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WENDY DREXLER: As Ike said, I am the director of online
development at Brown.
And we are in continuing education.
We sit within continuing education in the university.
And we have a number of different types of students,
different types of faculty, and different types of courses
that we run.
We have a pre-college program that is fully online that's
targeted to high school students.
And it runs in the fall, the spring, and the summer.
We have executive master's programs that are targeted to
executive students, professional students.
And then we also are running the summer for credit.
And as we speak, Brown is running its very first ever
for credit fully online course for undergrads.
And at Brown, that is a really big deal.
So we'll get to you later and let you know how that goes.
But so far it's going really well.
And I just wanted to give Jesse, before I keep going
forward. a chance to say a little bit more about himself
and where he came from and what he's doing.
And then we'll get on with it.
You might want to use this one.
JESSE SCHREIER: Hi, I'm Jesse.
I'll talk a little bit more later.
I'm a former community college history instructor developing
MOOCs really into online learning and fly fishing.
See ya.
WENDY DREXLER: Cool.
OK, so I would like to know a little bit about who we have
in this room.
How many of you are higher ed?
Any K-12?
Yay.
OK, cool.
I wanted to make sure that I have a chance to talk to some
of the K-12 folks as we go forward.
Our agenda for today is--
I don't know what happened to all of our
agenda titles there.
It looks like we lost a couple of them.
Basically I'm going to give you the back story of why we
decided to do this in the first place.
And then Jesse is going to tell you a little bit about
what happened when we ran this course twice.
Just last week we closed out the second run of this course.
And those two runs were very, very different.
And then he's going to give you a grand tour of
the course as well.
So when you think about a MOOC, if you will, why is a
pretty big question, right?
Why do people climb mountains?
Anybody.
Because they're there.
Exactly.
Why do people run MOOCs?
In many cases it's because they're there and they've had
the opportunity and because other people are doing it.
And that's been huge.
And we've got some of that going on at our own
university as well.
In this particular case, this is something that we had been
thinking about long before Canvas network was a
possibility.
I have my own personal dream.
And that dream is really to empower students, whether
they're K-12 students, high school students, or students
in any kind of environment.
And I think we have a long way to go before we
actually get there.
But there are some interesting things that are available now
that make this really possible.
And when you think about a MOOC--
and any of you who were in the last session, she talked a
little bit about what is it that makes a MOOC successful?
And all we really hear about are completions.
But the reality is that maybe completions
aren't what's most important.
The way that I see it, if we have students who are
empowered, and their goal is to learn something, they
should be able to learn anything they want to learn,
anytime, anywhere, from anyone.
And that could be multiple people and with anyone.
And that can be multiple people as well.
So when you look at this role of the facilitator, whether
that's the designer of the content, in this case, we had
an engineering professor who helped design the content.
But we also had Jesse doing a lot of the facilitation.
So that person becomes, like as you're climbing this
mountain, more like a Sherpa.
And I had some personal experience with this because
way back in 2008 I was one of the 10 or 12 for credit
participants in the Connectivism 2008 course with
George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
So that was a transformational experience for me.
It was part of what I was doing for my PhD program.
But I really looked at that from a learner's perspective.
So our thinking about doing this was really from the
learners perspective.
What would this experience be like for
a high school student?
And the reason why it was so important to us is because we
knew we had an issue in engineering.
This country has an issue in engineering
with engineering students.
40% or more of engineering students drop
out of their programs.
They don't necessarily drop out of school.
But they change programs.
Why?
It's hard.
So that's one of the reasons.
But another reason is, think about it, those of you in
K-12, if you have students that are good in math and
science, people will say to them, well, you should become
an engineer.
In a lot of cases, if they don't have engineers in their
family, they don't even know what that means.
And by the way, there are so many different kinds of
engineering and new types of engineering coming along all
the time, that we really need to give students at least a
baseline for understanding this.
And we already had an engineering course that was
running in our pre-college program.
So we had some really great content.
