The challenges of launching a MOOC and reusing that material in a blended campus class

Abstract

Online courses are launching daily on thevarious massive open online course (MOOC) platforms,such as Coursera and edX. These electronic resources arecostly to develop and often likened to sunk “capitalcosts”, as contrasted to ongoing “operating costs” of atraditional face-to-face class. To complete this economicanalogy, it makes sense to amortize, or profitably reusethose electronic materials in the university classroom, asa way to achieve a blended class. It is also worthwhilelearning from others' experiences so those large capitaland labour-intensive investments of video and resourcedevelopment are used profitably.There are some shortcomings and counterintuitiveaspects to the fully online class, described in the paper.The experience of the author using these MOOCmaterials in his active-learning flipped class is described.Plentiful advice is available online regarding the blendedclass, and we give feedback and commentary on thevarious successes and failures experienced when runningthis advanced, final-year engineering statistics course.What activities to use during scheduled class-time is oneof the more daunting questions for the instructor flippinga course, so this section is covered in greatest depth.Some student qualitative feedback is interspersedthroughout.