Meet a UBC Computer Science Professor who led the development of a Coursera MOOC, which ran for the first time this summer and is now being offered in parallel with an on-campus course. The talk will report on these experiences and present current beliefs about the challenges ahead.

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What will higher education become as the MOOC innovation era plays out?

Setting dire predictions aside it seems likely that students will have a vast range of resources for learning at their disposal. With MOOCs, MOORs, badge systems, learning communities and other innovations coming on line students will be able to get content delivery, active learning support, office hours and assessment from a variety of different sources. All of these will be available these at a wider range of price points and qualities than is possible today.

What do we do with our on-campus courses in this environment? How can we use these innovations to offer students a better education than ever before? What will it be like running courses that make extensive use of open online resources? What will open online courses be best at? Worst? What must we excel at?

These questions led us to develop a Coursera MOOC, which ran for the first time this summer. We are now offering that MOOC in parallel with an on-campus course, in a continued effort to understand the relative strengths of each modality. The talk will report on these experiences and present our current beliefs about the challenges ahead.

Speaker Bio:

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor in the Computer Science Department. His work is directed at enabling programmers to write programs that, as much as possible, look like their design. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). He is an ACM Fellow and the 2012 recipient of the Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for his achievements in programming language design research. He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera.

Location: Dodson Room, Level Three

This is part of the Open UBC series of events, celebrating International Open Access Week and Celebrate Learning Week at UBC. For more information visit the Open UBC website.