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I think that one of the most surprising things to me was
just the level to which some students chose to engage with the materials themselves.
I would present concepts in my class in a fairly introductory manner
and quite a lot of students will take those concepts and go find papers
and related videos and other items and bring them up in discussion, and we would go
much deeper with the subset of the course into topic areas that I just had
no idea people would be interested in.
The other is the quality of some of the student inputs. This is a free course. They're not getting
any credit for it, at least yet, and some of the
submissions came back with such a remarkably high quality.
You know, artistically done and the content of some of the work was
very well done. And I think that surprised all three of us how
well some of them were done.
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The other thing is that it's really affected the way that I think about
the instruction that I do on campus.
It really showed me the value of
preproduction, of thinking in advance about
how you're going to present an entire body of content, not just
the next lecture.
Working with Susan Russell, the Professor of Theater,
we worked with for almost the whole year, really changed our
whole image of what teaching is about. I think prior to that we were all
three engineering faculty. We all used interactive methods in our classroom.
But we came to see ourselves not so much as conveyors of
information as inspirers, people who
create dreams and then summarize the message - simplify, clarify,
and focus. That's what she told us to do.
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The interaction that I have with my colleagues about this. I mean both
on campus. I mean we had eight faculty that came together and worked on this
thing and got excited about and we did these, we had these video taped responses
where we sat down for an hour every
Monday after lunch and videotaped our responses to questions that students
had asked, and that got us talking about science
in a fun way or joking around, and that in and of itself was really
rewarding. I mean it was a completely ancillary benefit to the whole course.
But I think it really brought us together and got us talking about science more.
So I think that was really rewarding.
And the response that I've gotten from other faculty
at other universities, when I'm out you know giving scientific talks and visiting other places
now people will say 'I saw your MOOC. I use that video in my class.'
It's really hard for me to narrow down into one thing that I think is the more rewarding
aspect of the experience, but I would say that a lot of the naive
reactions from novices, people that have never done geography, never done mapping science
before, the sort of pure, beautiful reactions
they have when they come into the course for the first time and say 'Oh my
God, I think totally differently about the world now due to this
course!' That's a really affirming thing to have happen and certainly one of
the most rewarding things for me as a teacher. You know you get
examples of that when you teach tens and twenties and thirties of students at a time in undergraduate
and graduate settings. They come back a couple years later and say 'This class was really great.
It changed my life.' And that process is sped up exponentially in the MOOC, where
within 24 hours you have somebody telling you 'I had never thought about the world this way before,
so thank you!' And that's really rewarding.
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