Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a disruptive trend in education. Several initiatives have emerged during the last months to give support to MOOCs, and many educators have started offering courses as MOOCs in different areas and disciplines. However, designing a MOOC is not an easy task. Educators need to face not only pedagogical issues, but also other issues of logistical, technologica...

Several studies have described different hybrid initiatives to integrate MOOCs into traditional higher education. Most of these studies have partially documented students’ perception on hybrid initiatives, measuring course satisfaction among other metrics. Few researchers have reported institutional efforts implied in implementing hybrid initiatives and their benefits from a curriculum perspect...

Bioinformatics is a fast-growing interdisciplinary field in which the demand for quality education exceeds the supply, especially in developing regions and countries. A massive open online course (MOOC) is a new model for education that delivers videotaped lectures and other course materials over the Internet for all interested persons around the globe to learn for free. Here we present our MOO...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an emergent paradigm of large-scale knowledge distribution. One of the dilemma faced by MOOC teachers is the trade-off between introducing new material and reviewing taught material. We model the recap activities as units of monotonically decreasing lengths and study the their schedule. We validate our model with the data of a Digital Signal Proce...

We designed BOOC, an application that synchronizes textbook content with MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) videos. The application leverages a tablet display split into two views to present lecture videos and textbook content simultaneously. The display of the book serves as peripheral contextual help for video viewing activities. A five-week user study with 6 groups of MOOC students in a blen...

A massive open online course (MOOC) is a web-based class environment aimed at large-scale global participation and open access via the Internet. MOOCs are also a disruptive trend changing how education is delivered and funded throughout the world. In the spring of 2013, we developed and taught Vanderbilt’s first MOOC, entitled “Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked...

BACKGROUND Advances in medicine have helped many to live longer lives and to be able to meet health challenges. However death rates are anticipated to increase given the ageing population and chronic disease progression. Being able to talk about death is seen to be important in normalising death as part of life and supporting preparedness for death. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide o...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are successful in delivering educational resources to the masses, however, the current retention rates — well below 10% — indicate that they fall short in helping their audience become effective MOOC learners. In this paper, we report two MOOC studies we conducted in order to test the effectiveness of pedagogical strategies found to be beneficial in the tradi...