 Good morning, and welcome to this presentation on our experiences on running a MOOC. In December 2012, we ran a small course on architecting software for the cloud. It's an online course. It's in the genre of MOOCs. Of course, it was not a MOOC. In the sense, it is not massive. But instead of thousands of people, we had hundreds of people. Sometimes we call it a MOOC because it's a small online course. But for the sake of this presentation, I'm going to call it a MOOC. So I'm going to talk about what motivated us to run this MOOC, and what are the contents of the course, and the platforms we used, and the policies, and the management issues, and so on. So the idea came up because we have had some new ways of architecting software for the cloud, and we wanted to share it with a wider audience. Typically, what we do is to run short courses over two, three days for a set of people, 50 or 60 of them gathered in one place. And as educational institutes, we have been doing this kind of interactions. But then we were planning something like that, but then the MOOCs were born, and we were looking at it, and then common wealth of learning got us involved in MOOCs and made us understand how important this technology is. So the call intervention, again, was very critical in making us aware of this technology. So we decided to run a MOOC. So the primary objective of this MOOC was to deliver the learning material that we have created. Part of it was research material. I'll talk of that in a minute. But at the same time, we also wanted to see, apart from telling the audience what we know about architecting, we wanted to see how does one create a MOOC, and how does one set it up, and how does one run it. We wanted to have an end-to-end experience of a MOOC. So that is one of the objectives. So which means we needed to learn about how do we create content, how do we manage, and how do we deliver what are the appropriate technology stacks for this and so on. So about the course itself that we wanted to do, it's an elective level course, postgraduate level course. Half of it is textbook material, but half of it is research level content. It's part of a PhD thesis of one of our students. So the intended audience is senior computer science students, either senior undergraduate students who have already done a course on software engineering, or postgraduate students, and experienced programmers in the industry who have been architecting software. So the quantum of content we had is about 14 hours, 14 to 15 hours, and of course it has been broken down into small videos of 10 to 20 minutes each. So what is involved in doing the course, we have to create the content, and of course we have to deliver the content. So delivering the content is actually an event. So essentially we needed platforms for authoring the content, and we needed to plan for the event which is for the publicity issues, the course registration issues, and then of course we needed a platform for the delivery. So essentially there are two things, how do we create the course content and how do we deliver the course content. So what we did was we looked at various tools that are available for creating the content, and how do we do that inside a studio or outside a studio, and how do we manage the show. The whole event was handled by two instructors with two supporting staff. So the content itself is a set of short videos, as I said 10 to 20 minutes. I think our shortest was 7 minutes and the longest went to slightly beyond 20 minutes. And these are supposed to be self-contained learning objects. A learning object is a well-known pedagogical concept known to the teaching community for a while, quite old actually. So each, the whole course has been broken down into learning objects. And what happens is the instructor delivers a set of PowerPoint slides. There's a running deck and while delivering the lecture also writes on the slides. So scribbling some extra things that are not there or highlighting some particular point that is being talked about. And what is expected is in the video that is captured, you show the PowerPoint slides and sometimes the face of the instructor as well. Either the full face or in a small screen in some corner of the screen. So what we did for creating the content, what we need for creating the content is a good tablet. It can be a tablet PC or you can have an add-on tablet like Wacom has a very good set of tablets which you can connect to a regular PC and write on it. So that is one. And then you need screen capture software because whatever is being done on the screen like the instructor is writing on the screen let's say and you need to capture that. And then you should, you require video and audio capture obviously. The teacher is talking about something and you have to capture that and you may want to capture the screen, the teacher's face. And finally you require video and audio editing software because these performances are not very smooth and there will be pauses and problems during the recording and you need to edit it and make it smooth. So the important thing is the video needs editing and that means it's going to be very, very time consuming. Video editing actually is a very painful process and you require very good software. We tried several platforms for this work. One of the things we tried first was Microsoft Media Expressions. It was of course easy to use, it was also free but there were some issues when the video size became long. So finally we settled on what's called Camtasia Studio and Camtasia Studio for Windows was actually better than Camtasia Studio for Mac. So we used Camtasia Studio for Windows. For recording the content itself we had a choice to use a studio, a full fledged studio that's there in our campus set up by the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning, NPTEL as we call it. But the problem with that NPTEL recording was we required to schedule. There was a lot of activity happening, there are a large number of people and very often you had to wait for a slot. So we decided it is actually coming in the way of our own schedules and we explored the possibility of setting up a personal studio. Basically it means a powerful laptop with a good quality microphone and webcam and added tablet on the side and of course the Camtasia Studio software. So this personal studio having converged on what it should consist it helped us quite a bit, we were able to schedule our talks whenever we wanted. And the important thing was we had access to the output as soon as the recording is over. If we were doing the recording in a studio we