Octave and MOOCs

Coursera works with the world's top universities to provide massive open online courses. These courses span a variety of areas including computer science, engineering, business, humanities, and more. The online courses provide a full learning experience including video lectures, auto-graded assignments, and discussion forums. Octave has been used in a few of the online classes (e.g., Scientific Computing, Machine Learning, Probabilistic Graphical Models) to both demonstrate concepts and support programming assignments. In these classes, students were expected to complete functions in Octave and submit them for auto-grading. This talk will provide an overview of how we integrated Octave into the online classroom and our experience doing so.