UNM is venturing into the frontier of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) with a new offering on Coursera. Anyone, anywhere in the world can take the course online for free. Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Provost Greg Heileman is the first instructor from UNM to develop his online course as a MOOC. He has spent the fall working with UNM Extended Learning to record video lessons for his course on Web Application Architectures.
“I’ve taught this course [online] before, but it took a lot of time to rewrite the instruction and complete the videos,” he said. The video lessons are short, about six minutes, but packed with information, and all the normal pauses for questions have been eliminated. Heileman estimates the video lessons cover one third to one half the amount of information a student would get during a normal UNM course. Heileman looks at his course as an experiment.
Extended Learning is ready to assist faculty members who want to try teaching the online courses.
Visit UNM’s MOOC website to learn more.