Working Title -> The Mechanical Mooc (www.mechanicalmooc.org)
Project Plan / Timeline
If you make changes below, please also update this spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/a/p2pu.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao0xeQZKCVprdHhQcXJOaF95TUROY1BVMGcwUVU3bWc#gid=0
Final Deliverables
Probably push back to wait for Codecademy
[18 Jun] Sign up form is built/tested/integrated with MIT OCW (so we are ready for announcement)
[6 July] Mechanical MOOC engine ready
Development Plan
[18 Jun] Describe what it will look like
-> discuss with steve, vanessa, philipp
-> allow major / conceptual changes if necessary
[27 Jun] Rough prototype to play with
-> share with small group of beta testers
-> allow minor revisions / copy
-> [VMG] Sign-up questions
-> [VMG] Landing page copy
[XXX June/July] Announce (Sign-up form ready)
[XXX July] Script outline
Pushed back ---> [2 July] Product
-> stress test
-> bug fixes only
Content
Basic course structure -> http://pad.p2pu.org/mechanicalmooc-script
Mechanical MOOC engine design notes
Mechanical MOOC engine - "DailyLit-type" software
- Sign up form
- Collect email and some other data
- Disclaimer / Terms of Use / CC BY SA
- Ability to close sign-up and then re-open for next round [manual]
- For discussion: Opt-in to communicating within the cohort (or opt-out) - not a fan of this, it adds complexity to the app. If all my partners opt out, then I'm all alone. Once you're in a group, you're in. Check the mockups for ideas
- Group formation
- Run script to assign people to groups
- Todo - determine how we want to group people (logic of the script) - we need questions for this, once we know the questions it's trivial. this will be done once, manually.
- Allow -> cohort of one? - no, but people can skip being added to a group
- Quit group
- Exit form that asks why people quit
- Send emails
- Script emails on etherpad, copy/paste into form to send out
- Default: text email (nice to have: HTML formatted emails)
- Relay emails
- Route incoming emails to the right recipients
- Other:
- Archive full record of communication/email for future research and analysis - this is hard... still investigating
- Limited admin / research features, e.g. variable group sizes - not planning to build any "features" just collecting data that we can parse later
- End of course self and peer assessment?
"Script" - Content that is sent out every week [Vanessa/Philipp to write]
User Story (needs updating)
- User arrives at MIT OCW course page
- Sees invitation "Do you want to work through these materials with others students?" - Learn more and sign/up here
- Splashpage contains basic info, and sign up form
- Sign up -> users are automatically grouped into cohorts (we can set the size)
- Email list is generated
- On launch date course script kicks off (after launch date, new cohorts kicked off when full)
- Everyone works on the same schedule
- Emails:
- Contain a short description of the topic of that week
- Links to the materials on MIT OCW
- Link to code exercise on codecadamy
- Link to openstudy group for questions and answers
- Link to global meetups for the course
- Instructions on how to share personal work with others
Discussion / Questions
- One fixed launch date (or rolling start)
- Take advantage of the "it starts now" effect
- But allow experimentation with different combinations (teams within cohorts)
- Offer "option" to sign-up for small groups within the bigger cohort
- Everyone start at once to have scale
- Relationship between one large community and small groups/cohorts (see notes below)
- Email
- Email not primarily a two-way street for conversation / email focus is to "prompt" people
- Opt-in to communicating within their cohort
- CodeAcademy
- Python materials will be pushed out shortly (ballpark intro level)
- MIT course focused on concepts (which is similar to CodeAcademy)
- Likely that the two will line up well, BUT we don't know yet
- Next step: Steve to check with CodeAcademy on timeframe for relasing, and if their Python stuff is in line with MIT's materials)
- MIT Professor to see if there is a resource to create projects
- Who would figure out the structure and manage email -> P2PU
- How do we deal with recognition?
- OpenStudy has badges that could OBI compliant (Next step: Steve to talk through this with Preetha, mention badges)
- Codecademy has badges
- P2PU has badges that are OBI compliant (Next step: Think about what badges we could issue)
Goals / Expectations -> Explore if we can leverage Scholar courses to build a low-tech mooc that has community and creative learning
- Build a disagregated, open, model for MOOCs (choose great tools and stitch them together)
- Build richer peer-learning processes than current MOOCs offer
- Nobody is "in charge" - but automated cohorting / facilitation / orchestration
- Start as simple as possible (narrow down options for users) - learn from this
Background
- MOOCs - new efforts in online learning that are *scalable*
- What makes them scalable is automated assessments (that are more sophisticated than what existed before, but mainly quantiative/computed)
- Some P2P learning in self-organized forums and Q&A (but leveraging scale, rather than providing great peer learning opportunities)
- Approach has been to create monolithic platforms (which is the old paradigm)
- MIT OCW scholar courses
- all materials that are needed to study, but no community features, no features to "build" things
- MIT Introductory Computer Programming (Python) - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011/
- Designed for independent learners
- Rich set of resources (no additional textbook needed)
- It's a large course, but could be broken into three modules, and let people sign-up for each separately
- Codecademy is about to relase a set of Python courses (which may or may not match up well with MIT course)
- Leverage Mozilla Summer of Code
Roles
Roles (Next step: update based on Steve's document)
- MIT OCW - host core content
- P2PU - manage overall sign-up, orchestrate experience (via email), and optionally offer cohort features
- OpenStudy - general question and answer related to any part of the course
- CodeAcademy - host tutorials
- Meetup - no active involvement, but link to meetup for local group organization
Timeframe
- Announce together with Mozilla Summer of Code start / 23 June
- Run for 6 months
What's needed to build?
- Design the course script (what happens when?)
- Develop codecademy tutorials
- Build the automation engine that executes the script
- Set up splash page and sign-up form
Inspired by
- MOOCs
- DailyLit model of breaking readings into automated scripts (and "remind me again" button)
- Let's talk TED talks model of cohorting
Volume
[Who wrote this?] So I was thinking that their would be a cohort, not many at the 10 person granularity. I was thinking that the e-mail would not be a discussion channel but basically a push to keep people sequenced. The cohort in my mind is the whole 25,000 ala OpenStudy's model. Discuss. Is cohort more about someone who is studying the same thing you are at the same time or is about the personal connection to a very few learners.
[PS] Goal is to provide both -> very large help community (using OpenStudy) as well as small personal groups where you know everyone else and have a sense of working together / keeping each other going. Main function of email is to push sequence, but secondary function to allow people to talk to each other. That's what's missing in the big groups at the moment.
Expected Email Volume
- 25,000 users
- 6 weeks course
- 10 users / group
- 2,500 groups
- 3 threads / week
- 1 email to 10 people = 10 sends
- 5 people replies twice * 2 * 10 emails = 100 sends
- 110 sends/ thread
- 330 sends/ week
- 330 * 25,000 = 825000 ~ 1 million / week
- ~ 2000 USD / month