My First Completed Course - Part 1

A Summary of my First Coursera Course

My first course on Coursera was not the first one I signed up for. It was not a programming course either, which is what attracted me to MOOCs and Coursera in the first place. No, my first course was a business course on the subject of Gamification.

If you know me then you know I love playing video games, so when I saw the word gamification it piqued my interest. I read the synopsis for the course and learned that it wasn't what I thought it would be, but sounded interesting anyway so I clicked the sign-up button.

The course started on August 27 2012 and was run by Kevin Werbach from the University of Pennsylvania. As this was my first course of this type I had no idea what to expect. Thankfully, it was the first course of this type for Professor Werbach as well so it was a learning experience for all of us.

The course structure involved a weekly schedule of video lectures (5-15 minutes long) that included questions and exercises within the videos to check comprehension of the topics, followed by a weekly quiz that covers all of the topics discussed in the video lectures. In addition to the video lectures and the weekly quizzes, there were also three written assignments set during the 6-week course. These assignments gave a scenario and asked you to write a short report using the knowledge you have gained from the course.

When studying a course at an institution, or an online course through someone like the Open University, assignments are marked by the course tutors, who also provide you with feedback. this is possible because the courses have a limited size, giving the tutor(s) time to mark all of the assignments. With MOOCs, this is virtually impossible because of the way MOOCs are designed to be taken by a large number of people, with no limit to the number of students. This poses a challenge when it comes to marking written assignments during the course. What Coursera (and probably other institutions, I haven't done any research into it) do is to get the students who submit a written assignment to mark at least 5 other students' work. This idea of peer assessment was something I hadn't seen before and fascinated me. Thoughts ran through my head when I first heard about having to peer assess work of how it could be open to abuse in many ways: What's stopping someone from just giving full marks to everyone without even looking at the work? How do you stop trolls from giving everyone really bad marks when they aren't warranted? How can I be sure I'm being fair when doing the marking myself?

I'm sure these questions went through the minds of the peeps that built Coursera, and the fact is, it's very difficult to protect completely against cheats and trolls, but what has been put in place at Coursera goes a fair way to mitigating the potential issues of peer assessment. When peer assessing work, you are asked to preview all 5 pieces of work before beginning the marking. All of the work is anonymous, so you have no idea who the students are. The grading rubric is very clear, making it as easy as possible to mark the work and be sure that you are being fair. You are also asked to provide feedback when marking, particularly when you don't give full marks, so the student can learn from their peers. You are also required to mark your own work as well, something I enjoyed doing and often found myself being quite critical of what I had written. Finally, your grade is based on a calculated average of all of the peer assessments and your own assessment, meaning if you do end up being trolled, it doesn't have such a bad effect on your grade. Overall, I think the peer assessment worked very well for this course and I got some very helpful feedback, along with some very nice positive comments.

Now that I've given a brief description of the course structure, lets go through what I learned. Actually, this post is already quite long, so it will now be part 1 of 2. See you in part 2 where I talk about what I learned about gamification :)