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#MOOCMonday summer series: How to succeed in online education courses

Individual online learning is more popular than ever: Courses can be approached anywhere and anytime, and learners can easily integrate their further education in their working schedule and personal life. The Technical University of Munich is offering a growing portfolio of Massive Open Online Courses, in short “MOOCs”, to support individual learners around the world.

With the summer holidays coming up, the TUM Institute for LifeLong Learning is presenting a new series: Over the next four #MOOCMondays, we tell our readers more about online learning, ask the most popular questions about MOOCs to our TUM experts and present one course each week. We are starting today with “LOOP”, a MOOC about programming and computer science, and interviewed our expert Prof. Dr. Johannes Krugel about what learners can do to succeed in self-paced online programs.

Prof. Dr. Krugel, how does online education break barriers?
Online education breaks barriers because it enables learners from all over the world have to access high quality learning resources. Our course LOOP, for example, already attracted learners from more than 80 countries – despite even being in German.

What can students do to succeed in online programs?
In this kind of self-regulated learning, a very important aspect is the ability to motivate yourself. During every learning process there will also be hurdles and difficulties where you simply need to keep trying. It is definitely a good idea to communicate and cooperate with other learners. This proved to be a major motivating factor, especially because other learners probably have similar difficulties… and maybe other ideas to overcome them.

How were your users’ learning experiences of “LOOP” enhanced by the online delivery method?
In such online courses it is very advisable to split the content into rather small digestible units. Every such unit of LOOP consists of carefully designed videos and quizzes. A central aspect of our course are plenty interactive exercises where the learners can directly apply and use the theoretical concepts. Those exercises were reported by the vast majority of learners to be very helpful for truly understanding what object-oriented programming is about.

 

About the course

“LOOP” offers an easily accessible introduction to a fascinating field of computer science. In particular, object-oriented programming and simple algorithms are discussed. During the course, you will learn how to write small programs in the popular programming language Java. However, the course is not a pure programming course, but primarily intended to provide the essential basics for understanding and developing larger programs yourself. More information can be found here.

Find out more about MOOCs at the Technical University of Munich here.

About Prof. Dr. Johannes Krugel

Prof. Dr. Johannes Krugel is Professor for Digital Education and Didactics of Computer Science at Leibniz University Hannover. He completed his PhD and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich. In this time he also coordinated the creation and scientific evaluation of the course “LOOP – Lernen objektorientierter Programmierung”.

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