And what we wanted to do is we wanted it to pull out the
foundational content for that course and make it
available for free.
And then if students later decided that they wanted to
take one of the four paid courses, great.
But that was not the goal.
The goal was just let's make this freely available.
We want students anywhere in the world to be
able to take it.
And even further than that, and what we're starting to
work on now, and I can talk more with any of you who are
interested--
getting teachers to facilitate this two week course in their
classroom with students who become a small local community
of learners who can then interact with the other
learners in the online space.
So that was our plan.
JESSE SCHREIER: High school teachers using MOOCs--
WENDY DREXLER: We have to switch here.
JESSE SCHREIER: So when designing the scores, there
were a bunch of challenges, obviously.
I don't need it.
When designing this course, there were a lot of
challenges.
Obviously, one, we never designed a MOOC before.
So we didn't have a lot of experience.
Audience, like, we were designing a course for high
school students.
But how could we get high school students in the course?
We know that most students who take MOOCs are over 40.
Can I say that?
Sort of when we look at the demographics, how do we get
high schoolers in there?
And so we were worried about that.
I'm good.
Completion, right?
How can we encourage students to complete?
And that factors in the design too.
One of the things we thought about was let's have students
do something every day.
So when I show you the course, there's a daily
thing for them to do.
We know most online courses are module based, get it done
by the end of the week.
We thought, well, sometimes they might do something on
Monday and not come back until the next Monday.
And they might just lose interest.
So how can we keep their interest?
Try to give them something to do every single day.
Now, that has some pluses and minuses, which we learned.
And we just sort of wanted to make it non-MOOCy And what I
mean when I say that is I didn't want it be the great
professor lecturing and everybody just listening and
then taking a quiz on it, right?
I wanted the students to be active.
I wanted them to be doing engineering.
I wanted to take the online model of education and
actually transfer it to the MOOC environment.
I think MOOCs, all too often, if I could be a critic of
them, is just a great professor talking.
Sorry, I just fell asleep, right?
I mean, I can only take that for so long.
So the course goal when we designed this, introduce high
school students to engineering and help them decide if that's
what they want to do for their career.
So they had three objectives.
One, to go interview an engineer.
Two, to make a road map for their career as an engineer.
What courses should they be taking in high school, and
then what courses should they be taking in college if they
actually want to become an engineer?
And then the third thing was to actually design something
and then build it.
So that was sort of a challenge.
And we picked a playground because we
wanted it to be fun.
And that's the thing.
When I say non-MOOCy I just wanted the course to be fun.
And, yeah, MOOCs, they can be fun.
Those discussions are fun.
But I wanted it to be even funner
with high school students.
So our first run was in April.
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
We capped the course at 500 students.
They signed up in December.
The course ran at the beginning of April and we
thought, oh, we're going to have so many students.
500 is so many.
And what a mistake that was.
Many of the students who signed up in December forgot
the course was running in April.
Of the 500 who signed up, 150 logged in.
So there was 350 students who just never logged in.
Of those 150, I don't know this, but I think a lot of
them were adults just from, like, the introduction.
You introduce yourself on the discussion board.
Like, almost all of the people who were in
the course were adults.
They were like I'm an engineer.
I just wanted to check out this course.
And so we had three people finish the course.
Three.
Right?
And so did I cry?
I thought about it.
But Maria walked me off the cliff and helped me.
But we thought, well, how can we change this?
And the first thing was we had to get high school students in
the course.
And so we really marketed it to them.
We have all these ways of marketing.
Should I tell them, Wendy?
We use the PSAT lists.
So whatever high school students take the PSAT, we
send them emails and say we have these
great pre-college courses.
So we sent them emails like, hey, we have a MOOC.
Would you like to take it?
And so we ran the course again in June.
And it was more like Michael Jackson moon walking over and
over again.
I was just so happy.
And I'll show you the results.
But we had thousands of posts.
Let's see, we capped it at 2,500 this time.
We probably had 300 completions.
But it was sort of more the level of learning and
communication amongst the students.
