There is exciting work being done on how to borrow from a successful on-campus course to make a successful MOOC. But what about the other way around? What can an original on-campus course gain from its younger sibling MOOC?My hypothesis is this: Some specific pedagogical challenges that you overcome when you create a successful MOOC provide resources and opportunities that can be channeled back to the next generation of the original on-campus class.The result is that we can view the creation of online courses not as an end in itself, but as part of an ongoing process of give and take, between an on-campus course and its online version.My evidence is based on Science and Cooking, a course for non-majors at Harvard University. The course aims to teach basic chemistry and physics through food and cooking, and was recently converted to an online course on the edx platform. This approach to chemistry education appears to resonate with and motivate a broad audience � more than 90,000 people from around the world registered for the course, arguably making this one of the largest chemistry courses ever taught.In this talk, I will discuss three specific benefits that the MOOC offered back to the on-campus course.(1) By being forced to reconceive of the course material for a different audience, we generated numerous ideas for redeveloping the labs and homeworks with more intuitive experiments and problems.(2) By making the video material for the MOOC an assignment before class, we were able to use class time for a learning experience which we would not otherwise have had time or preparation for.(3) By offering the online materials as what is essentially an interactive textbook, the on-campus students had access to a resource that is otherwise difficult to provide for experimental teaching ventures of this kind.

From classroom to MOOC, and back: Three ways the on-campus version of Science & Cooking benefited from the construction of a MOOC

248th National Meeting (2014)

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