Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Our online course Computing: Art, Magic, Science, available from EdX, opens this Tuesday (tomorrow, 30 September) at 9 AM Zurich time (and at this time in your area).

An earlier article on this blog described the course, which integrates ten years of experience teaching introductory programming at ETH, and takes advantage of remote-compilation and remote-execution technology from our distributed development research.

You can find the course here.

First week of semester at ETH. The number of incoming informatics (computer science) students has reached an all-time high: 345; see the (bad-quality) picture from day one of “Introduction to Programming”. (And no, the gender distribution has not changed.) So much for fears that MOOCs and such will displace universities; in fact we have not one but two MOOCs to support the course. Computer science is back in fashion!

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.

The ETH introductory programming course, which I have taught since 2003 and used as the basis for the Springer Touch of Class textbook, is now available as a MOOC: an online course, open to anyone interested [1]. The project was started and led by Marco Piccioni.

The MOOC was released in September; although it was “open” (the other “O”) from the start, we have not publicized it widely until now, since we used it first for the benefit of students taking the course at ETH, and took advantage of this experience to polish it. If you follow the acronym buzz you may say it was first a “SPOC” (Small Personal Online Course”). The experience with our students has been extremely encouraging: they took it as a supplement to the lectures and widely praised its value.We hope that many others will find it useful as well.

MOOCs are hot but they have attracted as much criticism as hype. We have seen the objections: low completion rates, lack of direct human contact, threats to traditional higher education. Two things are clear, though: MOOCs are more than a passing fad; and they have their own pedagogical advantages.

MOOCs are here to stay; one ignores them at one’s own peril. For courses on a popular topic, I believe that in a few years almost everyone will be teaching from a MOOC. Not in the sense of telling students “just follow this course on the Web and come back for the exam“, but as a basis for individual institutions’ courses. For example the students might be told to take the lessons online, then come to in-person lectures (“Flip The Classroom“) or discussion sessions. For any given topic, such as introduction to programming, only a handful of MOOCs will emerge in this role. We would like the ETH course to be one of them.

The question is not just to replace courses and textbooks with an electronic version. MOOCs enrich the learning experience. Introduction to Programming is a particularly fertile application area for taking advantage of technology: the presentation of programming methods and techniques becomes even more effective if students can immediately try out the ideas, compile the result, run it, and see the results on predefined tests. Our course offers many such interactive exercises, thanks to the E4Mooc (Eiffel for MOOCs) framework developed by Christian Estler [2]. This feature has proved to be a key attraction of the course for ETH students. Here for example is an exercise asking you to write a function that determines whether a string is a palindrome (reads identically in both directions):

The program area is pre-filled with a class skeleton where all that remains for you to enter is the algorithm for the relevant function. Then you can click “Compile” and, if there are no compilation errors, “Run” to test your candidate code against a set of predefined test values. One of the benefits for users taking the course is that there is no software to install: everything runs in the cloud, accessible from the browser. Here we see the MOOC not just as a technique for presenting standard material but as an innovative learning tool, opening up pedagogical techniques that were not previously possible.

Besides E4Mooc, our course relies on the Moodle learning platform. Our experience with Moodle has been pleasant; we noticed, for example, that students really liked the Moodle feature enabling them to gain virtual “badges” for good answers, to the point of repeating exercises until they got the badges. For instructors preparing the course, building a MOOC is a huge amount of work (that was not a surprise, people had told us); but it is worth the effort.

We noted that attendance at the lectures increased as compared to previous years. The matter is a natural concern: other than the cold November mornings in Zurich (one of the lectures is at 8 AM) there are many reasons not to show up in class:  the textbook covers much of the material; all the slides are online; so are the slides for exercise sessions (tutorials) and texts of exercises and some earlier exams; lectures were video-recorded in previous years, and students can access the old recordings. Our feeling is that the MOOC makes the course more exciting and gives students want to come to class and hear more.

The MOOC course is not tied to a particular period; you can take it whenever you like. (The current practice of offering MOOCs at fixed times is disappointing: what is the point of putting a course online if participants are forced to fit to a fixed schedule?)

Marco Piccioni and I are now off to our second MOOC, which will be a generalization of the first, covering the basics not just of programming but of computer science and IT overall, and will be available on one of the major MOOC platforms. We will continue to develop the existing MOOC, which directly supports our in-person course, and which we hope will be of use to many other people.

Take the MOOC, or tell a beginner near you to take it, and tell us what you think.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer, Marco Piccioni and other members of the ETH Chair of Software Engineering: ETH Introduction to Programming MOOC, available here.

[2] H-Christian Estler, E4Mooc demo, available on YouTube: here.