high school credit for MOOC / Coursera classes?

[Lucy the Valiant]

(Please forgive the redundancy - I'm SURE this has been discussed, but I'm not skilled at search terms.)

 

So if you've had high school kids take MOOC / Coursera / EdX classes, what are some good ways to keep in touch with the kids to evaluate progress, etc.? Are there tests / checkpoints / "grades" of some sort? Or do you have the kids write papers or give oral presentations of what they're learning? (Maybe evaluation of these courses isn't necessary?)

 

 

 

 

[Lanny]

Some of them are "Instructor Led" and if one gets 80% or above, one gets a badge.  I am hoping Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University will offer again, in the future, a couple of their free MOOC courses, because I would like to take them, and because I missed them when they were offered the first time..  That said, I believe you must take into account the number of hours that will be devoted to a course, before you contemplate giving High School Credit.  I think it might take  a combination of different courses, to get enough hours.  That will vary, depending on the Course and the Provider (Canvas.net or elsewhere) and the school or company that created the course.  A course where they estimate 4 hours wouldn't do it, but if you find one that requires a lot of hours be devoted to it, then you are on the right track.   

[Jean in Newcastle]

The Coursera courses we did all had discussion questions at the end of each lecture notes in the book that comes with the course.  We used those as a guide.  I believe that some may have had essay suggestions as well but I'm not sure on that since it has been a couple of years since we've used them. 

[Corraleno]

Many of them include self-grading quizzes as well as discussion questions (with discussion boards) — Ancient Greek Hero, Viking Sagas, and Endangered Languages are three I can think of off the top of my head that DS did. He completed some but not all of the online assessments, but in his case, each of those courses was just one component of a more extensive credit (Greek Lit, Epic & Saga in World Lit, and Linguistics), so there was plenty of other output.

 

The EdX/ASU "Global Freshman Academy" courses are definitely worth a full HS credit; they're intensive (generally 8 wk) versions of a full semester college class, so they include multiple assignments and assessments. You can get a "verified" certificate if you pay a fee (~$50) and do the proctored version of the exams (for which you need a webcam); you can then convert the certificate to college credit from ASU for an additional $200 per credit hour.

[mumto2]

We used several Coursera classes. At the time we did Coursera we were able to get free certificates with verified certificates costing around $50. We always did the free. I evaluated each class on it's own merit in terms of how we handled it transcript wise. Some classes easily deserved a semester's credit, economics and calculus come to mind. Some classes prepared them to take Clep exams. Some were used as a section of that year's Language Arts/ lit credits, a Science Fiction class comes to mind.

 

There is a syllabus on the intro page and an estimated hours per week which is a good place to start. I also used some of the classes as electives on the transcripts. Sometimes I packed a couple together. To be honest it depended on what we needed each year because the Coursera classes were hard to predict in terms of availability at the time we were doing them.