Professors share experiences with Coursera

Five University professors who taught online courses through the new online platform Coursera last fall discussed their experiences at the Council of the Princeton University Community meeting on Monday. Among these experiences were difficulties bringing University students and online students together, confronting active forum participation but single-digit exam completion rates, working around the limiting factors of an online interface to explain difficult concepts, designing computer-graded drills and experimenting with flipped lectures.

Princeton was one of the original partners of Coursera, a for-profit online learning platform launched last April that has partnered with 62 universities around the world so far.

“The sheer scale [of participation on Coursera] was astounding,” history professor Jeremy Adelman said. Adelman, who taught HIS 201: A History of the World since 1300 through Coursera while teaching the class to University students last fall, said his lectures have received 1 million views, 800,000 downloads and 400,000 posts on the class online forum.

However, he explained he had difficulty bringing University students and students from the rest of the world into conversation with each other to show varying perspectives on a single issue, even though this had been one of his primary motivations in teaching the class through Coursera.

Even though there were heated discussions on the online forum, participation by University students was “not as intense as we would have liked,” Adelman said. In the future, he said he plans to integrate discussion further into the classroom by, for example, making participation in the online forums a class requirement for University students.

Adelman, who is also the director of the Council for International Teaching and Research, hosted a global precept during the fall that engaged Princeton students with Coursera students through a Google hangout that was also broadcasted through Coursera.

Sociology professor Mitchell Duneier, who taught Introduction to Sociology through Coursera over the summer, and computer science senior lecturer Kevin Wayne, who taught COS 226: Algorithms both through Coursera and at the University this fall, described their experiences with different grading practices for the online courses.

Duneier relied on peer assessment for grading the exams, which resulted in an average correlation of 0.88 between the peer grade and the grade Duneier would have given himself, he explained. He added that while not all peer assessment works, it does have some potential as a grading practice for massive open online courses.

Although 40,000 students enrolled in the online class, only about 2,500, or 6.25 percent, took the midterm and the final, he said.

However, not completing the exams did not prevent tens of thousands of students from being involved in the online forums or watching lectures until the very end, Duneier said.

“[People] just didn’t care that much about the exam,” he added.

Meanwhile, Wayne experimented with automated computer grading for both his students on campus and the tens of thousands taking his class through Coursera.

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A total of 750,000 drill questions were graded from Coursera students, while 25,000 drill questions were graded from the students on campus.

Although automating the coding assignments was a challenging process, due to the many possible ways a given problem could be solved, Wayne made the effort to automate every assignment grading for his class. Automated assessments gave immediate and detailed feedback to students and increased Teaching Assistant productivity, he said.

“They are hard to design, do not apply to all assessment genres and require significant development effort,” Wayne noted.

In addition, two engineering professors experimented with “flipped lectures” with their on-campus students. Instead of using the usual lecture time to introduce new materials, students had to watch their professors’ Coursera lectures and work their way through the material before coming to class.

Electrical engineering professor Claire Gmachl taught one of her department’s core courses, ELE 208: Electronic and Photonic Devices, to University students only using the Coursera interface and explained she found it more difficult to teach difficult concepts through the interface because she had to rely on homework assignments rather than discussions, which she said students would prefer.

Gmachl decided to “flip the course” in order to make the class more accessible to students both at the University and across the world, she explained. Class time was divided between Q&A, doing quizzes together and re-working the material.

Gmatchl said she is satisfied with the results, which were confirmed by an anonymous class survey where over 80 percent of students responded they had watched her lecture videos before coming to class. A good number had also watched the videos again after class to review class material, she said.

Similarly, electrical engineering professor Mung Chiang, who taught ELE 381: Networks: Friends, Money and Bytes, also experimented with flipped lectures, using class to answer questions, listen to guest lecturers and engage in debates.

Chiang and his TAs also built a new initiative at the beginning of the semester called the “Grand Challenge Homework” - problems that even they haven’t solved yet - to provide an opportunity for top-scoring students, both those at the University and those taking the course through Coursera, to connect with the top five labs in the country. No one has passed the bar yet, according to Chiang.

Chiang explained he has received regular certification requests from students around the world taking his class through Coursera.

“For a lot of people out there, for a kid in a Brazilian village, for a retired engineer out of Chicago, this [online class] opens a door to them,” Chiang said. “So it depends on what are your expectations. And my worry is that to some part of the society, the expectation is so high, so great that there’s no way we can meet that.”

Coursera is currently experimenting with selling certificates as a way to generate revenue, as well as seeking approval from the American Council on Education in order to offer courses for credit. Five courses have been approved so far.

Deputy Dean of the College Clayton Marsh, who has been involved with the negotiations about Coursera, said that the University’s open online courses have attracted over 500,000 students from across the globe.

“The world’s hunger, curiosity and appreciation for what we’ve served up on the platform was palpable and illuminating,” Marsh said.