Distance education 2.0 (2)

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By Xuyang Jingjing (Global Times) 09:07, October 14, 2013

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Getting it together

MOOC video lectures come in different styles. Some are more elaborate, with visual and audio effects, or precious copyrighted archival footage, while others are simpler, with the professors going over the key points behind a desk or at a podium. One of the six courses Peking University puts up on Coursera, General Chemistry, appears to be using videos of previous classes.

Putting together a MOOC course is no easy task. "The complexity involved in taping such courses is quite unexpected," said Li Xiaoming, a professor at the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, who was in charge of the cooperation with edX and Coursera. While he usually spends two to three hours preparing for a 2-hour lecture, he had to spend four to five hours preparing, shooting and editing a 10 to 15 minute clip, he said.

Teachers are generally left on their own to figure out how to create an online course, from shooting snippets of video lectures and devising weekly assignments and grading systems, to monitoring online discussion forums and interacting with students. The schools provide studios and some cameras, but no money.

Chen Jiang, an associate professor at Peking University, said he is spending all his time, aside from teaching, on preparing and delivering his course on edX, Electronic Circuits. About 4,000 people have registered for this course.

Chen, 39, has high expectations for his MOOC debut.

With a computer background, Chen took everything into his own hands, from planning the course to shooting and editing the video lectures. He has watched other MOOC courses and read about what professors from other elite schools think about MOOCs. He also tries to get feedback from his own class at Peking University and revise his edX courses accordingly.

Chen said it takes at least one full week to prepare for one week's course material, which includes about one to two hours of video lectures broken down into clips and slides and additional reading and assignments.

Yu Xinjie, a professor at Tsinghua University whose edX course "Principles of Electric Circuits" starts next week, said about 80 percent of his time since June has been spent on preparing MOOC courses. And it's not just making video lectures. "There's also the discussion forums, reacting to student feedback and so on, and we don't have any experience in this regard, and have no idea how much time we need to invest in it," said Yu, who now has about 6,000 people signing up for the course.

Wang Guixiang, a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University, is less enthused about putting in the extra time and energy. Wang, who is teaching History of Chinese Architecture, an introductory course on edX with five other professors, said the whole process is a bit of a hassle and he prefers the flexibility of meeting face-to-face with students.

In early February, a Coursera course was suspended indefinitely for technical and design issues. Two weeks later, Richard A. McKenzie, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Irvine, announced mid-course that he is leaving the MOOC Microeconomics for Managers offered on Coursera. He wrote that he decided to disengage from the course because of "disagreements over how to best conduct the course." The professor was unhappy that fewer than 2 percent of the nearly 40,000 who had registered for the course had been actively engaged in discussions.

But Chinese professors are mostly optimistic about MOOCs. They see them as a good opportunity to introduce Chinese universities to a world audience.