Introducing hands-on experience to a Massive Open Online Course on openHPI

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become the trending topic in e-learning. Many institutions started to offer courses, either on commercial platforms like Coursera and Udacity or using own platform software. While many courses share the concept of lecture videos combined with automatically assessable assignments, and discussion forums, only few courses provide hands-on experience. The design of practical exercises poses a great challenge to a teaching team and gets even more challenging if these assignments should be gradable. In the course Internetworking with TCP/IP on the German MOOC platform openHPI, the teaching team conducted an experiment with three practical tasks that were implemented as assessed bonus exercises. The exercise design was limited by the constraint that the platform software could not be adapted for these exercises and that there could be no central training environment to perform these assignments. This paper describes the experiment setup, the challenges and pitfalls and evaluates the result based on statistical data and a survey taken by the course participants.