A free software platform for an open education The OpenMOOC project A free software platform for an open education Sixto Martín <smartin@yaco.es> Lorenzo Gil <lgs@yaco.es>

Agenda The MOOC scene History of OpenMOOC, why it was created? Design goals Software architecture What we learn building OpenMOOC Functionalities and Roadmap Problems to be solved Case studies

The MOOC scene 1)

The OpenMOOC project started on August 2012. History of OpenMOOC 2) The OpenMOOC project started on August 2012. When it was conceived there was no open source platform to deploy MOOCs. The code of the project has always been published in a repository on github.

Simple and intuitive interface Reuse what already exists and works Design goals 3) Flexible and scalable Simple and intuitive interface Reuse what already exists and works

OpenMOOC components (I) 4) Identity Provider Q/A forum Wiki moocng, MOOC engine 100% open source SAML integration in all components Only moocng was written from scratch

OpenMOOC components (II) 4)

moocng early design decisions 5) Split data based on expected growth: Courses information is quite static Students interactions can grow very fast What went well? Use Postgresql for courses and MongoDB per student interactions What went wrong? MongoDB schema design On very high load situations some documents are lost without giving errors

MongoDB schema At the beginning: Two collections: activity and answers 5) At the beginning: Two collections: activity and answers Very big nested documents Easy to understand in the app layer Bad for performance since one update means realloc the whole document Later on: Small documents highly denormalized Map and reduce operations to compute aggregate data

OpenMOOC functionality I 6) Video/slide integration with documents and teacher’s remarks Self assessment progress Social discussion forum. Follow up own/others’ questions WYSIWYG + Latex interface for creation of questions Identity federation based on standard (SAML2). Just in time provisioning when accessing the components. Medals (badges) for assessing your social behavior in the forum and for success in a course

OpenMOOC functionality II 6) Teacher admin panel to create and manage the course. Also has stadistic and communication funcionalities (announcements and mail) Wiki Peer review exercises Assets management Support external billing systems

Content filtering and user moderation Improve Statistics Future. Roadmap 6) Content filtering and user moderation Improve Statistics Improve permission and role system Messaging system Gamification. (+Open Badges) Streaming system alternatives Improve the learning experience Wizard to create new course editions

How to monetize an OpenMOOC instance 7) Publicity: Ads related to the content ---------------------------------- Payment after a prove of content: Students recieve free content and have to pay to take the rest of the course. ------------------------------------- Certificates Students are willing to pay a small fee (10-20€) for an (almost useless) certificate If 10% of students pay: 10.000 x 10: 100.000 € Bigger fees for traditional exams on physical centers where better certificates can be generated Honestly: no idea yet. Some experiments: Contextual Ads Free initial unit, then pay for the rest Certificates

Teachers friction I 7) Teachers are used to traditional LMS

Teachers friction II MOOCs means a different way of teaching: 7) Multimedia oriented instead text oriented Need to sense the massivenes of the scale Can't focus on single student Must see trends

Case study1: unedcoma.es 8)

Case study1: Info 8) Platform up since September 2012 Courses started at February 2013 In times of active courses has grown to 650 concurrent users according to GA. It is one of the bets of the UNED (National Distance Education University) for e-learning. The unedcoma.es is the project that has made possible the emergence of OpenMOOC. Currently is one of the main sponsors.

Case study1: statistics 31/05/2013 8) Courses: 22 Users: 113k Visits: 1.3M (Unique): 523k Showed pages: 6.7M Showed videos: +2,5M Answers: +895k Submitted Peer Reviews: +29k Reviewed Peer Reviews: +84k

Case study1: Environment 8)

Case study2: difundi.com 8)

Case study2: Info 8) Platform up since March 2013 First course started at May 2013 Has developed a payment gateway and plans to offer interesting courses such as a low cost course to prepare the English First Certificate

Other cases 8) Took for them 30 hours installing and testing OpenMOOC. Found OpenMOOC relatively hard to install for people who are not familiar with server administration. Moreover, statistics modules are very incomplete. But, still, is OK, it provides basic functionalities and the teacher interface is friendly. Reference: I made a MOOC, and I survived http://peerdal.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/i-made-mooc-and-i-survived.html http://courses.cultureplex.ca/course/el-humanista-digital-mooc CulturePlex Lab Course (Western Ontario University) https://courses.mooc.telecom-bretagne.eu Télécom Bretagne Course (Institut Mines-Télécom) http://mooc.comunidadiberoamericanasc.org/ XII LatinAmerican Meeting of Civil Society (Spanish Association of Foundations)

References OpenMOOC project Web: http://openmooc.org Code: https://github.com/OpenMOOC Demo appliance: http://goo.gl/J8pz6 Some documentation: http://goo.gl/qwUO2

References Thanks!