Building the Web Science MOOC

This week at the University of Southampton we launched the Web Science MOOC with FutureLearn, the course is a dizzying whirlwind of interdisciplinary coolness that acts as a primer for Web Science and includes a wide variety of topics from cybercrime to digital democracy. My week is on Networks, and runs in week two of the six week course.

For me, becoming involved in building a MOOC was an opportunity that was to good to miss. Over the past six years I have been involved in a number of projects building technologies for Open Educational Resources, and getting involved in communities and deployments such as EdShare and HumBox. MOOCs are more formal than OER, but they share some of the same motivations about opening up Higher Education, and allowing academics to engage with the public in new ways.

Web Science is also a great topic for a MOOC. Mostly because its just so damn interesting! But also because spreading the word about Web Science is so important. The topics at the core of Web Science – how we use technology, and how it changes us as a result – are too important to remain fractured into different disciplinary silos. They are not academic questions either, but fundamentally important to our society. If we can better understand this cycle then we can not only build better systems, but also legislate appropriately, and create new socio-technical systems that have deeper and more profound effects.

As a lecturer I am also amazed by the opportunity that a MOOC offers me personally. I have been teaching for over ten years, and in that time have taught around 2000 students. FutureLearn is tight-lipped about numbers, but let us speculate wildly that there are over 10k students taking the Web Science MOOC this time around. That’s not only more than I’ve ever taught before, but more than I am likely to teach in the rest of my career.

That reach, that amazing reach, is one of the most exciting things about MOOCs. And it is also a little bit terrifying.

The experience of preparing a week’s material for the MOOC is worth sharing. We aimed for a core of two hours study, with additional work and optional material taking it to a maximum of six hours. I prepared and made three videos totalling around 20 minutes, wrote a network analysis exercise to explore the different ways we might measure power and influence in a social network, and prepared (with the help of some of our PhD students) a number of written pieces on research around social network analysis. If I was delivering that material live (for example, in a double lecture) I guess around two days preparation would be enough – but for the MOOC it was around a week’s work. Some of that time is probably due to the unfamiliar formats (video vs. lecture for example) but much of it was in making sure that the resources speak for themselves, as when there is no face-to-face they must be properly topped and tailed, and there is no room for mistakes. Spread over the Summer it was manageable, but considering the other five weeks of material, not to mention the support staff who have helped me organise, prepare, video, format, proofread and upload the material, it’s a significant outlay of effort.

On top of this there is the running of the MOOC itself. The leads for each week have already been interviewed for the official blog (you can read my interview here) and I am looking forward to seeing the activity next week around the Networks topic, both on the official platform and also on the student-led Google+ group that has built up considerable momentum in the last few weeks. With so many students I wont be able to interact directly, but I will certainly be keeping an eye on how things go, and working with some of our support staff to answer questions and monitor progress.

My hope going into the MOOC are that we manage to get across the excitement around Web Science. In my week on Networks we focus on our understanding of the structure of the Web, and how this relates to our understanding of the structure of all real world networks – we then go on to look at the different ways we might analyse a network, and look at how people have used those analyses in some very surprising ways. Some of the topics we look at in the MOOC are exciting because they relate to the zeitgeist, or seem revolutionary (or at least disruptive), but what makes Networks exciting is the power of looking at the world in this particular way. The network view is also seductive, so I will be encouraging students to keep a healthy scepticism about what can be achieved through network analysis alone.

It should be a fun experience – and I’ll try to post an update once the dust has settled!

Update, 26-11-13 – the week has now completed, it seemed to go pretty well. You can read my reflections on it here.