I mean, completion's great.
We had more, way more.
But it was also just the depth of the
relationships that were forming.
The depth of the learning was so much more obvious and
apparent, like, students really enjoyed it.
So this is the kind of thing that students did.
This was the winner of the playground design.
So we had the students go through the
engineering design process.
The first thing they did was draw a sketch, literally paper
and pen on paper.
They took a picture of that, uploaded it to a Flickr site.
The next thing they did was interact with each other and
give feedback based on those sketches and
then build a prototype.
So they build a prototype in this free program called LEGO
Digital Designer.
Again, wanted the course to be fun.
After they built the first prototype in LEGOs which I
think are super fun, which most people who, right, yeah,
ever think about engineering, they love LEGOs.
So they built a prototype then posted that to Flickr.
They had to sort of comment on each other and improve.
This was the winner.
And the students voted on this, by the way.
This student had something like 50 votes.
She had a double dragon headed slide.
And you saw throughout--
and I'll show you the Flickr page--
that the students really learned from each other.
Like, there were a lot of designs that
had dragons in it.
And there was a lot that had octopuses in it.
They were like, I guess, octopi.
They were sort of paying homage to each other.
And so it was just super cool to see.
And so we just had a much better course.
The discussions were, these are sort of the major
discussions.
This is where they posted their interview.
They had reflection, design reflection, roadmap to
becoming an engineer.
We did all of that on the discussion board.
So, I mean, what you can see here is some of the things we
learned is that you need a lot of TAs to do this, man.
Like, it was me and this Brown professor who was great.
Loved her, Karen Haberstroh, but she's really busy.
She didn't have time to be looking at all these
discussions, facilitating it, encouraging students.
So you can see that there's 1400 posts.
I didn't get to 700.
So there's 2,100 pots there.
I didn't even look at 700 of them.
The road maps, there were 282 that I looked at.
There were 200 that I didn't.
So what are the things we learned?
That you need facilitation.
I don't know.
I used to teach online.
And so I think that facilitation is so important.
And with MOOCs we say, oh, well, we just
leave it to the students.
And that's great.
And it's awesome.
But it's also great if you can get a professor or a TA like
me, even though I don't know any engineering,
they think I do.
It's great to have that interaction with the students.
So what did we learn?
Well, we needed a TA, right?
We also learned that we had to find the right audience.
This was much more successful with high school students.
And what we learned from the students was
just they wanted more.
They wanted more.
And so this brings up a question that's sort of like,
where do we stop with MOOCs?
Do we stop?
They're all like we love this course but I wanted to learn
more about the sub fields of chemical engineering.
We had videos where a chemical engineer would talk about what
they do with their career.
Students would also interview chemical engineers.
But they wanted to know the sub fields of chemical
engineering, right?
So students wanted more, more, more.
And that's good.
That's good.
So the last thing we learned, stuff's fun.
MOOCs can be really fun.
And I think that they can be really fun when the students
are doing something.
They're not just listening to a talking head.
So that's me right now talking at you.
So I sort of want to stop that.
But I want to thank Canvas Network first.
That's Wendy on the left, the wise sensei.
This is me on the left.
Or that's Wendy on the right.
That's me on the left thanking Canvas Network, especially
Maria, for helping us through this.
And let me show you, I guess, a tour of the course right now
if you're interested.
Questions?
Do they think taking this MOOC is going to
get them into Brown?
Absolutely.
I mean we see that--
WENDY DREXLER: We tell them that that's not how it works.
JESSE SCHREIER: Yeah, it's really funny.
AUDIENCE: They absolutely think that will be
[INAUDIBLE]--
JESSE SCHREIER: I would say--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] on the application process?
JESSE SCHREIER: Some of them do, which is interesting
because they're really smart kids.
You know?
AUDIENCE: So what do you think this costs Brown in terms of
[INAUDIBLE]?
JESSE SCHREIER: Oh, god.
I'll put it this way.
It was a two-week course.
I put a lot of [INAUDIBLE].
