Can MOOCs Support Secondary Education in Computer Science?

Despite the importance of competencies in computer science for participation in the digital transformation of nearly all sectors, there is still a lack of learning material and technically experienced teachers in German schools. In the paper at hand, we investigate the potential of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for secondary education. Schools can profit from this learning content and format provided by well-known institutions. However, German schools provide some challenging conditions, which have to be taken into account for a meaningful integration of e-learning elements. Our statistical and qualitative results are based on the representative data of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), the learning data of more than 100,000 online learners from over 150 countries, and the outcomes of several workshops with teachers and school administrators.

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   This, actually, is neither a revolutionary new insight, nor is it restricted to German schools. Back in the 1990’s L. Cuban examined very similar phenomena in American schools.

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   14 to 24 years old.

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   The IT summit is one of the main political instruments to implement the German Digital Agenda [7] – Germany's strategy to foster and shape digital transformation [8].

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   HPI is subject to the Federal Data Protection Act, as the servers with the user data are situated in Germany. For platform improvement and research reasons, only anonymous data is used [9].

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   4-15 min.

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   MINT-EC maintains a nationwide excellence network for German schools with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Its declared goal is to offer outstanding learning programs for students and teachers in STEM. More than 200 schools with more than 20,000 teachers are integrated into this network [10].

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   The GI and its 22,000 members worldwide offer a network to create early motivation and interest for informatics – supported by products to develop skills and aided by initiatives for training frameworks [11].

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   Another critical argument concerns the large amount of time pupils already spend by using technical equipment [18].

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   A cloud provider should provide the infrastructure. Administration should be part of the responsibilities of either a government agency or a private company, which is commissioned by a government authority to take care of this task.

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    Further necessary considerations are the learning materials and tools to be used with such an infrastructure.

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    To finish the registration process, the learners have to confirm their ownership of the provided email address by clicking on a link in an email that is sent to them by the system right after their registration.

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    As long as their account is not confirmed, a message appears with a link to request a new confirmation email.

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    While the teacher should not necessarily have the possibility to access the students’ passwords, he/she needs the possibility to reset them for organizational reasons.

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    Related research indicated that, according to one third of young people in Germany who were surveyed representatively, mobbing is one of the major risks of using the Internet. 3% experienced mobbing already on their own [18].

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    For reasons of child protection we did not promote the usage of Google Hangouts, e. g. for video calls, in those courses.

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    https://github.com/7compass/sentimental.

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    One of the authors has made a similar experience while teaching a face-to-face course at a University of Applied Sciences for several years. Even rewarding the students with bonus points for using a discussion forum in Moodle did not increase the activity in this forum. When asked why, the students replied that they preferred to discuss on Facebook as they could discuss there more freely without being under constant judgement of the teacher.

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    Often, however, these learning analytics are still reduced to counting clicks on an e-learning resource. It requires great care not to misinterpret this data, e. g. defining active students by the amount of clicks.

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    Additionally, e-learning is “enabling learners to take a more active role in their own learning” [6] in terms of autonomous and autodidactic learning.

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    The young teacher is studying IT systems engineering and developed her first own web page at the age of 10 years.

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    It featured about 11,000 participants, with a completion rate of about 33%. In the context of MOOCs, a completion rate of 33% is a very good result.

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    In average the amount of work involved depends on one's prior knowledge and is estimated at 5 to 10 h per week. This involves working with the videos and the course material provided, checking one's understanding of the curriculum with self-tests, completing the homework and actively participating in the discussion fora [9].

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    This learning mode was chosen to guarantee a comparable workload in both groups.

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    Comparable to grades or points for oral contribution in a traditional classroom setting.

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    In Germany, such promising visions are still struggling with its fragmented and federalist organization of education.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Hasso Plattner Institute for IT-Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam Campus Griebnitzsee, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

   Catrina Tamara Grella, Thomas Staubitz, Ralf Teusner & Christoph Meinel

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Catrina Tamara Grella .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Villach, Austria

   Michael E. Auer

2. International E-Learning Association and Kaleidoscope Learning, New York, New York, USA

   David Guralnick

3. Ulster University, Belfast, Ireland

   James Uhomoibhi

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