Learning 2.0 with adaptive software

Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley are doing it –Cambridge and Toronto, too. There is no prestigious university that has not been swept away by MOOC euphoria in recent years. MOOC stands for "massive open online courses". Using their own YouTube channels or specialised online platforms, universities are making their lectures available to the entire world for free. Lino Guzzella, Rector of ETH Zurich, also decided in 2012 to try out the new, web-based teaching formats as part of a two-year project.

The first person to offer an MOOC at ETH Zurich is robotics professor Roland Siegwart, who used the open source course platform edx.org to allow students from all over the world to take part in his lecture entitled "Autonomous Mobile Robots" during the current spring semester. Two further MOOCs are planned for the autumn. "They are a valuable communication tool when it comes to publicising the university and its course offerings," explains Andreas Reinhardt from the Educational Development and Technology (LET) unit. "However, ETH Zurich mainly wants to use the new interactive opportunities created by the internet to help improve the quality of the curriculum at its own university."

Reinhardt and his team thus developed their own teaching format called TORQUE (Tiny, Open-with-Restrictions courses focused on QUality and Effectiveness). These types of online courses are available only to students enrolled in a Swiss university. "TORQUE is a testing ground for us," says Reinhardt. At a later stage, these course offerings could be made available to a worldwide audience with minimal effort.

Less in-person attendance, more interaction

Four ETH professors currently offer TORQUE courses: Renate Schubert a basic course in economics (about 500 students), Danilio Pescia a course in physics (about 50 students), Markus Kalisch and Luke Meier a self-study course for the statistics software R (300 to 500 students), and John Lygeros the course "Signals and Systems II" (160 students). In addition to the lectures at ETH, students can access various filmed lecture sequences, animated slides, exercises, online quizzes and test tasks depending on the course. They can interact with their peers and professors in forums. How much learning material from the lecture hall is put on the internet is ultimately up to the lecturers. Renate Schubert, for example, was able to cut her lecture period in half thanks TORQUE. Andreas Reinhardt from LET, however, stresses that the aim is not to reduce personal contact between students and professors. On the contrary, "The hope is to intensify contact." If the students come to the lecture with knowledge they have already acquired through online materials, face-to-face time can be better used for individual questions and interactive learning. For the students, however, the amount of work for a semester-long course remains the same.

Adaptive learning

According to Reinhardt, hundreds of ETH lecturers already use online tools for teaching. In just a few years, it has been transformed from an outlier into a standard fixture in education. ETH Zurich currently manages its online course offerings with the open source platform Moodle, which is used all over the world. Moodle lets students access all of the materials needed for self-study, organised in a linear fashion and grouped by weekly lecture topic.

D-ITET Professor John Lygeros is taking a somewhat different approach. As part of a pilot project, he is providing all of the learning materials for his course Signals and Systems II on both Moodle and the online platform Albie. Albie was developed by Sean Summers, a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Lygeros. Using automatic control algorithms, the software estimates the learning progress of individual students and automatically proposes learning material accordingly. This type of "adaptive learning" does away with having to work through the lecture material chronologically over the course of the semester. Instead, students can study based on their individual abilities and needs. The first feedback from students is very positive, Summers reports with conviction.

For Reinhardt, however, something should be kept in mind: "These types of systems are not only a technical innovation. They also encompass a new learning culture." That is to say, while more self-study and more interactive classroom learning will bring about more freedom, students first need to get used to it. Whether or not adaptive systems will do a better job at fostering this process remains to be seen, which is why all TORQUE courses will be evaluated by Reinhardt's team by the end of the year. Based on the experiences, the Rector ultimately wants to improve the quality of the online courses offered in the future.