Coursera
From the Coursera website (emphasis added):
Classes offered on Coursera are designed to help you master the material. When you take one of our classes, you will watch lectures taught by world-class professors, learn at your own pace, test your knowledge, and reinforce concepts through interactive exercises. When you join one of our classes, you’ll also join a global community of thousands of students learning alongside you. We know that your life is busy, and that you have many commitments on your time. Thus, our courses are designed based on sound pedagogical foundations, to help you master new concepts quickly and effectively. Key ideas include mastery learning, to make sure that you have multiple attempts to demonstrate your new knowledge; using interactivity, to ensure student engagement and to assist long-term retention; and providing frequent feedback, so that you can monitor your own progress, and know when you’ve really mastered the material.
Classroom Management
As a platform designed with course management in mind, the Coursera platform is well-adapted for this purpose. It provides integrated tools for course organization, including the course roster, a gradebook, and tools for making announcements, presenting information, and designing assessments and activities as described below.
Collaboration/Discussion
Discussion Forums provide a mechanism for student interaction. In addition, there are tools for peer assessment and for group work.
Assessment
The Coursera platform includes integrated tools for several types of assessment.
- Stand-alone quizzes. Stand-alone quizzes provide students with a quick “check in” to test knowledge, get feedback, and to get further explanation of material. Quizzes can include multiple-choice and fill-in-the blank questions. These quizzes are automatically graded.
- In-video quizzes. The in-video quizzes allow students to test their knowledge and which provide immediate feedback. These quizzes are not graded.
- Programming assignments. These are especially applicable for computer science, statistics, engineering, and finance, are automatically graded and provide a score and feedback to students.
- Peer assessment. Peer assessment with associated training exercises, which allow students to create responses to more free-form assignments and to provide constructive feedback based on an instructor-designed rubric.
Pros
The Coursera platform was created with course management in mind. It therefore provides a structure that facilitates organization of course materials as well as integrated tools for student assessment (quizzing and survey functions) and student activities (such as a discussion board and peer evaluation assignments). The in-video quizzing function is a superior feature that is not readily replicated in other platforms.
The support structure for the Coursera platform is strong. Vanderbilt MOOC instructors enjoy a high level of support. It is not yet clear if VU faculty members will be able to use Coursera as a platform for non-MOOC courses (such as to flip a local course). If they are, they will receive support by access to Coursera help documents; a listserv of local Coursera users; and a Coursera blog.
Because it’s a Vanderbilt-supported platform, the Coursera platform is secure and updated automatically.
Cons
Because it’s a newer platform, Coursera doesn’t feature all of the tools supported by Blackboard Learn, such as chat, the blog tool, and the plagiarism detection tools (SafeAssign).
The assessment options are not always conducive for more open-ended and subjective types of assignments (e.g., essays or creative assignments). Although peer assessment is a great tool for filling this gap and has the potential to promote student interaction and metacognition, it requires extensive scaffolding by the instructor, including clear and detailed rubrics. In addition, peer assessment is often new to students and requires a good-faith effort to anonymously evaluate the work of others attentively and constructively. Peer-assessment training is available in Coursera, which could take time until students fall in the acceptable range.
The CFT provides a Coursera Resource Guide .
Coursera provides detailed instructions for each of the tools described here. Links to those instructions are available in the more detailed descriptions (see, for example, the Assessments page for information about In-Video Quizzes).
- Static examples given in the CFT Coursera Resource Guide .
- Multiple Coursera courses can be freely explored.
- Examples of the possibilities with Coursera (individuals with administrative access can see these examples)