Interview with teachers Coursera

Good day. Many people know and use the well-known platform for online education Coursera.org. I also belong to their number. After a couple of courses, I became interested in domestic cuisine. I contacted several teachers and asked them to give a written interview. About what happened read on.

Questions are answered:

Berzon Nikolay Iosifovich , professor, doctor of science. Author of the course “Financial Markets and Institutions” , HSE.
')


Paolo Prandoni, PhD. Together with Martin Vetterli he teaches Digital Signal Processing from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne



Jim Fowler , PhD. Together with Bart Snapp and Jenny George, he leads the course “Calculus One” from The Ohio State University. He is also the author of the course "Calculus Two"



Ready? Go!

---

Why did you decide to do an online course?
Berzon N.I. I read a similar course at HSE, and when the university decided to enter Coursera and record a number of courses, I said that I was ready to participate in this matter. I just couldn’t imagine what I’ve got into)) In general, it’s not so easy to get to Coursera. They checked the university for a long time, the quality of teaching, and so on. And when they gave the go-ahead, then the HSE management decided that we would write 11 or 12 courses. Well, I said I was ready.
Paolo Prandoni. We were lucky to be in close contact with Daphne Koeller when she launched Coursera, and we decided to contribute to the global free education world by creating Signal Processing.
Jim Fowler. I really want more people to do math. With the help of new, interesting, fascinating knowledge, I want to involve a large number of students in mathematics, and it does not matter if they study it for pleasure or professionally.

How closely is the process of interaction with the employees of the Coursera itself?
Berzon N.I. Practically nothing. We have a service (educational and methodical management), which took all the organizational issues for themselves. I was laid down only the preparation of materials, presentations, lectures, and so on. So Coursera did not bother me.
Paolo Prandoni. Not very crowded. The platform, although not completed, is understandable.
Jim Fowler. Not too closely when working on this course, although I often talk about other things with them.

Tell us how the course was prepared. How many people participated in this? How much time did it take to record lectures and test preparation?
Berzon N.I. I usually read this course in the magistracy for children who have chosen the specialty “Financial markets and institutions”. I just had to adapt it to the lack of communication with the audience. I tried to place as much information as possible on the slides, this is the first. Secondly, I understood that people who are far from finance can listen, so I simplified some issues without going into nuances that are important for specialists.
Paolo Prandoni. First we prepared the slides for the video. Then we recorded the voice that commented on the slides on the Wacom tablet. Finally, we recorded the introduction with the teacher for each lecture. Thus, the preparation of each lecture took about 5 man-days.
Jim Fowler. I need about 10 hours to record one hour of lectures, including editing. To make this possible, I developed an “autocutter”, which you can read about on github . He copes with editing for us.

What difficulties did you have during the course design? Are there any “test students” where the course was run-in before its public opening?
Berzon N.I. Mostly purely technical difficulties. For example, you can not come to the shooting in a striped shirt, it is impossible that the tie was speckled.
It was also difficult for me to adapt the lectures to the recording format. Usually my lecture takes one and a half hours, and the recording goes in fragments of 10-15, sometimes 20 minutes. And it was necessary to break the lecture into several blocks, and each should carry a complete thought. That was hard. But, nevertheless, everything turned out well.
"Test students" was not. We could control the records before they were posted. So, after recording the video, they sent it to me. I looked, if I do not like something, then we rewrote it.
Paolo Prandoni . The course is based on the discipline that we have been teaching in the EPFL for 6 years, so we got enough feedback to create the first version of the course. Today we have the third launch of the course and feedback from the online community helps us to constantly improve the course.
Jim Fowler. At first, recording and editing were very difficult - there were a lot of cuts, and what we needed to do was difficult to explain to another person (for example, “every second video is shot from top to bottom” because we shoot a lot of mathematical content). Autocutter solved this problem.
No, we do not have a test audience. As far as I know, there is no easy way to make the material on the Coursera available only to a test group of students.
On the contrary, I view MOOC students as “test” for the things that I would like to do at Ohio University. I can launch a large “learning experiment” in MOOC that could not be done “in reality”, and we will get a lot of interesting data on Calculus training.

