TY  - GEN
A1  - Staubitz, Thomas
A1  - Teusner, Ralf
A1  - Meinel, Christoph
T1  - MOOCs in Secondary Education
BT  - Experiments and Observations from German Classrooms
T2  - 2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
N2  - Computer science education in German schools is often less than optimal. It is only mandatory in a few of the federal states and there is a lack of qualified teachers. As a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) provider with a German background, we developed the idea to implement a MOOC addressing pupils in secondary schools to fill this gap. The course targeted high school pupils and enabled them to learn the Python programming language. In 2014, we successfully conducted the first iteration of this MOOC with more than 7000 participants. However, the share of pupils in the course was not quite satisfactory. So we conducted several workshops with teachers to find out why they had not used the course to the extent that we had imagined. The paper at hand explores and discusses the steps we have taken in the following years as a result of these workshops.
KW  - MOOC
KW  - Secondary Education
KW  - School
KW  - Teamwork
KW  - K-12
KW  - Programming course
KW  - Java
KW  - Python
Y1  - 2019
SN  - 978-1-5386-9506-7
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2019.8725138
SN  - 2165-9567
SP  - 173
EP  - 182
PB  - IEEE
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Staubitz, Thomas
A1  - Meinel, Christoph
T1  - Graded Team Assignments in MOOCs
BT  - Effects of Team Composition and Further Factors on Team Dropout Rates and Performance
T2  - SCALE
N2  - The ability to work in teams is an important skill in today's work environments. In MOOCs, however, team work, team tasks, and graded team-based assignments play only a marginal role. To close this gap, we have been exploring ways to integrate graded team-based assignments in MOOCs. Some goals of our work are to determine simple criteria to match teams in a volatile environment and to enable a frictionless online collaboration for the participants within our MOOC platform. The high dropout rates in MOOCs pose particular challenges for team work in this context. By now, we have conducted 15 MOOCs containing graded team-based assignments in a variety of topics. The paper at hand presents a study that aims to establish a solid understanding of the participants in the team tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to determine which team compositions are particularly successful. Finally, we examine how several modifications to our platform's collaborative toolset have affected the dropout rates and performance of the teams.
KW  - Teamwork
KW  - MOOCs
KW  - Team-based Learning
KW  - Team Assessment
KW  - Peer Assessment
KW  - Project-based learning
Y1  - 2019
SN  - 978-1-4503-6804-9
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3330430.3333619
PB  - Association for Computing Machinery
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Staubitz, Thomas
A1  - Meinel, Christoph
T1  - Collaborative Learning in MOOCs - Approaches and Experiments
T2  - 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference
N2  - This Research-to-Practice paper examines the practical application of various forms of collaborative learning in MOOCs. Since 2012, about 60 MOOCs in the wider context of Information Technology and Computer Science have been conducted on our self-developed MOOC platform. The platform is also used by several customers, who either run their own platform instances or use our white label platform. We, as well as some of our partners, have experimented with different approaches in collaborative learning in these courses. Based on the results of early experiments, surveys amongst our participants, and requests by our business partners we have integrated several options to offer forms of collaborative learning to the system. The results of our experiments are directly fed back to the platform development, allowing to fine tune existing and to add new tools where necessary. In the paper at hand, we discuss the benefits and disadvantages of decisions in the design of a MOOC with regard to the various forms of collaborative learning. While the focus of the paper at hand is on forms of large group collaboration, two types of small group collaboration on our platforms are briefly introduced.
KW  - MOOC
KW  - Collaborative learning
KW  - Peer assessment
KW  - Team based assignment
KW  - Teamwork
Y1  - 2018
SN  - 978-1-5386-1174-6
SN  - 0190-5848
PB  - IEEE
CY  - New York
ER  -