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>> [Background Music] This week, we will explore questions such as.
>> To access the course, click here.
>> An international group of scientists under the.
>> There we go.
It's working.
>> It's working.
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>> When I first heard that Dartmouth was going to be working with edX to develop MOOCs,
all those words, DartmouthX, edX, MOOC, they kind of all flowed together.
>> I didn't think it was highly relevant.
I also was curious about how much learning could take place.
>> I have been at Dartmouth for 12 years.
And when I came here, one of the things that really attracted me to Dartmouth was
that teaching is really valued here.
And I think that's true of a lot of faculty who come to Dartmouth.
They come to Dartmouth because they care about teaching,
and they are really top scholars in their fields.
>> There was skepticism in the community, not so much about the experiment
of creating these open courses online but that they would address the fundamental challenges
that we have in higher education.
>> I saw a request for proposals that said, you know, would you want to teach a MOOC.
I thought, well, Environmental Studies 2, I have been doing it
for a while, so it might be interesting.
It might mix things up a little bit.
I'd be willing to give it a try.
And I am certain that it would help and change the way I teach on campus.
>> [Counting Together] Five, four, three, two, one.
Woo hoo.
[ Cheering ]
>> All right.
>> Week 1 is in business.
Intro to Environmental Science.
Course is live.
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Given all the adverse consequences of large-scale industrial agriculture,
a number of people in the United States and elsewhere in the world,
have looked at other forms of agriculture.
The course is a condensed and shortened version of introductory environmental science,
which is a fairly standard course taught at liberal arts universities
and colleges around the United States.
We designed the course to almost be self-contained with just the videos.
[Background Music] But to someone who wants to do more, it's a richer experience
if you do the readings and you take the tests or the self-assessments
that are interspersed throughout the week.
>> We can look at, I made a little montage there.
>> Oh, did we really?
Oh, yeah.
>> So, that'll be something you haven't seen.
>> Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. OK.
Let's bring that up.
That sounds like a good idea.
>> Each course has a course team made up of the faculty member, an instructional designer,
a librarian, a media production specialist, a media producer, TAs,
and other people providing support.
>> We were able to up front develop the, through visual style, what we thought would work
in terms of how it looked and felt and sounded.
>> At the beginning, I didn't have a lot of experience with video crew or working
with others such as Mike Goudzward, the instructional designer.
I might have had a TA, but I didn't have a team to work on a course.
And so this was really exciting.
It caused all kind of creative moments.
State that the temperature on Earth has been.
Was that a rough transition there?
Or lag?
We literally started in July and started filming in August
for a course that went live in February.
GMOs are banned by the European Union but are abundantly used in the United States.
In commercially grown crops in the United States,
perhaps 85 to 90% of the [multiple speakers].
>> With a MOOC, you don't have that instantaneous feedback from an audience.
So, you have to think very precisely about what it is
that you are trying to communicate to the students.
>> Hey, I wanted to know if you could help me with this post.
>> Sure. Sure.
What's up?
>> To go through it.
>> I got a better sense of putting myself in the mind of the student and trying
to say what's going to resonate with the typical student.
And so I was doing it for, in this case, a broad audience that was international and had people
of different ages although the median age was 28.
But I think it helped me get a mindset for a certain group of people.
And I think I can do that even better now after this experience of teaching the MOOC.
>> A student who has a background in chemical engineering
from Ecuador will have a very different opinion than an architect living in Nigeria.
And I'm very excited that we have both.
And, you know, when they come together to discuss an environmental topic, you know,
their brains are going to approach the problem just a little bit different.
We're all going to learn together.
>> Have you checked that number, 36.4 mega joules per liter?
>> The platform is a young one, and it's developing.
There's certainly a lot to learn about how to use it.
I think we really used a principle of simplicity.
Reducing environmental impact and maximizing our energy resources.
>> It's always great to learn from the process of building the course ourselves
and say next time we would do even more.
That's all part of the learning process.
>> Dartmouth, we came late to the whole MOOC movement.
We really took our time to really think about, OK, where does it make sense
for a place like Dartmouth to participate?
We were very clear we're trying to invest in a methodology to innovate
to improve residential education.
>> The faculty that I've heard from so far through the projects have indicated
that they have developed approaches to teaching through working on the MOOC
that they are interested in bringing back to the classroom.
>> I've already written a proposal to get some additional assistance to take some
of these five-minute to eight-minute video clips and maybe modify them a little bit
and make them available to my students.
So, when they walk in the door, I don't have to present that basic information.
[Background Music] We can just start at a higher level.
>> What I am really excited about is the way in which the experience of these teams working
on the MOOCs is transforming how they are thinking about teaching at Dartmouth
and then how we can communicate that with other faculty and other students.
>> It absolutely was a valuable experience for me, for the entire course team,
the undergraduates who helped me, the graduate students who helped me, the post-docs,
the staff, the instructional designers,
the media production group people, a whole host of people.
It's been a tremendous learning experience I think for everyone.
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