1. The OpenMOOC project A free software platform for an open education
Lorenzo Gil

2. 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

3. The MOOC scene 1)

4. 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.

5. 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

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

7. OpenMOOC components (II)4)

8. moocng early design decisions5)
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

9. MongoDB schema At the beginning: Two collections: activity and answers5)
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

10. OpenMOOC functionality I6)
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

11. OpenMOOC functionality II6)
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

12. 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

13. Free initial unit, then pay for the rest Certificates
How to monetize an OpenMOOC instance 7)
Publicity:
Ads related to the content
Payment after a prove of content:
take the rest of the course.
Certificates
an (almost useless) certificate
If 10% of students pay: x 10: €
centers where better certificates can be generated
Honestly: no idea yet.
Some experiments:
Contextual Ads
Free initial unit, then pay for the rest
Certificates

14. Teachers friction I 7)
Teachers are used to traditional LMS

15. 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

16. Case study1: unedcoma.es8)

17. 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.

18. Case study1: statistics 31/05/20138)
Courses: 22
Users: 113k
Visits: 1.3M (Unique): 523k
Showed pages: 6.7M
Showed videos: +2,5M
Answers: k
Submitted Peer Reviews: +29k
Reviewed Peer Reviews: +84k

19. Case study1: Environment8)

20. Case study2: difundi.com8)

21. 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

22. Other cases 8) Took for them 30 hours installing and testing OpenMOOC.
Found OpenMOOC relatively hard to install for people who are not
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
(Western Ontario University)
Télécom Bretagne Course
(Institut Mines-Télécom)
(Spanish Association of Foundations)

23. References OpenMOOC project Web: http://openmooc.org
Code:
Demo appliance:
Some documentation:

24. References
Thanks!