Introduction to Recommender Systems MOOC

Joseph A. Konstan and I created (based on an initial plan by Joe and John Riedl) the Recommender Systems MOOC on Coursera. We originally offered it as a one-time 14-week course in the fall of 2013; due to the demand for a repeat offering, we have made a version of it available in a self-paced, on-demand format since January 2015.

The original course had both a concepts track and a programming track. The current course only contains the concepts track, due to platform limitations; we are working on plans to bring back the programming component.

We also took the opportunity to study the effectiveness of MOOCs as an educational tool, resulting in a paper at the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale that we later expanded for Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Through a pre- and post-course knowledge inventory, we showed that MOOC students do learn; the papers contain details on that and several other findings.

TOCHI15
2015

Joseph A. Konstan, J.D. Walker, D. Christopher Brooks, Keith Brown, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2015. Teaching Recommender Systems at Large Scale: Evaluation and Lessons Learned from a Hybrid MOOC. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22(2) (April 1st, 2015). DOI 10.1145/2728171. Impact factor: 1.293. Cited 115 times (shared with L@S14). Cited 28 times.

L@S14
2014

Joseph A. Konstan, J.D. Walker, D. Christopher Brooks, Keith Brown, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2014. Teaching Recommender Systems at Large Scale: Evaluation and Lessons Learned from a Hybrid MOOC. In Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (S ’14). ACM. Proc. L@S ’14. DOI 10.1145/2556325.2566244. Acceptance rate: 37%. Citations reported under TOCHI15. Cited 75 times.