Twenty years after it started offering online courses, the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University has introduced its first massive open online course.

“The iSchool has been at the forefront of online education for two decades,” said Jeffrey Stanton, senior associate dean of the iSchool and professor teaching the online course. “2013 is literally the 20th anniversary of the offering of the first online course.”

The free course, called “Introduction to Data Science,”was made available to the first 500 interested students for the spring semester.

MOOCs are classes taught online to large numbers of students with minimal involvement by professors. Students typically watch short video lectures and complete assignments that are graded electronically, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Aug. 8.

Running exactly four weeks long, the course covers data science topics like binary representation, open source R statistical programming and the statistical topics of central tendency, variability and sampling, according to the class’ syllabus.

While the course is not for any school credit, a letter of completion signed by iSchool Dean Elizabeth Liddy will be provided to each student who completes the course satisfactorily, according to the syllabus.

While online courses have been offered for years, Stanton said MOOCs are relatively new, and are natural extensions of the innovation of online courses.

“There are lots of different ways of doing a MOOC,” he said. “For example, a MOOC can be combined with a face-to-face class very easily. This kind of hybrid is more of what SU is doing with this particular course.”

People use the online program to do homework, complete interactive exercises, practice quizzes and engage in Q-and-A forums, Stanton said.

While online courses often cost money, one of the biggest advantages to MOOCs is that they are generally offered for free, he said.

Enrollment in the iSchool course was open to the public, and the response was very positive, said Christopher Sedore, associate vice chancellor for academic operations, in an email. The course maxed out at its 500-student capacity.

“There are many innovators among our faculty and students who bring experimentation and new pedagogical approaches every semester,” Sedore said. “MOOCs are yet another new form of learning and SU felt that it made sense to encourage some campus experimentation given the enthusiasm.”

Faculty and students saw it as an opportunity to extend SU’s reach into the world, he said.

While iSchool faculty members have been enthusiastic about introducing more MOOCs, online classes have been a hotly debated topic in the world of academia.

“Some pundits and entrepreneurs think that MOOCs are a new era for higher education with free education for anyone,” Sedore said. “Others believe they offer nothing new and conflate access to information with learning.”

If this course runs successfully, Sedore said similar ones will likely be added in the near future.

Said Sedore: “Our experiments with online education will probably include a few more MOOCs and other kinds of new offerings as technology evolves.”

Published on March 5, 2013 at 11:07 pm

Contact Levi: ldstei01@syr.edu