Interviews with Coursera teachers

Good afternoon. Many people know and use the famous Coursera.org online education platform. I also belong to them. After a couple of courses, I became interested in domestic cuisine. I contacted several teachers and asked them to give a written interview. Read about what happened next.

Answers to questions:

Berzon Nikolay Iosifovich , professor, doctor of sciences. Author of the course “Financial Markets and Institutions” , HSE.



Paolo Prandoni, PhD. He teaches Digital Signal Processing with Martin Vetterli from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne



Jim Fowler , PhD. Together with Bart Snapp and Jenny George, he is teaching the course “Calculus One”from The Ohio State University. He is also the author of the Calculus Two course .



Ready? Go!

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Why did you decide to do an online course?
Berzon N.I. I read a similar course at the HSE, and when the university decided to enter Coursera and record a number of courses, I said that I was ready to participate in this matter. I just could not imagine what I got involved in)) Actually, you can’t get into Coursera so easily. They checked the university for a long time, the quality of teaching, and so on. And when they gave the go-ahead, then the HSE leadership decided that we would write 11 or 12 courses. Well, I said that I’m ready.
Paolo Prandoni. We were fortunate enough to be in close contact with Daphne Koeller when she launched Coursera, and we decided to contribute to the world of global free education by creating the Signal Processing course.
Jim FowlerI really want more people to do math. With the help of new, interesting, fascinating knowledge, I want to involve a large number of students in mathematics, and it does not matter if they study it for pleasure or professionally.

How closely is the interaction with the Coursera employees in the process?
Berzon N.I. Almost nothing. We have a service (educational-methodical management), which took care of all organizational issues. Only the preparation of materials, presentations, lectures and other things fell upon me. So Coursera didn't bother me at all.
Paolo Prandoni. Not very crowded. The platform, although not perfect, is understandable.
Jim FowlerNot too crowded when working on this course, though, I often talk to them about other things.

Tell us how the course was prepared. How many people participated in this? How much time did it take to record the lectures and prepare the tests?
Berzon N.I. Usually I read this course in graduate school for children who have chosen the specialty “Financial Markets and Institutions”. I could only adapt it to the lack of communication with the audience. I tried to place a maximum of information on the slides, this is the first. Secondly, I understood that people who are far from finances can listen, so I simplified some issues without going into the nuances that are important for specialists.
Paolo Prandoni.First we prepared the slides for the video. Then we recorded a voice that commented on the slides on the Wacom tablet. Finally, we recorded an introduction with a teacher for each lecture. Thus, the preparation of each lecture took approximately 5 person-days.
Jim Fowler I need about 10 hours to record one hour of lectures, including editing. To make this possible, I developed an "autocutter", which you can read about on github . He does the editing for us.

What difficulties did you experience while registering the course? Are there any “test students” who tested the course before its public opening?
Berzon N.I.Basically, purely technical difficulties. For example, you can’t come to the shooting in a striped shirt, you can’t have a tie speckled.
It was also difficult for me to adapt the lectures to the recording format. Usually my lecture lasts one and a half hours, and the recording goes in fragments of 10-15, sometimes 20 minutes. And it was necessary to break the lecture into several blocks, and each should carry a complete thought. That was difficult. But, nevertheless, everything turned out well.
There were no “test students”. We could control the records before they were posted. So, after recording the video, they sent it to me. I looked, if I do not like something, then we copied it.
Paolo prandoni. The course is based on the discipline that we have been reading in the EPFL for 6 years, so we got enough feedback to create the first version of the course. Today we have the third launch of the course and feedback from the online community helps us to constantly improve the course.
Jim Fowler At first, recording and editing was very difficult - there were a lot of cuts, and what we needed to do was hard to explain to another person (for example, “every second video is shot from top to bottom” since we shoot a lot of mathematical content). Autocutter solved this problem.
No, we do not have a test audience. As far as I know, there is no easy way to make the material on Coursera accessible only to a test group of students.
On the contrary, I see MOOC students as “test cases” for the things that I would like to do at Ohio University. I can launch a large “training experiment” at MOOC that I could not do “in reality”, and we will get a lot of interesting data on calculus training.

