Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become one of the hottest trends in higher education, providing access to high-quality classes from such elite universities as Stanford and MIT. MOOCs thus offer a new opportunity for self-directed learning for millions of students worldwide. However, most MOOC platforms have been designed around the conventional classroom-learning model, with short lectures followed by a multiple-choice quiz that reinforces what has been taught during the video.
While this model works well for many subjects, it falls short in the sciences and engineering, where students need to conduct research experiments to support their study. Consequently, a major challenge in current MOOC systems is how to design a framework that effectively supports large-scale, self-directed learning as well as self-organized experiments and research. To meet this need, Beihang University (opens in new tab), in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia, has developed MOOR (Massive Open Online Research), a new cloud-based platform built on Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab).
The MOOR platform consists of three major components:
- A course-specific virtual lab facility, which enables remote access to the devices needed for experiments
- Course-management middleware, which coordinates both the online course services and virtual lab services, such as lab reservations, resource allocations, and lab assignment grading
- The MOOR portal, which integrates the virtual lab functions into the online learning interface
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The illustration below shows the relationship of these three pieces.
The MOOR platform consists of three components, each of which plays an essential role in enabling lab experiments and research in MOOCs.
Wenjun Wu (opens in new tab), professor of computer science and the MOOR project leader at Beihang University, comments that “MOOR lets teachers design course-specific content and tasks and allows students to conduct research and creative experiments remotely—anywhere, anytime.” The MOOR system will make its debut during the autumn semester at Beihang’s MOOC Center, where it will be used in conjunction with an undergraduate course in computer networking.
As noted earlier, MOOR is powered by Microsoft Azure—for good reason. As a massive online learning environment, MOOR needs to push high-quality video streams to tens of thousands of students simultaneously, a need that demands a cloud-based, elastic video streaming service. With its almost limitless scalability, Azure easily supports large-scale media streaming of MOOC lecture videos. In addition, Azure provides virtual machine (VM) resources that permit customization of the software environment of the virtual labs; by defining VMs, instructors enable their students to run course-specific simulations and logic verifications and to access virtual lab equipment. Furthermore, Azure tools facilitate Python-based web portal development for MOOR and support load balancing for the web application.
Professor Wu and his team are continuing to collaborate with Microsoft Research Asia to enhance MOOR, which will be one of the featured demos at the Microsoft Research Asia Faculty Summit 2014 (opens in new tab) in Beijing from October 30 to 31. “We look forward to interacting with distinguished scientists and scholars from Microsoft Research and top Asian universities [at the summit],” said Professor Wu. “This is not only a great opportunity to let top-tier academics learn about our project, but also a chance for us to get their feedback and suggestions for future improvement, and an opening for exploring possible collaboration in the future.”
—Xin Ma, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia
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