Developing and Delivering a Geoscience MOOC -- What's Involved, and What Works (Invited)

Efforts to develop free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have exploded in the last year, and geoscience education is part of this boom. Developing and delivering a MOOC is a major undertaking, and the proliferation of MOOCs can potentially be disruptive to more traditional forms of education, so it's worth asking: What role can/should/will MOOCs play in future geoscience education? Our experience in developing and delivering two MOOCs--Introduction to Sustainability (the first geoscience-related MOOC ever delivered), and Planet Earth . . . and You--provide insight into the impact that a MOOC can have, and into approaches that can work to yield a pedagogically sound experience. Both of these courses cover content similar to that of lower-division college classes, but MOOCs have very different participants than do equivalent, for-credit (i.e., for-fee) university courses. Examination of statistics that characterize student performance, along with interpretations of exit surveys, indicate that MOOC participants are older, are more likely to be working, are not enrolled in a college, and have different educational backgrounds than do traditional students. Significantly, MOOC participants are international (more than100 different nationalities were represented in our MOOCs) and come from both western and non-western traditions. This situation not only leads to ESL challenges, but also enables cross-cultural discussions and global ("crowd sourcing") data collection, beyond what is possible in traditional classes. Peak participant performance is very high (better than the performance of students in campus courses), but drop-out rates are also very high (typically, less than 20% of participants complete all assignments). Active MOOC participants perform as well in online assessments as do either traditional on-campus or traditional (small class, for-credit) online students. MOOC development can improve on-campus instruction, partly through technology transfer and partly through motivating pedagogical awareness. For example, MOOC content, which is owned by the university that produces it, can be incorporated into credit-bearing online courses, and can be used to transform on-campus geoscience courses into 'blended-learning' experiences that enhance learning outcomes. Developing a MOOC is a collaborative effort, involving not only faculty but also a team of professional videographers, illustrators, programmers, and online-format specialists. The approach to course development used for a MOOC, therefore, differs markedly from the traditional approach of course development that involves only one or two professors and perhaps a graduate teaching assistant. MOOCs do not necessarily return revenue to the universities that create them, but they are a useful vehicle for outreach and appeal to an audience that might not otherwise have access to high-quality educational materials.