Most courses have a team of lecturers and TAs. How many people were on your team, how were the roles distributed among them?
Berzon N.I. Anna Petrikova, a graduate student of my department, helped me. Sergey Volodin is a senior lecturer in my department.
I distributed the roles, of course, but then they all mixed up anyway. Sergey, since he makes slides well, I asked for a decent presentation. Also, Sergey accumulated questions asked at the forum. He answered the questions that he was able to give an answer, and he sent the rest to me.
Anna's task was to prepare the tests. Of course, I had tests, I passed them to her, and she expanded them. For each week, we wrote 30 tests. She modified them, then I looked through them again, corrected something and sent them back. She accompanied them, because the automatic checker sometimes failed.
Paolo Prandoni. Martin and I created lectures. Then they recruited five graduate students to do their homework, two people worked on the video, and three TAs support the forum.
Jim FowlerWe ran this course three times in a row. This time Dr. Jenny George was the person in charge, so she watched most of the videos, wrote questions, answered messages and made announcements. I like to work with the model of the “magnanimous dictator”, when one person constantly completely controls the course and can change it when he sees fit.
When we first placed the course, I created a lot of content (for example, course structure, scales and grading policy), and also wrote a backend, which is a modified Khan Academy code, integrated into our platform, built on hidden Markov models and adaptive learning algorithms. The math parser was written in JavaScript.
Steve Gubkin developed the MOOCulus exercises.
Bart Snapp led the writing of the textbook and recorded more videos as he led the course.

What guided you in making up the structure of the course?
Berzon NI . His course at the HSE.
Paolo Prandoni. We tried to make the course as similar as possible to a course in the EPFL. The goal was to create a high-quality course in digital signal processing, which could be used both at the university and outside it.
Jim FowlerThis is a good question, I am an adherent of the old school. Some expect MOOC to use “modern” methods, but I do not consider it necessary to change the curriculum. Calculus One is presented online only as a video, a tutorial, and randomly generated questions, but in content it is very close to the standard AP Calculus AB course. I hope many people will be able to reuse the course to achieve their goals.

During the course, lectures were published weekly. Are they also recorded on the go or was everything ready in advance?
Berzon N.I.. All lectures were made before the opening. The university has hired a company that specializes in recording videos. There was a director, cameraman, sound engineer, etc. You know, it turned out to be not so simple. I came, we recorded, then rewritten something, then there was already editing. But in any case, everything was done centrally.
About the time. I have 9 lectures, about 1.5 hours each. Each lecture was recorded for 4 hours. Because some things had to be rewritten. Well, for example, when you give a lecture, and you’ve made a mistake somewhere, you can say: “Oh, guys, I'm sorry,” get better, and then we went on. Immediately you will not do
Paolo Prandoni. Most of the video lectures were ready before the start of the course. They are too stressful to write them to write on the go.
Jim fowler. We made a video during the course. With Autocutter, this is not so long.

If an error is found in the test tasks, is there any way to fix it, restart the test or remove it from the assessment at all?
Berzon N.I. It is somehow possible, but I don’t know the details.
Paolo Prandoni. Yes, we can fix or delete the question.
Jim Fowler Depending on the situation. If the error affects only the wording of the problem, then it can be corrected without significant difficulties. If the problem is in the wrong answer, then it will be necessary to lower the grade for the test, or not to take this test into account in the final grade.

It is known that participants receive certificates after some time. But grades for control are known in advance. Why is there a delay? Processing not automated? How do you summarize and generate certificates?
Berzon NI . I can’t answer, these are technical questions. The very form of certificates was made by our guys from the educational-methodical management.
Paolo Prandoni. Certificates are prepared by Coursera. We cannot control this time.
Jim FowlerWe wait until the last opportunity for someone to pass the job expires. What usually means a couple of weeks from the end of the final exam. The calculation of the final assessment itself takes several hours, after which we make sure that the calculations are correct, and only then we send a request for the production of certificates. After the request is sent, there is also a delay.

