Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are very recent, but are quickly gaining popularity. Coursera is one of the big platforms that offer those free courses, along with edX and Khanacademy just to mention a few. Last year I took a fantastic course offered by Coursera called ‘Model Thinking’ given by Prof. Scott E. Page, who’s the Director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan ( I posted already about it here : – ).
In March this year, I was glad to receive a mail from Scott Page, giving us some feedback from his experience doing this course, and sending us also a link to a presentation he did about the making of the course.
To give you an idea of the popularity of this course, there were 60.000 students enrolled on the first run of Model Thinking, beginning of 2012. It grew to 100.000 for the fall run (by the way, if you are interested there will be a new run this fall 2013, and it may be the last one, says Prof. Page).
I would like to share with you Scott’s insights on his experience on making this online course contrasting it with the making of his online course ‘The hidden Factor’. This last one was professionally done in a studio and he called ‘Model Thinking’: my garage band online course : – )
In fact, it was really recorded in one unused room of his house, because he said that the starting and stopping of the heating system in the rest of the house was picked up by his mike, so sensible it was even though it was just a $100 one.
To prepare the course, he thought of making it more modular. So he cut it in small chunks, so that each video was independent, and treated a subject in no more than 15 minutes. But as he said, that was the easiest part because what took him much more time was the recording of each lecture. One big issue he had was that he was alone in this room to do the recordings, and trying to be smiling, engaging and enthusiastic is difficult without an audience. Not only that, but he had unforeseen events from time to time, like his dog wandering around, and he laughed and found himself doing funny movement to chase him.
The editing took a lot of time, each video had to be reviewed, and in case of errors, it was difficult to fix it. So at the end, some mistakes remained. On the other hand in the professional approach, they took care of each error, but they had better tools and a battery of technicians to look into them and find different alternatives to correct them. Sometimes he had to repeat one word they detected he had staggered with, and they told them even the intonation he had to use to repeat it; sometimes they just put a picture about the subject he was talking about, and he could rephrase one sentence.
In conclusion, here’s his comparison regarding costs to do the 2 videos:
So it is much more costly for a professional quality. Time-wise, it was surprisingly more or less equivalent:
The studio made video was undisputable better, being much easier to correct any mistakes:
But in the end, is the improvement in quality worth the cost? Not really he says; the best quality is not needed, a good enough approach is better, even more if the cost prohibits its making. So the best solution stands between those 2 options.
I found also very important his comment on how presenting this course changed his everyday work life. He has now 1 hour per day reading his mail, answering to diverse requests on his subject of expertise. He receives inquiries from technical advisors, deans, diverse influencial people that he cannot really discard. On the one hand it’s not strictly his job, for what he is paid for, but on the other hand, can these requests be ignored? Is it responsible if you know your intervention can have such an impact as to do better policies, to improve many people’s life?
