The paper is devoted to the main aspects of using MOOCs as a part of university curriculum. HSE University has the expertise of implementation of blended learning using our own 53 MOOCs on Coursera and 27 MOOCs on Russian National Open Education Platform and courses of other universities. The emphasis will be on institutional decisions, organizational schemes and management solutions that allow...

We present an analysis of instructional design quality of 76 randomly selected Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The quality of MOOCs was determined from first principles of instruction, using a course survey instrument. Two types of MOOCs (xMOOCs and cMOOCs) were analysed and their instructional design quality was assessed and compared. We found that the majority of MOOCs scored poorly on m...

In this paper, we describe the the planning system SGPlan6 participating in the satisficing tracks of the deterministic part of the Sixth Planning Competition (IPC6). SGPlan6 is designed to solve both temporal and non-temporal planning problems specified in PDDL3 which may have soft goals, derived predicates or ADL features. SGPlan6 inherited the parallel decomposition framework from SGPlan5 wh...

Distinguishing subpopulations in group behavioral experiments can reveal the impact of differences in genetic, pharmacological and life-histories on social interactions and decision-making. Here we describe Fluorescence Behavioral Imaging (FBI), a toolkit that uses transgenic fluorescence to discriminate subpopulations, imaging hardware that simultaneously records behavior and fluorescence expr...

The master equation of a lattice gas reaction tracks the probability of visiting all spatial configurations. The large number of unique spatial configurations on a lattice renders master equation simulations infeasible for even small lattices. In this work, a reduced master equation is derived for the probability distribution of the coverages in the infinite diffusion limit. This derivation jus...

STScI has continued the development of systems for HST data calibration. The calibration database system (CDBS) tracks information about all HST calibration files. CDBS has been rebuilt to be more automated and provide some additional capabilities for users. We have also begun investigating the requirements for an on-the-fly calibration system. This system would allow users to retrieve data tha...

The principal causes of cracking in prestressed concrete sleepers are the dynamic loads induced by track irregularities and imperfections in the wheel-rail contact and the in-phase and out-of-phase track resonances. The most affected points are the mid-span and rail-seat sections of the sleepers. Central and rail-seat crack detection require visual inspections, as legislation establishes, and i...

Previous studies about engagement in MOOCs has focused primarily on behavioral engagement and less attention has been paid to cognitive engagement. This may lead to incomplete or even incorrect understandings about students experience and learning in MOOCs. In this study, we use number of lectures watched as a proxy for behavioral engagement and number of pauses in lectures watched as a proxy f...