Mechanical MOOC

The Mechanical MOOC is a perfect example for a P2PU Labs project. It offers users a way to learn Python, and it’s a great experiment to find out how to automatically support peer-learning in small groups for very large courses.

It’s two things: A massive open online course (MOOC), and an experiment in how to offer these courses.

First, the course: We’re offering an eight-week course called A Gentle Introduction to Python. It is, as it sounds, a course in learning the basics of Python programming.

Second, the approach: Rather than trying to create a platform that structures the end-to-end learning experience, as recent MOOCs have done, we’re taking the best of existing open learning site—content from MIT OpenCourseWare, communities from OpenStudy, exercises by Codecademy—and joining them loosely with a mailing list that will coordinate student activity.

Instead of a professor or university organizing the class, our e-mail scheduler will do it–that’s why it’s mechanical.

More reading:

• Here is what the New York Times says about it.
• A first blog post about our ideas and plans for the project.

The MOOC lives at http://mechanicalmooc.org