What are your personal impressions of this new teaching format? What problems and prospects of MOOC do you see?
Berzon N.I.Looking from what point of view to look. From the point of view of the university, this is absolutely the right step. Because in my course there were over 16,000 people, and what else can you come up with for university PR? And I thought that only people from Russia and the CIS countries would listen to me, and they would listen from America, Germany, Israel and France. For the university, the fact that it has entered this global trend is an absolutely right strategic decision.
From the point of view of me as a teacher. First, it’s hard to read the course into the void. I don’t see the audience, I don’t see the students ’eyes, I don’t understand their reaction: do they understand me or not. The teacher who gives the lecture is akin to the artist who performs on stage, and it is important for the artist that there is a full room. This is important to me too. At my university, a lecture turns into a conversation, a discussion, some discussion. I can say to the guys: “Next week we will discuss bonds, I recommend reading this and that chapter.” This allows you not to tell the basics at the lecture and switch to problems. And here from scratch - it's hard. But then I got used to it.
Second, it is physically uncomfortable to stand in one place while recording. After all, when I give a lecture, I revive it with the help of working with the board (I draw formulas, graphs). And here everything is very static, it was hard. I suggested making a recording during the course of a lecture, but, as I was told, it would be three times more difficult than a studio recording. In addition, this would require more equipment (for example, three cameras instead of one). Although, probably someday I will try this format.
All in all about MOOC. Not so long ago, I read on the Internet an article by a German professor who writes that in 10-15 years only the strongest universities will remain that have embarked on the MOOC path. This will make education quality, affordable and cheap. Indeed, why should I graduate from a third-rate university if I can get knowledge from leading professors in the world? This is his forecast, not mine. But there is some truth to this. On my own, I note that, nevertheless, verbal communication is necessary for both the student and the teacher. Therefore, online courses will still not completely supplant the traditional training format.
Paolo Prandoni. We think this is a great tool that will not replace universities, but can give many people the opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge. This is a great job on the part of the teacher, but also a great reward.
Jim Fowler I think the best in this new format is the diversity of students. MOOC enriches people from all over the world, no matter where you live. As a result, there are more people who do math.
As a potential problem, I’m very worried about the big dependency on the video. My favorite analogy is this: one-on-one training is an amateur theater, while MOOC is more like a movie or television. But this analogy extends deeper: when creating a production or video, we will need ACTORS. I don’t want people to watch mathematics anymore, I want them to do it more. I hope that the diversity of online communities will solve this problem. MOOC brings together a lot of people who want to do more math together, so I'm not really worried. This is a promising trend.

In your opinion, are there any shortcomings in the Coursera platform itself?
Berzon N.I.Testing is done automatically, we are not allowed there. And sometimes there were some strange failures. And the wrong answers were given out as the correct ones. We had to call and correct the situation.
Paolo Prandoni. The platform is not user friendly, as we are used to expect from many web platforms. Work must be completed, but it is a gradual process.
Jim Fowler Everything can be improved. The best thing that can be in Coursera is that we can receive data for a new development cycle. In this video I talk in more detail:


Do you have any future plans related to MOOC, if so, which ones?
Berzon N.I. Unfortunately, not everything here depends on me. I am waiting for the decision of the university. I would repeat the course. Moreover, on recurring issues on the forum, I see that not everything I could intelligibly explain. Such fragments, of course, need to be redone. And I have ideas for another course.
Paolo Prandoni. We are considering collaboration with other universities to update and coordinate the program.
Jim Fowler I want to do courses in geometry and topology.

What are the statistics for the course?
Berzon N.I.. 16289 - signed up. Lectures have been listened 237,849 times. Tests are written 41,518 times. The average score for the week varies from 7.6 to 8.6 (out of 10). 1 939 students received a certificate with honors (more than 80 points), 545 ordinary certificates (more than 50 but less than 80). 14 164 students did not receive a certificate.
Paolo Prandoni. About 20,000 students sign up for the course, of which about 1,000 receive a certificate.
Jim Fowler 185,021 students signed up for the course, of which 5% passed the exam.

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One of the instructors (Kevin Werbach, a course Gamification , University then of Pennsylvania You will) declined to be interviewed, but at the end of the course laid out a detailed statistical videos, short squeeze for those who want more numbers, under the spoiler.



PS Many thanks to my wife for editing my clumsy translation.