Assessing the Efficacy of Third-Party MOOCs in Hybrid Instruction

The California state legislation's recent move to mandate that public universities award credit for new forms of online instruction such as MOOCs raises questions about how to measure what students learn by taking these courses. How can we devise appropriate baselines for unaffiliated learners? We have set out to explore these questions using MOOCs in hybrid classes. Along the way we encountered numerous challenges: Does the material in MOOCs, even presumably standard courses such as introductory statistics, match up well against existing curricula? What do we really achieve by testing individual MOOCs when there's so much variation in quality and pedagogy? We'll review factors to consider in determining when and whether it makes sense to adopt a third-party MOOC in your course or institution, the implementation challenges of incorporating MOOCs into existing courses, and how to design MOOC assessments.