In 2013, “massive open online courses” or MOOCs were all the rage. The startups Coursera and Udacity were founded to capitalize on this disruption of higher education. Udacity and San José State University teamed up to deliver “developmental” (i.e. remedial) math courses on the Udacity MOOC platform. It didn't work so well. Not really surprising. Teaching math with multiple choice questions, no textbooks, and no study sessions. To students who are struggling with the subject matter. “We stacked the deck against ourselves,” SJSU provost Junn said.
But there was another course that did much better: CS046—Introduction to Java Programming. Pass rates where higher than the on-campus course, and student performance was much higher, most likely due to the extensive programming practice.
The course was developed by myself, Cheng-Han Lee and Sara Tansey of Udacity, and Kathleen O'Brien from SJSU. We designed the course to be suitable for both SJSU students and for students and teachers in the AP CS course. Several hundred thousand students have registered for it.
Udacity had good ideas and venture money to realize them. The course videos are well planned and slickly produced.
Udacity has since pivoted from college education to “microdegrees”, and then, with the acquisition by a consulting company, to provide internal corporate training.
Even though Udacity's dreams of disrupting higher education are history, you can access all materials through the links below. Thanks to San José State University for having had the foresight to have their courses developed through a “creative commons” license.
If you want assign this material to your students so that you can check on their progress, use CodeCheck Assignments. Click on the Clone button for each lesson or problem set. Give the assignment URL to your students, or put it into your learning management system as an LTI link.
A huge thank you to the Internet Archive for providing this material!