So you got to ask the head honcho, but it
was a lot of money.
WENDY DREXLER: That is a really difficult question.
And the question was what did this cost
Brown in hard dollars?
And to be perfectly honest, I couldn't even begin to tell
you because we have people who are already in the office
doing other things, creating other courses, like Jesse,
like myself.
Are there opportunity costs?
We're doing this, so we're not doing something else.
Yes.
Were we really committed to this and
feel that it's important?
Yes.
Do we think that some of the work that we did could lead to
enrollments in the courses that we offer
that are for a fee?
Yes.
It's hard to say.
I know that the other-- and I'm involved in the Coursera
courses that the university's creating as well.
And those have required a lot more of faculty time, support
time, and huge opportunity costs there.
So the jury's still out.
We're really trying to figure out ways that we can do this
more effectively and more efficiently.
And I think one of the key ways is--
JESSE SCHREIER: More cost effective.
WENDY DREXLER: More cost effectively, yes.
And one of the key ways is to, again, have the
students doing more.
If we can put more of the responsibility of learning on
the students, but provide guidance, I think we can start
to get there.
But we're not there yet.
JESSE SCHREIER: Without high-production video, when
you see Coursera courses, those videos are nice, right?
Low production--
this is her webcam at home.
But she's not talking to them for an hour.
She's talking to them for two minutes.
Welcome to the course.
So this is the front page.
We tell them what to do.
And then here's sort of the course schedule.
Did I mention it?
I stole this from some other Canvas.net course that I saw.
I was like, aw, [INAUDIBLE], that's really good.
I don't know who that was who did that, but--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
[? everyday ?]
[INAUDIBLE].
JESSE SCHREIER: Well, I think it worked really well for some
students, especially high school students.
They do stuff every day.
And a lot of them actually were still in class now.
So the sense that, OK, let me just go in and do this and
then I'm done.
Let me just spend 30 minutes to an hour today doing this
and then I'm done was good.
I mean, I think when you have something to do by the end of
the week, and it might be five or ten hours of work, and
you're not paying for it, there's no buy in, they just
don't do it.
So I thought, well, let me make this manageable.
The issue is that sometimes students get behind and they
don't do it.
They don't catch up even though we encourage them.
Question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] you look back on it [? as ?] two weeks,
like [INAUDIBLE]?
JESSE SCHREIER: No.
I would make longer.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: Three weeks for now.
I mean, that's the thing.
You learn so much when you run it.
So the first time we ran it, I would say, hysterical.
It's like, no one was in your course.
You've done all this [INAUDIBLE].
And no one showed up.
And the ones who did show up left.
And you were like, [INAUDIBLE].
It would be like if all you guys just took off
[INAUDIBLE].
Hey, man, I got feelings.
So that was it.
And so let me take you to day three.
This is where Karen sort of says, hey, guys, let me
introduce you to the design process.
And we're actually going to do the design process.
This is what all engineers do in every field.
And then draw something on paper and go
to our Flickr website.
And let's see if this baby opens up because there's some
really cool stuff on here.
Wendy, are you logged in?
Cool.
AUDIENCE: Why did you choose to post there versus the
discussion board in Canvas?
JESSE SCHREIER: So many reasons.
One, we can market this better because it looks cool.
I mean, sorry.
Sorry, guys.
You want the truth?
It looks great.
It's hard to do it within Canvas.
All right?
What are you going to do?
Have them attach something on the discussion board?
Well, every time, they have to click that JPEG open.
This is you can see it.
You can vote on it as your favorite.
You can come over here and comment on it.
Flickr made a lot of sense to us, just the way it looks.
So there are over 1,000 of these photos on here where
students are designing these playgrounds.
This person had 13 favorites, Emily Yang.
Didn't quite win.
She only got 13.
And actually Karen-- no, Karen didn't respond to this one.
But this was where students would sort of respond to the
design and give them improvement.
Was there other reasons we picked Flickr that I'm
forgetting?