will have to wait for a day or two sometimes a little longer depending on the load in the studio for the DVD to come to us. But here it's right on our desk and that's very very important because I could see the quality of the recording and sometimes schedule a re-recording and so on. But the downside of it was you needed soundproof rooms so often we had to schedule our recording late in the night when people have all gone home and the fans are off and things like that. Ultimately half the recording happened on a PC and half on the studio. Content delivery. So we required a robust content delivery platform and of course the simplicity of use and organizing an online class were the major driving points. But also it was important that we have full control on the intellectual property that is being generated. We didn't want people to have access to the user data for example and use it for means other than we strictly intended. So that was one of the issues. One major decision we took actually was to bung the videos on YouTube. It's a critical decision because typically what happens is video streaming is going to take huge amount of bandwidth and huge amount of server power and of course more competent management which we didn't want to invest in. We are compromising some of the IP if you can use that word but upfront we all actually have said that content is free in this world and anybody who wants to learn should be able to learn so it's in line with the philosophy of MOOCs. So there was no issue but we said videos will go on YouTube. So having decided that things got simplified quite a bit. So now we are looking for a platform which scales up. MOOC platforms are supposed to deal with large number of students so scalability is an issue. The video content delivery is handled through YouTube and MOOC platforms should allow you to collaborate. Collaboration is a large part of an online course and since online interactions are replacing classroom interactions it's important that the quality of the online interaction is rich and well managed. So collaboration is an issue. It should have strong analytics. Basically it means logging every activity that happens on the platform. So that is another requirement. And MOOC platforms also would like assessment support. That means if let's say tens of thousands of students are taking the course and we want to give an assignment and correcting them as an issue. So what we would like to do is to make students correct each others. That means the platform should help me manage this assigning jobs to students and collating whatever happened and so on. So these are some of the characteristics that a MOOC platform will have but in our case we decided that we are not going to have a very large course not in thousands of students but in hundreds of students and given that all these problems actually drop down in complexity and we realized we can actually manage the conventional learning management system. So we investigated various options for learning management systems. These are some of them. For example, we looked at Sakai LMS as a hosted solution. There is something called R Smart which gives you Sakai on a hosted platform. We thought maybe we can use this but the terms of use were not clear. Typically these are encouraging universities to manage their own teaching programs. So it's okay to do it for your class in the university but if I am talking about running a program for everybody in the world it's not clear what the terms of use are. So same thing with the instructor running the Canvas LMS. So we couldn't use that either. Of course we had the choice of using Udemy or Coursera but then the problem there was, as I said, we wanted full control on the IP and we didn't want the user data, for example, to be misused. We looked at some platform as a service options. For example, we thought we could take Google Course Builder and use it but it's meant as a solution for MOOCs. But the problem in our case was it came a bit late. Much late into our own planning. It was not easy to use. It was a beta product and it required some coding and configuration and expertise with the Google App Engine which at that point of time we were not willing to invest in. We could have built a platform using Google Sites because it's quite powerful. It comes with analytics and so on but incorporating assessments like with us was a problem so we didn't use Google Sites either. And of course it also required Google IDs. So then what we decided is finally we will use an open sourced learning management system and we manage it ourselves. So we have two, we've converged on two choices, Canvas and Sakai and we could either host it on a local machine in the IIT or put it on the cloud. The IIT Kanpur has a very good infrastructure. We have a very good data center facility and a good bandwidth so we could actually put it in our own institute but we didn't want to go through the risk of having to manage the hardware and the OS infrastructure and having to run the course as well. So it was an added responsibility and we decided to reduce our risks so we said okay we will not put it in our premises, we will go out. Canvas. The Canvas is a very good option. It has a wonderful contemporary user interface but documentation on setting up Canvas was not easy. It was not well documented. In fact we tried hard using it for example we couldn't set up the email notifications so it was difficult to use but Canvas LMS is a very nicely documented system especially for administrators and most important was we had expertise in running Java software so this is often how decisions get taken in the industry. You do something because you have expertise in that not because it is the best for the particular solution. So finally we chose Sakai and of course the downside of it was we needed a larger virtual machine. Okay publicity issues. So this has been the most difficult part of the course. We had absolutely no experience on how to advertise our course and we really struggled to manage this part of the total experience. We started off by putting links on our departmental website and on the institute website and we sent email notifications to our friends in the industry but then there was no mass media, newspapers or TV kind of reporting that had happened. Another interesting thing was we didn't initially put up a Facebook page. Somehow we were not too much in favor of going to Facebook but then subsequently we were told if you are not on Facebook you are not there. So it was almost a necessity to have a presence in Facebook. So then we put up a Facebook page as well