: retrospective reflections, tips and tricks, important time frames, workflows, etc. Even if the course was a complete success there can always be improvements in the content or the processes if you’re going to host it again. And don’t forget about the students. I guarantee you they have something to say. Record your student’s feedback. Make sure you reference these notes before starting a new project.