Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 37

Learning and it ran the following Semester. He was able to gain access via written
permission from Coursera, to use the videos and materials for his own class. This
worked well and the next Semester he required his own his students to register onto
the MOOC and using the course as a ‘wrapper’ around his own programme, he was
able to engage with the student’s online along with the students in his own class to
apply what they were learning within the classroom. He adapted the course so that
it was more suited to the way that he wanted to teach the subject and in addition, he
created his own videos for content that Ng didn’t cover, and he gave his students a
final project (in addition to the content on the MOOC).

SUCCESSES
The successes for this were two fold. For his teaching, he was getting better
evaluations than he had ever had and he felt the impact of being part of a
community of educators, something that he said in 25 years of teaching he had
never felt that he was part of. He compares this to the way that scholarly
communities of researchers might share their work and collaborate, and now he
says that he has this to, but for teaching materials and ideas. He also says that he

is now more enthusiastic than he had ever been before about teaching.
The materials for the courses he teaches now are part MOOC and part on campus
but they are synthesized. So he combines the teaching materials with his own and
the students essentially have a seminar programme.
The workload for him was ¼ of what he would normally have had for an UG course
as he was using Coursera to do much of the grading (auto-grading systems were in
place for this course).

CHALLENGES
Doug was concerned that his on campus students would feel that he had cheated
them from valuable lectures, by using someone else’s materials. He also said he
was struggling himself, with the idea of using someone elses materials as he felt
that part of being an academic was to create your own materials for your class.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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