Today I took the first quiz in “Model Thinking,” the massive open online course (MOOC) I enrolled in using Coursera. The quizzes are set up to allow three attempts, and only the highest score is counted. I’ve been recommending this type of assessment to faculty creating online courses for years. This strategy allows students to measure their own learning and get immediate feedback. It was a great feeling to benefit from this teaching strategy myself. I only needed the first attempt, but knowing it was okay to make a mistake because I could learn from it and improve my score, made the quiz feel like a learning experience, not a high stakes assessment. I also enjoyed the variety of question types: short answer, multi-select, multiple choice, and computation. It felt great to dust the cobwebs off my algebra skills and put them to use in calculating index of dissimilarity.

Open-Book, Multi-Attempt Quizzes…are awesome.

Before diving into the section 2 video lectures, I opened up the quiz and pasted the general idea of each question into my Google doc notebook for the course. Then, as I was viewing the lectures, I took notes under the relevant questions. When it came time to take the quiz, I was able to refer back to my notes and felt very confident in my answers. Submitted the quiz and – 100%! It doesn’t matter how old you are, if the course is free, or even if the course offers “real” credit — it still feels great to get a perfect score on questions you could not have answered a few days ago. Assessment is not just for the teacher/institution; it’s an important aspect of any course for the student’s proof of their progress through the material.

Instructor Scott Page shares his screen to demonstrate how the free program NetLogo can be used to run Schelling’s Segregation Model.

Video Lectures = Talking Head + Screenshare + WhiteboardI’m not sure what technology is being used, but the result is a neat little video package that includes the professor’s talking head on one side of the screen and whiteboard space on the left, which he can fill with a screenshare or real-time writing and drawing using a digital pen and tablet.

Bonus: The videos are not Flash-based, so I can watch them on my iPad. In fact, I’ve been interacting with the course mostly on my iPad. So far I’m impressed by the course design and technology accessibility and wonder if all Coursera courses have to meet certain quality and technology standards.