MOOCGdP, my first completed MOOC

Yes, I just finalised my first MOOC!

• MOOC Title: ABC de la gestion de projet
• School: Ecole Centrale de Lille (Remi Bachelet and a team)
• Language: French
• Platform: CANVAS
• Length: 4 weeks
• Levels: a « basic » one (quizzes) and an « advanced » one (quizzes + peer-reviewed assignments)
• Number of students: limited to 3600 but many more were interested!

About the form:

• 10-15mn videos followed by a short quizz, 5-6 videos per week: 15 mn is really the maximum length, I feel; the quizzes are a must to get some feedback on our level of understanding and memorisation of the video content, and the ability for several attempts lets the student learn some more; an hour and a half is the maximum total length for a week
• videos include the speaking teacher, the slides, the mouse cursor moving along the spoken presentation: it’s good to get multiple channels at once, and some level of « animation »; also having the plan and the progress along it always visible helps

About the platform: 

I would say that Canvas is globally ok. It’s not as attractive as the EdX one though. It takes some time to figure out some navigation (providing a peer-review for example required a guide). What I like in EdX (I’m currently following the « Introduction to biology » course from Eric Lander, it’s great! see my posts) is that almost all software tools required for exercises are embedded into the platform: there is no further stress to make it on time due to problems in the tool installation. Of course, using external tools (GanttProject, VUE, …) has the advantage that we still have the tools installed after the end of the course.

Peer-reviewed assessment:

That was a new stuff for me, and one I was really wondering about! And indeed, it is not easy to « play the teacher »… At least an evaluation grid was provided for each work to be assessed with criteria description and values.

Thought about the Business Model:

In the final questionnaire, there was one question related to a possible Business Model. From the extensive literature that can be found online nowadays, this is still to be defined…