From MOOCs to SPOCs
UC Berkeley EECS Professor and Director of Berkeley’s MOOCLab, Armando Fox, discusses the positive and productive use of MOOCs as an aid to traditional classroom teaching. The tools built into MOOCs, such as auto-grading with multiple capacities (soon to be more!), allows professors to spend more time interacting with students. Since MOOCs have an exponentially greater scale of students, this allows professors to use inferential statistics techniques to provide data for improving teaching techniques which “may well raise the bar for acceptable teaching”. Fox clearly states the aim for MOOCs being no different than any class in an educational setting. From a teaching perspective the hope is to “give many great teachers a more prominent voice” and to reach large amounts of students in the process.
Fox is scheduled to speak at the Hariri Institute on 2/25 at 3:00pm on Using MOOCs to Reinvigorate Software Engineering Education.