Monthly Archives: March 2012

Online Learning for Free?

I recently signed up to take a free online course, Human-Computer Interaction, through Stanford University. While I already have my master’s degree in HCI, I thought it would be a fun way to stay engaged and gain new insights into the field. That it was free certainly didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for the course to get off the ground—what was originally a January start date, was pushed back to March and has now been shelved as “under-development.” I’m still on the mailing list and hopeful that the course will be offered soon.

In this month’s Wired, writer Steven Leckart chronicles his experience taking another free Stanford University online course. This course, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and what started as an experiment of providing the course free to whomever wanted to take it quickly turned into something else—an astonishing 160,000 students signed up.

In both cases, the aim of these courses is to make learning accessible and free, opening up opportunities those who might not otherwise have them.  Coursera, the site the HCI course is offered through has several other courses available from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of California–Berkley. While Thrun is spinning his course into a new company, Udacity devoted to creating a new education institution made entirely of free online courses, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also currently exploring this concept with their own initiative MITx set to launch in Fall 2012.

How these courses and programs will affect the future of online learning, we can’t know, but it does bring up some interesting ideas. I’m not suggesting that DePaul should start offering free online classes, but I do think it will be interesting to watch as these programs evolve and expand. I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.”

How am I doing?

As an instructor in an online or hybrid course, I want to know how the students feel about the content as well as the structure of the course. I have given a number of surveys for both my hybrid and online courses that include both an initial survey and an end of quarter survey. While the university has an official assessment instrument for the evaluation of instruction, I find an informal, anonymous survey in my courses has helped me fine-tune the course for the next time it is offered. In this survey, I not only ask about the content matter, but also about the format and structure of the course. I ‘bribe’ the students to take the surveys by giving participation points or extra credit for completion.

Attitude and Demographics

As a matter of course, I ask a few questions at the beginning of the quarter to gather some demographic information as well as some attitudinal questions. I repeat the attitudinal questions at the end of the quarter to see if there have been fundamental shifts in the mindset. Here are some example results from a large lecture Mathematics class that was conducted as a hybrid (semester results)

(Click for a larger version.)

Course Content

At the end of the course, I ask a number of questions relating specifically to the course content as well as the layout and structure of the course. Course content is, of course, specific to the material being taught, but I also ask questions directly related to the layout and structure of the online materials. Here are some sample question with results from the same hybrid course (with a few content specific questions).




Free response questions

In addition to the standard survey questions, I ask students several open-ended questions that, for me, provide the greatest insight to their feelings about the course. Knowing that the results are anonymous allows the students to open up, and I have found that they really don’t hold back. Here are a few sample open-ended questions with a few student responses:

What do you think was the biggest factor in your success or failure in this course? Your response is anonymous

“being able to watch the videos over and over…but there sometimes needed to be more videos with more examples not just one because sometimes everything wasnt worded the same as how its written in the book”

“I tended to put all of my homework off until the night before class.”

Please add any information that you think will me improve this course for the next semester. Your response is anonymous

“ALL ONLINE. Teach the students how to use the online site before you start giving them assaignments on it. I was really confused in the beginning because no one said how to use the website, but now i understand it. “

“no global warming assignments, there are bigger issues to worry about no body pas [sic] attention to global warming anyway. make this class easier, this type of math isnt important for some majors, it just creates stress and wastes students time. as long as people can do basic adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing they will be good to go in life.”

ED NOTE – this is common

Conclusion

I have found these surveys to be an invaluable tool in reworking my course for the next time it is offered. I generally do not share data with anyone else, but I believe it provides a valuable insight to where any potential trouble spots are. If you wish to add a pre-post survey to your course, your instructional designer can assist in putting an anonymous survey in place.