Keynote Speech VII by Timothy K. Shih

MOOC brings to higher education a new challenge and a potential big change. Although the concept of flipped classroom encourages students to look at video instructions before class, yet, high quality instructions are hard to create. Sharing learning materials via social network is a potential solution if proper tools are developed for instruction designers. The talk contains the results of a project awarded by Google, using Google technologies to create tools to help MOOC users via social network. The talk starts from an engineering approach to define the specification of Exchangeable Learning Objects (ELOs) and an Open Repository for exchanging materials and experiences. The goals include providing a set of metrics for similarity measurement, searching result ranking, diversity between two ELOs, and relevancy among ELOs. These metrics serve as a base for investigating the searchability and reusability of learning objects. The resulting tool on can further gather a topology of exchanging ELOs among MOOC content users. The topology not only forms an information flow, an on-line social community can be built. Measurements on the social community can be used to know what are the new popular knowledge areas, as well as the influencing MOOC authors. Contribution can be used in strategic planning for future MOOC development.