Massive Open Online Courses in Engineering Education

Though higher engineering education generally lacks students in Germany, some universities are faced with the challenge of dealing with extremely high enrollment numbers due to recent changes in education policy. In the winter term 2011/2012 approx. 1,900 students enrolled for mechanical engineering and industrial engineering and management at RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) Aachen University putting the educational skills of teachers to the test. Obviously, new concepts become necessary to find adequate teaching models. Modern information and communication technologies have already become a constant part of everyday life among the new generation of students. But their full potential for higher education has not yet been exploited. Concepts hitherto focused on integrating technologies such as Audience-Response-Systems or mobile applications into face-to-face lectures. Only recently a new approach emerged, bearing the potential of teaching increasingly high numbers of students entirely online and of revolutionizing the higher education landscape: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). They seem to highly motivate their students to actively participate in online courses and to interact with teachers and fellow students using social and technical networks. As demonstrated by initiatives such as the Khan Academy, udacity, edX, or Coursera MOOCs attract enormous numbers of students (In 2011 160,000 students followed the Stanford lecture on Artificial Intelligence by Prof. Thrun and Prof. Norvig with 23,000 earning a certificate). This paper aims to show how MOOCs might help to tackle the challenges of teaching large classes in higher engineering education. As they have attracted large amounts of students especially for engineering topics, they might be adequate for higher engineering education. A variety of MOOCs have emerged so far based on fundamentally different learning principles that cater to the needs of engineering education in different ways. Thus, this paper categorizes MOOCs according to their underlying didactical approaches in a first step. In a second step it is evaluated to what extend the different kinds of MOOCs can be used to implement active and problem-based learning in a large class and for what purposes in engineering education they can be best applied. The results are useful for any university teacher in higher engineering education dealing with large classes.