Outline of the talk

1. Who the heck am I?
2. A brief taxonomy and history of online educational models
3. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
4. JHU Biostat involvement in Coursera
5. Novel moving target directions of the field statistics
6. Data Science series
7. SWIRL

• HTML5 using (customized) Google io2012 style
• Created using slidify
• Appear on github at (https://github.com/bcaffo/MOOCtalk) fork if you'd like
• Jointly written with my collaborators Jeff Leek and Roger Peng
• CC licensed by-nc-sa

• Department of Biostatistics
• Center for Teaching and Learning
• Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Johns Hopkins University
• Coursera
• Team SWIRL
• Lauren and Ethan (Brian's 2013 interns)
• Contributions from github pull requests
• Tolerant families!
• A half of a million intrepid self learners

SMART (www.smart-stats.org)

resting state fMRI

1. PhD program
   • Around 50 students with around 10 matriculating per year.
   • Around 200 applications per year.
2. ScM program
   • Around 25 students with around 10 matriculating per year.
   • Around 50 applications per year.
3. Concurrent MHS program
   • Typically around 10 students with around 2 matriculating per year.
   • 2 - 4 applications per year
4. Standalone MHS program

• Biostat 751 and 2
  • 16 weeks (8 x 2) of classes
  • Two 80 minute lectures per week
  • Two tests per term
  • Four homeworks per term
  • One TA
• About 10 students
• Covers intro methods and (mostly) linear models at the doctoral level
• Recently I've introduced the flipped classroom model

• Traditional in person teaching generally has characterists of: in person, lecture style, non-scalable, high cost, restricted access with a large amount of instructor interaction valued credentialing
• "Tranditional" online courses are online or blended online and in person and otherwise try to approximate traditional in person classes.
• Online interactive learning (OIL Code School, Code academy) primary characteristics are student-paced interactive learning
• Intelligent tutoring systems (swirl), like OILs just not necessarily online
• Khan Academy is online, interactive, scalable and low cost
• Other modalities : iTunes U, OpenCourseware, Udemy

Primary characteristics are open access, low cost, scalable, online

(every letter is negotiable, from Wikipedia citing Mathieu Plorde)

Several university/organization-specific sites, platforms and content delivery systems

• Stanford, CMU, Duke, Harvard, MIT, google ...
• Varying degrees of content/delivery
• EdX platform has been open sourced
• Google course builder (now contributing to EdX)
• Massive amount of development going into platforms and instruction sites/portals

• Example from data science inference
• Ad hoc phone recording

Equipment

• Cintiq 22inch display
• Yeti usb microphone
• Camtasia
• Note 2
• Lecture notes
• ffmpeg

Main source for student interaction

(Forums can be brutal)

Original three

• Brian Caffo, Roger Peng, Jeff Leek
• Run 09/2012, 09/2012, 01/2013
  

• Students participate in MOOCs for a variety of reasons
• Numerous students sign up for a course, but do not actively participate
• Current (ongoing) MBBC 1
  • 1% of enrolled students have taken any quiz whatsoever
  • 25% of enrolled students have watched any video content

• Classes considered are MBBC1, MBBC2, CDA, DA, Case
• A total of 549,542 students enrolled
  

• 13 class offerings

  • Average of 42,272 students per class.

• Minimum class size of 6,742 for class MBBC2 offering 2

• Maximum class size of 101,747 for class DA offering 1.

• Verification based on typing patterns (highly unique according to Coursera)
  • Secondary verification via webcams
• Coursera gives student aid
• Revenue distribution via agreement between Coursera and partner institution
• 155 signature track for 20k students in MBBC1 V4
• Much higher retention and completion rates for signature track

Case studies

Codirected and taught by Roger Peng, Jeff Leek and Brian Caffo

• Everything done on Coursera
• All programming in R
• All lecture notes done in Slidify (common theme)
• All content open source
• Version control through git and github
• (Students will learn and use git)
• RStudio as an IDE
• knitr for reproducible documents and report writing

http://swirlstats.com