Massive open online courses can reach a vast number of
students, but have been limited to one school offering the course from a single
platform. Now, Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland are working
together to develop a cross-institutional MOOC on mobile app development.
The MOOC will begin Jan. 6 with two segments 10 weeks
in length hosted on the Coursera platform.
“Creating such an opportunity for Vanderbilt and
University of Maryland students alone would be incredibly complex in a
traditional environment,” Douglas Schmidt, professor of computer science and
computer engineering at Vanderbilt, told eCampus News.
“With the MOOC platform, not only is it possible, it will now be available to
learners globally.”
The Maryland portion of the MOOC will teach students user-facing
portions of mobile apps, while the Vanderbilt portion will focus on the server
portion of mobile apps, according to a press release from Vanderbilt.
“Faculty-driven collaborations have historically been
common in the research sphere, but the MOOC environment now allows that
visceral excitement that comes from the sharing of different perspectives to be
applied to the teaching domain as well,” said Cynthia Cyrus, associate provost
of undergraduate education at Vanderbilt.