Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Seite 36

WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF BLENDED LEARNING USING MOOCS?
The impact of the MOOC on the campus students here was that they had a much
more involved style of teaching, with deeper levels of learning, through the use of
the MOOC Platform tools. The sessions seem to have changed from lectures to
seminars and there was much more feedback both through the MOOC learners and
the on campus students. One conclusion could be that the students essentially
were thriving in this environment, which was clearly stimulating.
There was also an issue arising over the level of the content of the materials. The
students provided feedback with their course evaluations and Rixner reported that
they thought the materials were too easy. This was not the case, according to
Rixner, but could be accounted for by the difference in teaching style. Rixner
suggested that because so much time was spent in seminars style sessions, that
the materials seemed to be easier, but in fact, the level of materials were the same
but the approach meant that the course team could spend more time discussing and
working on more materials. One side effect of this was that they found that they
were running out of materials.

5.4 CASE STUDY 4
Academic: Doug Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of
the Institute of Digital Learning
Institution: Vanderbilt University
MOOC: The only academic using an external MOOC with his own course. Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Learning.

CONTEXT
Fisher taught Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a regular course almost the same time as
the infamous Coursera MOOC on AI, led by Stanford Professor Andrew Ng
(Standford University, 2013). The course Fisher was teaching was on Machine

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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