When it comes to offering massive open online courses, it's already been proven that if you build the infrastructure, students will enroll - and usually by the tens of thousands.
But according to professors who were part of the first U. of I. MOOC class cohort last year, there's a lot more going on than just construction and big numbers.
In fact, they say participating in the process has increased their passion for teaching, made them reconsider the way classroom content can be delivered and ultimately the university's role in educating the world.
"I think being a part of Coursera is already paying off," said Jose J. Vazquez-Cognet, a U. of I. professor of economics, who last year turned his 900-student microeconomics principles lectures into a MOOC.
He's expecting about 20,000 students to sign up this fall.
"We're getting students from around the world in different situations, but the thing they have in common is they really want to learn," he said. "I knew there was a demand for economic course credit, but not for economic learning. It's re-energized my teaching."
Vazquez-Cognet said the experience has shown him that educators should embrace technological change in their classrooms - because it's a way to engage students who have already embraced it themselves.
"It gives us the opportunity to experiment with different types of pedagogy before we offer them as campus courses," he said. "The fact that this is noncredit (though a certificate is offered) means we have much more flexibility to experiment."
"It was an intellectually exhilarating experience," said Rob Rutenbar, a professor of computer science who has turned his 15-week computer chip design course into an eight-week MOOC. "We feel so good about the quality of information we're delivering; though it's a lot of the same information, it's being delivered much differently and to many more students."
From the ground up
Rutenbar, who has taught for 30 years, said that he and three teaching assistants became energized knowing they were being academic pioneers. In all, it took them about 25 hours a week for nearly four months to convert the class to an online course.
The team had to create software and open source tools for students to use exclusively with the course. They built a "graphics environment" inside a browser and their own cloud-based teaching assistant software to provide immediate feedback to students seeking help.
Students are asked to solve logic and geometric design problems for integrated circuits and run their calculations through the software to determine whether it is workable.
"It has given students a chance to interact with their designs in a pretty sophisticated way - in a way they don't in a traditional classroom," he said.
Usually offered to 20 to 50 students at a time, Rutenbar watched as 17,000 participants registered for the Coursera class.
For Vazquez-Cognet, making a MOOC was a natural progression.
He already had offered his basic economics course online for three years when Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise announced her intention for the U. of I. to become the first land-grant university to join Coursera.
"I was approached by campus leaders to be one of the first because the class was so large and in demand and I already had materials developed for the online course," he said.
After the initial MOOC offering, Vazquez-Cognet decided to redesign the course, employing the help of campus instructional designers and other media experts versed in video and virtual classroom presentation. The process took about six months.
It was decided that using economic case study examples from the Champaign-Urbana area in the MOOC would not only bring in real-life lessons on supply and demand, but serve the added purpose of promoting regional economic development.
"We open each week in a different part of town," he said, "and we visit several different local businesses. It's a case study grounded in the community and the students seem to have really connected to it."
Virtually face-to-face
Vazquez and Rutenbar said the most valuable part of the MOOC experience for the university is student feedback.
Those include assessment tools that help grade tests and measure mastery of concepts, and forums where students set out on their own to answer each other's questions and even grade each other's work (using Coursera's peer-grading algorithm).
"If someone gets snarky, you can vote their posts up or down," Rutenbar said. "Negative posters will just get hammered to the point of irrelevance. As an online student, you can lob a question and your peers will answer it. And they find bugs quite rapidly, which are inevitable. There are a lot of eyeballs on the problem, which is always a good thing."
Rutenbar offered top students extra credit that involved them trying to solve industrial test cases.
He said one of the negatives that has been ascribed to MOOCs is a low rate of completion for some courses.
Many students do drop out or don't finish, Rutenbar said, but mainly because "it's harder to get an appointment with a good dentist" than to sign up for a MOOC.
The experience has shown him that different students learn at different rates - and that the rate is many times determined by other priorities in their lives, such as a job or family.
That's why the information in his course has been segmented, and why it has been so popular.
"Some of these students simply don't have the time to sit down and watch a two-hour lecture video," he said. "But they can watch a series of 10-minute videos over time."
Vazquez-Cognet also paid special attention to his highest-performing Coursera students, congratulating them in a conference call that he also used to prod them for course feedback.
He said it is much too early to make grand statements about how the MOOC movement ultimately will fit within the structure of higher education because serious questions remain. A fundamental example: If credit ever were to be offered for a MOOC, how would the university verify the virtual student is really who the student claims to be?
"I'm not sure yet," Vazquez-Cognet said. "This is part of the experiment. For now there will be two different and distinct spheres."
Trending upward
The number of U. of I.-approved MOOCs will increase as the university works to develop and roll out a second cohort.
Right now, six of the 10 original U. of I. courses have been offered, two of the remaining four are nearing completion and will be offered early next year, and funding for five new MOOCS recently was approved by the campus review committee.
"Two important selection criteria are that the course has to reflect our mission as a land-grant institution and has to benefit our students in some way," said Deanna Raineri, an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Already half of the current MOOCs originate from LAS and Raineri said that trend may continue because general education courses are inherently easier to transfer to an online format - or already are being offered online.
The average cost so far for a MOOC conversion is still unknown because much of the content in the current MOOC roster already existed in an online format. Much of the expense is for audio and video production, captioning and graphics. And much of that work has been done by staff at LAS' Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Online and Continuing Education (now part of the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning).
"This is really a team effort and we've provided a huge amount of support," Raineri said.
She said the value of online courses is becoming more and more obvious, whether it's for recruiting, reaching nontraditional students, repurposing online content to enrich an on-campus course or as a way to reduce time-to-degree completion.
"For one thing, we're not doing this exclusively for us or for Coursera - it's part of our land-grant mission to reach out to the world and we are benefitting in many ways," she said. "For example, being a part of Coursera has given educational researchers here access to an unprecedented amount of data. The sheer scale of MOOCs allows us to quickly identify whether a new teaching practice or assignment works well and these best practices can then be applied to the classroom. It's also an opportunity to showcase what we do at Illinois."
Students from 140 countries have signed up since last year.
Raineri said instructors also are using MOOCs to test alternative forms of credentialing, including the use of digital "badges" in an effort to recognize various levels of knowledge acquisition or mastery - though there are no plans to offer transcript credit.
"We can't compare them to our own students because it's an entirely different group of students with entirely different needs," she said. "Many of the Coursera students just want to look at the videos but they have no intention of taking the exams or finishing the course."
Further integration of the MOOC mentality will play out with creation of the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.
"I'm glad we did this," she said. "We are learning so much and it is enriching our campus courses, but we are proceeding cautiously; the university has to figure out what our strategy is for delivering MOOCs."