and we had a few thousand views on that in just a few days. It's actually quite interesting. And ultimately it so happened that most of our registrations came in the last week of the registration time. Engaging the class, it happened via online discussions which are based on forums and text-based chat rooms which are part of the Sakai LMS. The chat room was on all the time so people were there any time of the day whenever I go in and see I would find at least 5 to 10 people there. But then we would announce scheduled chats over weekends and told them the instructors will be present so that you could ask questions and that time we had a larger number about 30 to 40 people. We had to choose weekends because many of our students were working professionals. The forums were very active. Students were answering questions for each other. It was nice to see that. There were several students who actually knew about cloud technologies for example and they would answer the questions posed by the other students and sometimes we also learned new things by the answers given by the other students. The chat sessions were a little confusing initially because the questions would come in in a flood. Sometimes 4-5 questions would come in and we needed to schedule them properly. So that was slightly difficult but very soon we learned how to manage that. A Google moderator would have helped us quite a bit but we didn't know about it in time to use that. So we used the LMS chat. This is again very interesting. As I said we were not so Facebook pro so we were not using the Facebook page for any which thing apart from the initial advertisement but the users themselves have created a Facebook page and they were interacting with each other on that. Not just on our forum or the chat room but they were talking to each other on their Facebook page. That we found very interesting. It also had some interesting users for them. I will talk of that a little later. Assessments. We had two kinds of assessments if you can use the word. Basically we were looking at the attendance as one of the assessments. That means is the student coming to the site frequently enough? Has he or she watched the video? How often has she watched the video? And is the student participating in the chat room? Is the student answering or asking questions? So these are the kinds of statistics are used to see how well the student is engaged with the course. So that's one. And of course we also had quizzes, multiple choice quizzes as part of the assessment. There was one interesting issue. We were using the Sakai's inbuilt analytics for gathering this data. As I said the content is online and on YouTube actually gives you statistics. You can find out how many times the video has been watched and so on. But that was not giving us the right answer because very often the students have downloaded the videos onto their machine. And actually we were sharing the downloaded copies with each other. So we would think nobody has watched the video but actually everybody has watched the video. So that was quite an interesting learning. We had a course fee of 900 rupees. Major problem we had in managing the course fee is resolving the names. We had two ways to pay the course fee. You could do an online payment or you could make a demand draft as you call it and send it a bank notification. But then very often many students did not have bank accounts in their own name or credit card based payments in their own name. So they will use their parents or some of them use their spouse's credit cards and so on. And matching who paid for whom was a big issue. So that took a huge amount of time, surprisingly large amount of time. So that is one policy decision in terms of charging a course fee. As you all know that MOOCs typically are free but this one is we had a registration fee. The other thing is we also are giving certificates. We have decided to give certificates from the continuing education program of the institute. So that is again a policy decision. So what are the lessons learned? It has been actually a very rewarding opportunity. It was a huge learning opportunity for us. We learned a lot of things about how to design the course, how to break it up into learning objects, how to prepare the slides, how to talk to the camera and how to evaluate the various software that was used and of course how to manage the course. But apart from that the content was extremely reusable. For example I almost immediately in the next semester that I taught a course on software architecture I was able to use all my lectures and I could run my lecture that part of those course in a flipped classroom mode. An important point was identity management. So we didn't have too many mechanisms in place to figure out who is what and the only identity we had was the name and the email ID. The students used to use the same email ID, the names were used with abbreviations, without abbreviations there were more than one name and again as I said who is paying for whom that was an issue. So we realized identity management is a big problem. So this was one of the first MOOCs offered by an Indian university and it's also interesting in the sense there is a certificate given by an institute, not by the instructor. Typically MOOC certificates don't come from institutes, they come from the instructors. But in this case the institute has given a certificate. So one last word on based on this experience. Traditionally classrooms interact, classrooms are where learning happens, teaching and learning happens. And there are not too many technologies there. The teacher goes to the classroom, writes on the board, answers questions, makes the students wake up in the class and listen to him and make them interact. Students go and interact with each other because they have met each other physically. So the interactions are easy to manage and well understood and face to face. So they are completely under the control of the university. But the moment you go online things change completely because technology is what is dictating how an interaction happens. Often the experience that one technology platform gives you is very different from another and maybe even superior sometimes. So between two MOOCs the differentiator can be not just the content or how the instructor has delivered but the platform. So that means the MOOC instructor now is heavily dependent on technology, the technology provider. So this is a factor which is going to greatly influence on how our educational institutes and teachers are going to behave in the future. That's all I have to say. Thank you.