PROFESSOR: Many of you have heard of MOOCs.
They're very famous, Massively Open Online Courses.
MOOCs are very open and large classes, often with thousands
or tens of thousands of participants.
And MOOCs are essentially a big movement
to really democratize education.
SPOCs are a little different.
So 16.842 was run as a SPOC, which stands for Small Private
Online Course.
So like a MOOC, a SPOC is also offered online.
You can take it in person in a classroom at one
of the hosting universities or you
can take it entirely online.
It's really up to you.
It's small because we have a few dozen students instead
of thousands, and it's private because in order
to take the class it's by invitation.
In this particular instance, we had two universities that
co-sponsored this class.
One is MIT and the other one is called
EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
in Switzerland, which is also quite active in the world
of online education.
The way fundamentally that a SPOC works,
is that you have the course management
system at each of the hosting universities and institutions.
And you essentially post the same materials, the lectures,
the readings, the exercises, you post them
in parallel at each of the hosting universities.
The lecturers themselves, however,
are run online using an open collaboration platform,
like WebEx for example.
You can do it with Google Hangouts.
There's a lot of different platforms.
And this is important because it is
important to have live connections between the faculty
and the students, but also the students
amongst themselves can discuss.
The trickiest part of running a SPOC, of course,
is the time zones and the time differences.
In this case, the two universities
were six time zones apart.
And so it was offered in the morning here at MIT and then
the afternoon in Europe.
If you're running this as a global class,
it will be more challenging to find a time
slot that works for everybody.
The feedback from the students has been very positive,
because you can think of a SPOC in this particular class
as a blended form of education.
Part of the class is live.
The lectures are given live, and every lecture is recorded.
So even if you miss a lecture as a student,
you can watch it later.
And so there's a record of it.
The assignments are asynchronous,
and there are some assignments that are individual.
And there are team assignments as well.
And so it's a blended form of education,
which is an important trend in education where
we take the best of the online experience,
and we try to combine it with the best
of the in-person experience.
Teaching a SPOC is fun and challenging at the same time.
It's fun because you get to converse and interact
with students, not just in a physical classroom at one
university but across multiple institutions.
And that enhances the class, because students will speak up
with experiences from different cultural backgrounds.
But it's also challenging, because you
have to keep track of what's happening at multiple places.
And you have a mix of students from different backgrounds
and different institutional constraints as well.
And so it's both challenging and fun,
but it's a very focused experience.
And the feedback from the students has been great.