WENDY DREXLER: Yeah, really, I think the biggest reason-- and
Jesse's right.
I mean, we have all kinds of different
reasons for doing this.
But this is an open course.
So you really have to think about what you want to keep in
that-- as we were hearing, Audrey was talking about this
morning, the walled garden.
And one of the beautiful things about Canvas is the way
that you can integrate other programs and add other
programs and connect to other programs.
So we wanted to have the students posting their work in
an open forum so that other people could see it.
Now when we run this course again, we can send students
back to this page for motivation to do an even
better job next round.
JESSE SCHREIER: They're doing something,
they're building something.
And that was the challenge with an online course.
That's what you do in an engineering course is you
actually build stuff together and then look at it, rework
it, how did you do it?
So then all the students, of course, in the suggestions
were like why don't we use CAD?
And I'm like because that takes lots of time to teach
you and the money to get you that software--
so, you know, it's an interesting suggestion.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: Yeah, I mean, I just wonder how much the
peer review is useful to them.
I mean, that's what you hear when you hear about the
complaints in MOOCs.
It's like, oh, this other guy read my paper.
And you want the professor to read your paper.
Yes.
But that's where you have to go.
That's the compromise.
And, yeah, we thought about it.
And we tried to get them to do that.
But when you have a MOOC, there are so many students who
don't get comments at all.
WENDY DREXLER: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: There are so many students
who don't get a comment.
So what we did was we sent out announcements that said,
please comment on people who don't have comments.
And if you don't have a comment, comment on somebody
else's and say, please comment on mine, too.
So, yeah, that was absolutely a challenge.
That's the challenge with peer review is the students who
don't get any review.
And it's tough with MOOCs because they drop out.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: Were there more female engineering
students in this course than I would have expected or in
other courses?
Yes.
Notably the 10 best designs, eight of them were female,
which was interesting.
I didn't run data on this thing.
I mean, maybe somebody named Dana, who, like, made a pink
playground, was a male.
Maybe.
But my sense was of the 10 best designs, eight of them
were women, which that was striking to me, which is why I
remember it.
So I would say the course was about 50/50, though.
But I haven't run the data.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: Well, there was only one TA
and that was me.
How many completed and how many hours did the TAs put in?
We left the course open until yesterday, actually.
So we counted on Friday.
So we had 233 completions on Friday.
But, as you see, I didn't get to all of these new things,
all of these new posts.
So I'm guessing, now that these students have put up
their interviews and their roadmap to becoming engineers,
we're going to have more like 400 completions, which is
pretty good out of 2,500, to be honest.
And, you know, that's the good thing about having a high
school students.
Their parents are looking over their shoulder sometimes
telling them to finish.
And especially really motivated students who would
be in a MOOC or who would, like, want to take a MOOC from
Brown, they're still in class.
They're doing this in addition to, like, their final exams.
And that's another thing we learned.
Don't run it at the beginning of June.
Run it at the end of June or early July.
We had students say that.
I'd love to put more time into this course but I
didn't have the time.
I was studying for finals.
So Awesome.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JESSE SCHREIER: All over the world, man.
AUDIENCE: All over the world?
JESSE SCHREIER: Literally.
Pakistan, China, Tanzania, I think.
Definitely Australia, Europe.
So everywhere.
South America, which was great.
Cool beans.
Thanks.
Should I show them LEGO Digital Designer more?
I don't know if you have [? it downloaded. ?]
LEGO Digital Designer is awesome.
You guys have to check it out [INAUDIBLE].
It's free.
Just download it.
WENDY DREXLER: Thank you all very much.
I would encourage you to contact us, either one of us,
if you're thinking of doing something like this,
especially if you're thinking of offering a MOOC for high
school or K-12 students.
And if you are in K-12 and you are a teacher or have teachers
in your school that would be interested in facilitating a
smaller community in the fall, have them contact us as well.
JESSE SCHREIER: Like a teacher can just use this.
Do something every day, just like you would in high school.
So they can use it.