Most of the courses have a team of lecturers and TA. How many people were in your team, how were the roles distributed between them?
Berzon N.I. Anna Petrikova, a graduate student of my department, helped me. Sergey Volodin is a senior teacher in my department.
I distributed the roles, of course, but then they mixed up anyway. Sergey, as he does the slides well, I asked to give the presentation a decent look. Also, Sergey accumulated questions asked on the forum. He answered questions that he was able to answer, and sent the rest to me.
Anna's task was to prepare the tests. Of course, I had tests, I gave them to her, and she expanded them. Every week we wrote 30 tests. She modified them, then I looked through them again, corrected something and sent them back. She accompanied them, as the automatic checkout sometimes faltered.
Paolo Prandoni. Martin and I made lectures. Then he attracted five graduate students to work on their homework, two people worked on the video and three TA support the forum.
Jim Fowler. We ran this course three times in a row. This time Dr. Jenny George was the person in charge, so she watched most of the videos, wrote questions, answered messages and made announcements. I like working with the “generous dictator” model, where one person constantly fully controls the course and can change it when it sees fit.
When we posted the course for the first time, I created a lot of content (for example, course structure, scales, and assessment policy), and also wrote a backend, which is a modified Khan Academy code integrated into our platform, built on hidden Markov model and adaptive learning algorithms. Math parser was written in javascript
Steve Gubkin developed the MOOCulus exercise.
Bart Snapp supervised the writing of the textbook and recorded more videos while he led the course.

What guided you, making the structure of the course?
Berzon N.I. His course in the HSE.
Paolo Prandoni. We tried to make the course as similar as possible to the course in EPFL. The goal was to create a high-quality course on digital signal processing that could be used both at the university and outside it.
Jim Fowler. This is a good question, I am an adherent of the old school. Some expect from the MOOC "modern" methods, but I do not consider it necessary to change the curriculum. Calculus One is presented online with just a video, a textbook, and randomly generated questions, but in content it is very close to the standard course AP Calculus AB. I hope many people will be able to reuse the course to achieve their goals.

The lectures were published weekly. Are they recorded in the same way “on the go” or was everything ready in advance?
Berzon N.I. All lectures were made before the opening. The university has hired a company that specializes in recording videos. There was a director, cameraman, sound engineer, etc. You know, it was not so simple. I came, we recorded, then we copied something, then there was already a montage. But in any case, everything was done centrally.
About the time. I have 9 lectures, approximately 1.5 hours. Each lecture was recorded for 4 hours. Since some things had to be rewritten. Well, for example, when you are giving a lecture, and somewhere wrong, you can say: “Oh, guys, I'm sorry”, to get better, and went on. You can't do it right there
Paolo Prandoni. Most of the video lectures were ready before the course. They are too tense to write them to write on the go.
Jim Fowler . We made a video during the course. With Autocutter it's not so long

If an error is found in the test tasks, is it possible to correct it, re-assign the test or remove it from the assessment at all?
Berzon N.I. This is somehow possible, but I don’t know the details.
Paolo Prandoni. Yes, we can fix or delete the issue.
Jim Fowler. Depending on the situation. If the error only affects the formulation of the problem, then it can be corrected without significant difficulties. If the problem is in the wrong answer, then it will be necessary to lower the mark for the test, or not to take this test into account in the final mark.

It is known that participants receive certificates after some time. But the estimates for the control are known in advance. Why is there a delay? Is processing not automated? How does summarizing and formation of certificates take place?
Berzon N.I. I can not answer, these are technical questions. The very form of certificates made our guys from the educational and methodical management.
Paolo Prandoni. Certificates are prepared by Coursera. We can not control this time.
Jim Fowler. We wait until the last opportunity for someone to hand over the job expires. Which usually means a couple of weeks from the end of the final exam. The very calculation of the final assessment takes several hours, after which we verify that the calculations are correct, and only then send a request for the production of certificates. After the request is sent, there is also a delay.

