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.
, , , , and . 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 117 times (shared with L@S14◊). Cited 29 times.
, , , , and . 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. DOI 10.1145/2556325.2566244. Acceptance rate: 37%. Citations reported under TOCHI15◊. Cited 77 times.