Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 68

Many Shades of MOOC's
multicampus, urban institutions in the
greater Boston area with many students
from low-income and underrepresented
communities. MassBay and BHCC serve
6,500 and 14,000 full and part-time students,
respectively. Both schools are comprehensive
colleges; MassBay and BHCC
offer 70+ and 100+ associate and certificate
degree programs, respectively. BHCC
serves a highly diverse student population
with 67% students of color (“BHCC Fast
Facts,” 2014). MassBay similarly serves a
diverse student body where 44% are students
of color (“MassBay Fast Facts,” 2014).
MassBay’s Computer Science Department
has a larger computer science associate’s
degree program in comparison to
BHCC’s Information Technology Department
which offers large computer support,
database, networking, and computer security
degree programs, along with a small
computer science program. Instructors
at both colleges were identified to develop
courses to implement the MITx 6.00x
course for blended (hybrid) delivery in
spring semester 2013.
MOOC Development: Purpose, Audience,
and Objectives
This edX-Community College Partnership,
funded by the Bill and Melinda
Gate Foundation, was established to conduct
the first empirical study exploring the
efficacy of offering massive open online
courses (MOOCs) for college course credit
in a more traditional community college
setting (Bell, Hunter, L’heureux, and Petersen,
2013).
Important Project Research Questions:
• Can community colleges (and other
credit granting institutions) adopt and
use MOOCs to benefit their students?
• To what extent do edX courses (and
MOOCs in general) need modification
for delivery in a community college
classroom?
• How do different types of students
respond to the flipped classroom approach?
• How does the community college student
experiences (and performance)
compare to those students who have
completed the same course as a MOOC
in the Fall 2012?
• What support does the faculty need to
use the edX courseware? How are institutions
able to support them?
• Is this a scalable approach for community
college courses in computer science?
This project focused on two audiences:
(a) U.S. community colleges and (b)
the highly diverse (i.e., by income, gender,
age, race, ethnicity, language, prior academic
preparation, especially in mathematics)
undergraduate student populations
commonly served by community colleges.
The edX MOOC course, 6.00x Introduction
to Computer Science and Programming
Using Python, is similar in content
and structure to a course taken by
noncomputer science majors at MIT. 6.00x
was “designed to help people with no prior
exposure to computer science or programming
learning to think computationally
and write programs to tackle useful problems”
(“edX Intro Python,” 2013). The MIT
edX 6.00x MOOC ran for the first time in
fall 2012 with roughly 20,000 participants
active in the MOOC (over 80,000 had enrolled
initially).
During the fall 2012 semester, a team
of faculty at MassBay and members of the
BHCC’s Computer Information Technology
Department worked with edX administrators
and technical staff to design distinctly
different courses in order to address differ-
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