What are your personal impressions of such a new teaching format? What problems and prospects of MOOC do you see?
Berzon N.I. It depends on what point of view. From the point of view of the university, this is absolutely the right step. Because in my course there were over 16,000 people, and what else can I think of for PR of the university? And I thought that the guys from Russia and the CIS countries would only listen to me, and listened from America, Germany, Israel and France. For the university, the fact that it has entered this global trend is an absolutely correct strategic decision.
From the point of view of me, as a teacher. First, it's hard to read the course in the void. I do not see the audience, I do not see the eyes of the students, I do not understand their reactions: they understand me or not. A teacher who gives a lecture is akin to an artist who performs on stage, and it is important for an artist to have a full room. This is important to me too. At my university, a lecture turns into a conversation, a discussion, a kind of discussion. I can say to the guys: “Next week we will discuss bonds, I recommend reading the chapter such and such.” This allows you not to tell the basics of lectures and switch to problems. And here from scratch - it's hard. But then I got used to it.
Second, it is physically uncomfortable to stand in one place while recording. After all, when I give a lecture, I enliven it with the help of working with the board (I draw formulas, graphs). And here everything is very static, it was hard. I offered to make a recording at the time usually lectures, but, as I explained, it would be three times more difficult than a studio recording. In addition, it would require more equipment (for example, three cameras instead of one). Although, probably, someday I will try this format.
In general, about MOOC. Not so long ago I read an article by a German professor on the Internet, who writes that in 10–15 years there will be only the strongest universities that have taken the path of MOOC. This will make education quality, affordable and cheap. Indeed, why should I finish a third-rate university if I can get knowledge from leading professors of the world? This is his prediction, not mine. But there is some truth in this. From myself, I note that, nevertheless, verbal communication is necessary for both the student and the teacher. Therefore, online courses are still not completely supplant the traditional training format.
Paolo Prandoni. We think this is a great tool that will not replace universities, but will be able to give many people better skills and knowledge. This is a great job by the teacher, but also a great reward.
Jim Fowler. I think that the best in this new format is the variety of students. MOOC enriches people from all over the world, no matter where you live. As a result, there are more people who do mathematics.
As a potential problem, I am very concerned about the great dependence on the video. My favorite analogy is: one-on-one learning is an amateur theater, while MOOC is more like a movie or television. But this analogy goes deeper: when creating a production or video, we will need CAST. I don't want people to look at math anymore, I want them to do more about it. I hope that the diversity of the online community will solve this problem. MOOC brings together many people who want to do more math together, so I’m not too worried. This is a promising trend.

Do you think the Coursera platform itself has any disadvantages?
Berzon N.I. Testing of tests is done automatically; they are not let us in there. And sometimes there were some strange failures. And the wrong answers were issued for the right. We had to call and correct the situation.
Paolo Prandoni. The platform is not user friendly, as we used to expect from many web platforms. The work must be completed, but it is a gradual process.
Jim Fowler. You can improve everything. The best thing about Coursera is that we can get data for a new development cycle. In this video, I tell in more detail:


Do you have future plans related to MOOC, if so, which ones?
Berzon N.I. Unfortunately, not everything depends on me here. Waiting for the decision of the university. I would repeat the course. Moreover, I see that I could not explain everything intelligibly to the recurring questions on the forum. Such fragments, of course, need to be redone. And I have ideas for another course.
Paolo Prandoni. We are considering cooperation with other universities to update and harmonize the program.
Jim Fowler. I want to do courses in geometry and topology.

What is the course statistics?
Berzon N.I. 16289 - signed up. Lectures are listened to 237 849 times. Tests written 41,518 times. The average score for the week varies from 7.6 to 8.6 (out of 10). 1 939 students received a certificate with honors (more than 80 points), 545 ordinary certificate (more than 50 but less than 80). Not received a certificate of 14,164 students.
Paolo Prandoni. About 20,000 students sign up for the course, about 1,000 of whom receive a certificate.
Jim Fowler. The course was signed by 185,021 students, of which 5% passed the exam.

---

One of the teachers (Kevin Werbach, Gamification course, University of Pennsylvania) refused to give an interview, but at the end of the course he posted a detailed statistical video, a brief squeeze for those who want more numbers, under the spoiler.



PS Many thanks to my wife for editing my clumsy translation.