Coming Home from a MOOC

In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been in the public discussion in Europe, as much as in the United States. I had kept myself a safe distance from the debate until, about a year ago, École normale supérieure (ENS) asked me to participate in a pilot project to set up and teach a masters-level MOOC in statistical/computational physics. The ENS project also included a course on French philosophy, and one on Galois theory, a branch of mathematics. A recording studio was to be installed on our campus in the Latin quarter, and videos were to be recorded, cut and edited by professionals. Courses were to be hosted on the Coursera platform. I would be able to recruit additional teachers and student assistants. All this effort was quite engaging. I first checked that my colleagues with whom I had taught a successful course in our English-language Physics masters program were interested in adapting the course to the internet. I then signed up, not expecting what was going to happen: Our 10-week MOOC on Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations attracted 30,000 registered students, triggered 256,000 video downloads, and 120,000 visits to its forum. When it was all over, we were overwhelmed by our teaching experience with an enthusiastic international and transcultural class of students that neither we nor our university had chosen. We had gone to the center of core subjects in science, including the nature of phase transitions, the physics of liquids, random processes, path integrals, and Bose-Einstein condensation. We had discussed many deep connections between physics and computing. By the time it was over, we had presented and prepared for download about 250 programs (in Python), and initiated a great amount of practical computing and program writing and program rewriting in the nine homework sessions. When we were done, we finally took our eyes off the forum that for three months had been a buzzing platform of heated discussions and of mutual help. We had motivated students toward a common goal, but had also been boosted by their enthusiasm. When the course was over, we had not suffered from the absence of a live audience during lectures, although it is now most rewarding to discuss with former students when they occasionally come up to us and present themselves on the street in Paris, New York, or elsewhere at conferences and seminars. Students had worked hard, although not for university credit. They had handed in 6300 homework solutions, and corrected about 20,000 of them through the peercorrection system that worked amazingly well. They had FIG. 1. Announcement video (“teaser”) of our MOOC after professional editing (left) and during production using a green screen (right).