Month: August 2014

My colleagues and I have just finished recording our new MOOC (online course), an official ETH offering on the EdX platform. The preview is available [1] and the course will run starting in September.

As readers of this blog know, I  have enthusiastically, under the impulsion of Marco Piccioni at ETH, embraced MOOC technology to support and spread our courses. The particular target has been the introduction to programming that I have taught for over a decade at ETH based on the Touch of Class textbook [2]. In February this blog announced [3] the release of our first MOOC, embodying the essentials of our ETH course and making it available not only to ETH students but to the whole world. The course does not just include video lectures: it also supports active student participation through online exercises and programs that can be compiled and tested on the cloud, with no software installation. These advanced features result from our research on support for distributed software development (by Christian Estler and Martin Nordio, with Carlo Furia and others).

This first course was a skunkworks project, which we did entirely on our own without any endorsement from ETH or any of the main MOOC players. We and our students have very much benefited from the consequent flexibility, and the use of homegrown technology relying on the MOODLE framework. We will keep this course for our own students and for any outside participant who prefers a small-scale, “boutique” version. But the EdX brand and EdX’s marketing power will enable us to reach a much broader audience. We want to provide the best introductory computing course on the market and the world needs to know about it. In addition, the full support of media services at ETH  helped us reach a higher standard on the technical side. (For our first course, the home-brewed one, we did not have a studio, so that every time an ambulance drove by — our offices are close to the main Zurich hospital — we had to restart the current take.)

The course’s content is not exactly the same: we have broadened the scope from just programming to computing, although it retains a strong programming component. We introduced additional elements such as an interview with Professor Peter Widmayer of ETH on the basics of computer science theory. For both new material and the topics retained from the first version we have adapted to the accepted MOOC practice of short segments, although we did not always exactly meet the eight-minute upper limit that was suggested to us.

We hope that you, and many newcomers, will like the course and benefit from it.

References

[3] EdX course: Computing: Art, Magic, Science, preview available here.

[2] Bertrand Meyer: Touch of Class: Learning how to Program Well, with Objects and Contracts, Springer Verlag, revised printing, 2013, book page here.

[3] Learning to Program, Online: article from this blog, 3 February 2014, available here.