Behind The Scenes Of A Startup MOOC

Is it Live or Is It a MOOC?

After the first NSF class held via videoconference, it dawned on me that since I wasn’t physically in front of the students, they wouldn’t know if my lecture was live or recorded.

Embracing the “too dumb to know it can’t be done,” I worked with a friend from Stanford, Sebastian Thrun and his startup Udacity, to put my Lean LaunchPad lectures online. Rather than just have me drone on as a talking head, I hired an animator to help make the lectures interesting, and the Udacity team had the insight to suggest I break up my lecture material into small, 2-4 minute segments that matched students’ attention spans.

Over a few months we developed the online lectures, then tried it as a stand-in for me on the NSF videoconferences, and found that because of the animations and graphics the students were more engaged than if I were teaching it in person. Ouch.

Now the NSF teams were learning from these online lectures instead of video conferenced lectures – but the online lectures were still being played during class time.

I wondered if we could be more efficient with our classroom time.

Flipping

Back at Stanford and Berkeley, I realized that I could use my newly created Lean LaunchPad MOOC and “flip” the classroom.  It sounded easy, I had read the theory:

1) A flipped classroom moves lectures traditionally taught in class, and assigns them as homework. Therefore my students will all eagerly watch the videos and come to class ready to apply their knowledge, 2) this would eliminate the need for any lecture time in class.  And as a wonderful consequence, 3) I could now admit more teams to the class because we’d now have more time for teams to present.

So much for theory. I was wrong on all three counts.

Theory Versus Practice

After each class, we’d survey the students and combine it with a detailed instructor post mortem of lessons learned.  (An example from our UCSF Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences Class is here.)

Here’s what we found when we flipped the classroom:

• More than half the students weren’t watching the lectures at home.
• Without an automated tool to take attendance, I had no idea who was or wasn’t watching.
• Without lectures, my teaching team and I felt like observers. Although we were commenting and critiquing on students’ presentations, the flipped classroom meant we were no longer in the front of the room.
• No lectures meant no flexibility to cover advanced topics or real-time ideas past the MOOC lecture material.

We decided we needed to fix these issues, one at a time.