An Innovative Educational Change: Massive Open Online Courses in Robotics and Robotic Vision

In this article, we discuss our experience in developing and implementing two massive open online courses (MOOCs) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. The MOOCs, titled Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision, each ran for six weeks and comprised online lectures, assessments, programming exercises, and an optional robot-making or vision-system-creating project, respectively. As well as being among the first MOOCs in the world on these topics at the undergraduate level, the QUT MOOCs were innovative in two particular areas: first in the integration of automatically graded MATLAB programming assignments and second in the use of an automated process for student-peer review of project outcomes.