Teaching a “mooc:” Experiences from the front line

The course Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering was recast for an massively open online course (MOOC) environment and taught beginning in January 2013 using the Coursera platform. Enrollment grew throughout the course´s twelve week duration, ending up at over 34,000 registrants. Of these about 4,000 were watching videos at the course´s end and 500 were working the problem sets. Recasting the course for the MOOC teaching scenario is estimated to have taken about 500 man-hours and supporting the course while it was active is estimated to have consumed another 400 hours. While preparing video lectures took most of this time, the aspect of the course requiring the most inventiveness was composing problems for the homework because of issues related to computerized grading, necessary because of the massive number of students.