A new teaching method: Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) applied to space education

摘要

In June 2015, the course of Prof. Claude Nicollier "Space Mission Design and Operations", given at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) since 2004, was selected to be adapted as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). A MOOC is an online, free of charge course and available to anyone with a fair Internet connection who is willing to register on a specific platform using only an email address. It took almost one year of preparation from the selection to the online release of the course. Each year more than 100 students attend Claude Nicollier's course at EPFL. This adaptation into a MOOC is an opportunity to increase significantly the number of students that follow the course: more than 4000 students had registered 3 weeks before the release. The course became open to students all over the world with a huge majority from the USA (18%) and from India (13%). A MOOC is made of videos, texts, exercises and forums that are adapted online to a wide audience. The professor speaking ex-cathedra is replaced by short videos that are recorded in a specific studio. Other video-clips coming from other sources such as simulations, documentaries, interviews with international space experts have also been incorporated in the online version of the course. This paper will present the different steps of the creation of such online courses, compared to a classical ex-cathedra course given at Master level. It will detail the features created especially for the online version, discuss the feedback of students and the advantages and drawbacks of these features. The other aspects that will be considered in this paper are the interaction with the students during the period when the course was made available online from February 24 until April 27, 2016 as well as the outcomes of this first edition. For this purpose, several surveys were conducted with the students and discussions with the teacher Claude Nicollier, the teaching assistants and the EPFL team supporting the project were analyzed.