[MUSIC]
When I first started like two, two and a half years ago,
the biggest thing that surprised was that this even existed, honestly.
When I heard about it, I was just blown away.
I was like wait, people are putting this stuff online and I can just take it?
I can just learn computer science?
>> I really think that being somebody who loves to learn
is the only way you can be a teacher.
I think that my excitement for
trying to learn definitely comes across in my classes.
>> The main thing we think about is students first, that's our motto.
It has to be fun to learn or
how can we expect our students to enjoy our classes?
>> Making a class could be something that seems very simple,
very straightforward, but there's actually a lot of people involved.
There's a lot of thought, a lot of hard work behind making a good class.
>> The most important part of the course development process to me is the first
step where you decide what you're going to teach.
>> How do you approach,
how do you choose- >> So
right now we're in the planning phase and we're trying to outline the class to
get a really holistic view of what's actually going to go in the class.
So we're cutting material, we're adding material,
we're trying to get a sense of what the student's actually going to see, and
it's a really fun, creative part of the process.
>> Figuring out fun interactions that the students can do,
like programming exercises that the students will do, or
even just like fun thought questions to get them thinking.
>> What we're really trying to do is make the class that
has the most relevance to the real world for the students.
>> Really trying to empathize with who you're target learner's going to be,and
trying to understand where are they?
Where are they in this development towards being a computer programmer or
whatever their goal happens to be?
Where am I trying to take them, and really thinking what are the big
milestones from where they are to where I'm trying to take them?
>> I think it's really important to actually start by thinking about
the interactions from the student rather then starting with what dialogue you
want to say and then throw in the interactions.
It feels a lot more natural when you know what your goal is.
>> So you start by making assumptions, you say this is my learner,
this is how she's feeling, this is what she knows,
then you try to empathize with her based on your own personal experiences.
And then you check all of those hypotheses and
assumptions by finding representative learners like that and creating paper
prototypes of the course that you've designed and bringing it to them and
letting them demolish your ideas a little bit, and learning from it,
iterating, and then bringing them back with new versions of your ideas.
This is what we did early on in the course, which is a lot of back and
forth in terms of acquiring feedback and iterating to create a better product.
>> And I think we do a really good job of supporting each other and
offering feedback when asked for, and asking for feedback proactively, all
these sorts of things to just help each other make the best stuff that we can.
>> I'm always collaborating with my fellow course developers.
We all sit pretty close together in the office and
we're constantly bouncing ideas off of each other.
>> I will reach out to them and I say what do you think about this?
Is this reasonable?
How would you improve upon this?
>> After we have a good outline and a good plan for the course, we go in and
start drilling down the details until we're ready for
the production phase, and in the production phase we start to record.
>> Okay, so what we are going to do in this video is work together
to get to- >> The things I enjoy most have to be
the collaboration, the creativity, and probably the recording too.
We have a lot of fun when we're recording,
it's pretty funny in the recording studio.
>> Thanks, Oprah.
[LAUGH] >> Hello.
Hello, my name is Cameron Pitman and this is me talking.
>> Blah.
Okay, one more time, that was a funny noise.
>> What was suppose to be a recording session turned into
a surprise planning session.
I guess like most other creative processes, everything takes a little bit
longer and requires a little bit more review than you might originally think.
>> So what you saw previously was essentially the last bout
of headshots that we had to do, and then in the next couple of weeks all we do is
just polish before the class actually goes out and students start to take it.
>> Students are going to write some code and then we have to write code that will
evaluate that and determine whether they were correct.
It's really important to give people feedback that actually is sort of
targeted at what they answered rather than just being really generic, I often
like to put in something that's actually tailored to what they did answer.
>> Once the class launches, oh, that's so
good because you've been working really hard.
You're done with the production and now you have this thing online that people
are taking, and they're in the forums, and you see them learning,
you see them asking questions that are perfect.
You see them asking questions that are indicative of somewhere where you might
have messed up, and that's okay, you go back and you fix it.
But it's cool to see after all this time and effort that like 10 thousand people
are now learning physics or computer science because of all that work.
>> If you get it right, then the scale is just tremendous.
We're talking about thousands of students,
hundreds of thousands of students.
>> You know I started just blown away at the existence of it, and
now having been deep into the making of it for the last two years, oh,
it's not nearly enough that things like this exist, we have to do it right.
Like how do we use this amazing thing, the Internet, to make education
amazing and relevant and accessible?
These are big questions and it's pretty exciting to work on them.
[MUSIC]