openHPI: Evolution of a MOOC Platform from LMS to SOA

This article presents a new platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), developed at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany. After describing the evolution of the MOOC concept and the format, we explain how we defined the requirements for the platform, how we evaluated different open source learning management systems as candidate solutions, and how the actual platform was built. The results of two first courses delivered through the platform are presented and an outlook is given towards a planned redesign of the platform based on a Service Oriented Software (SOA) approach. 1 MOOC FORMAT AND HISTORY The concept of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has been coined in 2008 in the context of a course experiment conducted by Canadian educational researchers Stephen Downes and George Siemens, who opened a for credit course titled Conncectivism and Connective Knowledge at the University of Manitoba, Canada to open registration. The gist of the experiment consisted in encouraging learners to take the course content not as the end, but as the beginning of an autonomous and active journey defined by the connections the learner creates between resources and with co-learners (McAuley et al., 2010). The same concept has recently been invested with a considerably different meaning when applied to University courses that are migrated from the setting of a closed physical classroom with a limited audience to an open online environment with a massive audience. MOOCs in this second sense have originated at Stanford and MIT and some of them attracted more than 100,000 participants. Most discussions about MOOCs distinguish between these two concepts and formats, often referring to them as cMOOC and xMOOC (Siemens, 2012). At the heart of this distinction lies the tension between two opposing forces that are acting on higher education: On the one hand, higher education increasingly leaves the confines of national boundaries, and relates to supranational frameworks (e.g. the Europoean Bologna process) and global markets. On the other hand, pedagogical theories that conceive the learning process as active and social instead of passive and individual no longer are the privilege of alternative and marginal institutions or educators, but are now the backbone of commonly accepted learning designs like collaborative or problem-based learning. MOOCs, both the c and x variants, can be clearly situated in both movements: • By offering a MOOC today, universities try to position themselves as global leaders of innovation, and as educational institutions capable of delivering high-quality education on a global scale. And in the same time invest in their attractiveness for the most talented prospective candidates. • While a MOOC can be organized according to an established model of instruction, where teachers transmit a well-defined body of knowledge to unknowing learners that prove their progress by repeating back that same knowledge, it also offers the opportunity of integrating collaboration and exploration into the learning design. And even if xMOOCs have been criticized for a lack of pedagogical innovation, it can be hypothesized that their massive success is due both to the effervescent nature of their discussion forums and to the learning tools available in many MOOC platforms that allow creative exploration of the domain through virtual laboratories. 2 OPENHPI’S COURSE FORMAT AND REQUIREMENTS openHPI is a platform for xMOOCs, hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam (HPI), Germany. openHPI is the result of tele-TASK, a research and development project conducted since 2004, which has brought into existence an advanced lecture recording system (Schillings and Meinel, 2002), and an online portal1 for the distribution of lecture videos. While the tele-TASK portal has been augmented with sophisticated semantic web search capabilities (Sack et al., 2009) and social web functionalities, it mainly stayed focused on delivering lecture content to HPI’s students allowing them to replay or to replace the class lecture. In the advent of the MOOC format, we see the opportunity to open up the pedagogical quality and domain expertise formerly reserved to our students to a broader audience. While the inspiration for our project stemmed from the success of the Stanford courses about artificial intelligence2 and databases3 and the MIT course on Circuits & Electronics4, we set our ambition to define a course format following a unique educational scenario: The subject domain is split up into six weekly units. For each week, video lectures, reading materials, and quizzes are produced and presented in a learning sequence. Discussion forums are set up for each week, and actively moderated by the teaching team. Learning progress is assessed through self-tests that can be taken an indefinite number of times, and homework, where points are granted and collected for the final score, required for obtaining the certificate. For the technical implementation of the platform, it was clear that we did not want to rely on an external SAAS hosting solution, but create a platform we could freely adapt and evolve. Teaching at HPI focuses on IT-Systems Engineering, and the ambitious project of creating a platform for thousands of learners constitutes a very interesting challenge for our own teaching and research. Critical success factors for the fulfilment of this ambition were identified with respect to the delivery of content, the learning process, and community building. 2.1 Learning content The teaching team should be empowered to concentrate on the quality of the content by being provided 1http://www.tele-task.de/ 2https://www.ai-class.com/ 3http://www.db-class.org/ 4https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/ intuitive and powerful tools for content editing and structuring. The presentation of the learning content should suggest a meaningful path to novice learners while giving advanced learners the freedom to jump to topics most relevant to them. xMOOCs draw on the distinctive engagement qualities of video lectures, chunked into small-sized segments. The platform must allow to embed video content, and to enrich it with textual explanation. openHPI uses videos from the tele-TASK portal, where lecture video recordings already exist in form of chunk podcasts and additional metadata extracted from the videos. Learning content needs to be presented in its hypertextual structure, in order to allow learners to grasp more than a linear sequence of content, i.e. the rich connections that exist between knowledge inside and across learning domains. 2.2 Learning process The learning environment must support the learning process by allowing learners to test new competences and by confronting them with graphical representations of their progress. Assessment tools need to be user-friendly and interactive in a way to engage and motivate learners. The synthetic representation of learning progress must be easily accessible from any part of the platform. Learners should be able to annotate content with personal notes only available to them and with shared notes and comments that trigger reactions from the teaching team and discussions in the learning community. Learners should also be allowed to connect the learning experience with their own tools and devices, e.g offline consumption of lecture videos, or integration of course schedules with personal productivity environments. 2.3 Learning community The distinguishing feature of the MOOC format is its social event character: In the past, universities have made course materials available on institutional websites, and eventually provided feedback forms or discussion possibilities, for example MIT’s openCourseWare project (Lerman et al., 2008). MOOCs take place during a given time period, and hence concentrate the otherwise dispersed participation into a coherent site of collective learning. Discussion forums should allow the teaching team to trigger participations and learners to question the content. Many learners are less comfortable when taking part anonymously in large groups and prefer the intimacy of small groups, eventually defined by similar characteristics like age, location, or interests. The platform should allow learners to find like-minded learners, and to define protected spaces for groups to organize a collaborative learning experience. The platform must not lock the user into its own confines, but allow users to connect their learning experience to their social networks. 2.4 Quality attributes These functional requirements are mainly compatible with what many learning management systems, proprietary or open source, provide. But while weighting quality attributes (Bass et al., 2005), like stability, scalability, usability, look & feel, extensibility, maintainability, security and performance, important questions arose: On the one hand with respect to performance: Learning management systems have been conceived for the context of schools or universities where class sizes range from tens to at the most hundreds of students. Delivering a MOOC to thousands of possibly concurrent users needs a robust technical infrastructure, and a scalable architecture. On the other hand, we envisioned a platform that would be easily extensible in order to implement teaching methods like game-based learning, peer teaching and evaluation, and to connect to virtual laboratories. Last but not least, we set as our goal, to attract learners through an attractive online experience that does not fall behind their experience with modern Web 2.0 platforms. 3 OPENHPI’S TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE With the start of the openHPI project, the first task was to build up an infrastructure that scales for a potentially massive amount of users and is highly available, and to implement a suitable courseware for the desired course format. 3.1 Courseware Implementation The first general decision to be taken was between designing and implementing an own solution base