What you may need to know about Coursera as a a kind of MOOCS.

1. Amira Abd El wahab

2. Agenda
MOOCS.
 Coursera.
History.
Philosophy.
Mission
Courses.
Learner supports.
Technologies.
Quality Assurance.
Management Systems.

3. MOOCS
Massive Open Online Courses are offered over the
internet and are open to anyone all over the world for free.
In a few short years, MOOCs have become more popular
and well known to many people (moocs,2015)
There are many major MOOC providers such as edX,
Udacity, and Coursera (Pappano, 2012).

4. Coursera
Coursera is an education platform that partners with top
universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses
online for anyone to take (Coursera, 2015)

5. History
Coursera has been founded in 2012 by computer science
professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from
Stanford University. Penn hosts the Inaugural Coursera
Partners' Conference on April 5 and 6, 2013. As of October
2014, Coursera had reached 839 courses and 10 million
users. As of May, 2015, Coursera had more than 1000
courses from 119 institutions and 13 million users from 190
countries.

6. Mission
Coursera offers universal real opportunities to access to
best education in the world (Coursera, 2015).

7. Philosophy
Effectiveness of online learning.
Mastery learning.
Peer assessments.
Blended learning (Coursera, 2015).

8. Courses
Hundreds of specialization courses are available in mnay
different fields.
These courses are related to:
Arts And Humanities… Social Sciences.
Business… Physical Science and Engineering.
Computer Science…. Data Science.
Life Science.. Math and Logic.
Personal Development.

9. Learner supports
 Learner Support Forums Guidelines
 students can write in this forum about any problem(technical
issues)
They can and interact with other students by using this
forum.
It has many steps to be followed:
Use a meaningful title for your thread
Be specific.
Stay on topic ..etc

10. Technologies
Most MOOCs are delivered through online videos. They require the
cooperation of many people, including videographers, instructional
designers, IT specialists and platform specialists.
Coursera uses Scala because it provides a type safe language with
powerful concurrency primitives on top of a mature technology platform.
A handful of Stanford students wrote the first lines of Coursera using
PHP. As the engineering team grew, we began searching for our future
technology platform.
After experimenting with many technology platforms including Python
and Go
Coursera has settled on Scala and the Play Framework because itsmeets
our needs best.

11. Quality Assurance
Coursera has introduced a protocol for quality assurance.
This protocol is designed to supplement review processes already in place at
the home institution, and to streamline the transition from design to deployment.
By aiming to limit issues of course design and technological risk, the protocol defines
the process and timeline for submitting course materials for review by Coursera, as
well as the timeline for uploading approved materials to the Coursera course
platform.
The protocol outlines five primary milestones in course design and development:
 course description pages
 course development agreements (two months prior to the course start date)
 early uploading of course materials (one month prior to the course start date)
 on-going class monitoring
 post-course feedback

12. Management systems.
• Taxonomy of LMS
• Digital Teaching Platforms
• First, there are learning management systems as platforms for
course development..
• Second, there are self-contained online courses, that students
can take from start to finish without teacher interaction.
• The PLATO system is an example that dates back to the 1960s,
and one of the most interesting contemporary examples is the
Open Learning InitiativeProbability and Statistics course
from Carnegie Melon (spearheaded by Candice Thille, who is
now headed to Stanford. Always happy to have a voice for
openly licensed resources head to the Silicon Valley).

13. References
• Marzban, H., PhD., & Zamanian, M. (2014). Towards The
Incorpotation of Critical Pedagogy in Elt Materials
Development: A Survey On The Iranian Teachers And
University Professors’ Attitudes. Modern Journal of Language
Teaching Methods, 4(1), 114-132.
• Rashidi, N., & Safari, F. (2011). A model for EFL materials
development within the framework of critical pedagogy
(CP). English Language Teaching, 4(2), 250
259.doi:10.5539/elt.v4n2p250
• Safari, P., & Pourhashemi, M. R. (2012). Toward an
empowering pedagogy: Is there room for critical pedagogy in
educational system of iran? Theory and Practice in Language
Studies, 2(12), 2548-2555.doi: 10.4304/tpls.2.12.2548-2555.