Coursera online classes are comprised of three major components: video lectures, assessments, and interactions with/among students.
- Video Lectures:
- Classes usually offer 2 hours of pre-recorded video per week broken up into 8-15 minute chunks with embedded quiz questions in each chunk.
- Along with these videos you can also attach resources, such as accompanying slides that students can download.
- Students can watch the videos at 0.75x speed or at 1.5x speed, allowing for a personalized watching experience to maximize understanding and retention. The videos can also be paused, rewind, and repeated many times.
- English subtitles for all of Coursera videos
This is a sample video lecture from a course:
2. Assessments: Coursera offers four types of assessments.
- Standalone quiz: These quizzes can be assessed directly from the class page. Once a standalone quiz is submitted , it is automatically machine-graded based on the answer scheme provided by the instructor.
- In video quiz: These quizzes are used to test the students understanding while watching the lecture. These are mainly designed to complement the video lecture rather than test students.
- Programming Assignments: Coding assignments too can be auto graded using the internal and external auto graders provided by Coursera.
- Peer assessments: Typically used in humanities, social science, and design engineering classes, peer assessments allow instructors to assign essays, long-answer questions, drawings, designs, photographs, video, music and so on.
For more information on assessments check this link.
3. Interacting with students: There are a few ways to interact with students.
- Discussion Forums: Vibrant discussion forums where the students can post questions, feed backs or have discussions.
- Announcements & Emails: Remind students about important dates and upon uploading of lectures.
- Wikis: Most of Coursera classes employ wikis for students to contribute to.
- Google Hangouts: Weekly video chats to address issues raised in the forums are extremely popular.
The following overview video details some of the capabilities and features of the Coursera platform.