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Creator of MOOCulous Receives 2014 Crestron Summum Bonum Award

March 25, 2014

Creator of MOOCulous Receives 2014 Crestron Summum Bonum Award

Jim Fowler, assistant professor, mathematics, received the 2014 Crestron Summum Bonum Award for Excellence in Teaching at Ohio State’s annual Innovate conference on March 25, presented by the president of Crestron Electronics during the “Steal My Idea” component of the conference. The award recognizes the impact of Fowler’s innovative work on thousands of students across the world.

A year ago, Fowler brought calculus to the world, designing and teaching Ohio State's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), a Calculus MOOC, known as MOOCulus. It was a friendly introduction to calculus that facilitated self-study and interactive feedback. Living up to its name, 47,000 students signed up for Ohio State’s first MOOC spring semester 2013. The majority of the class was from outside the United States—the largest groups were from South America, India and East Asia.

Crestron Electronics created the Summum Bonum Award five years ago and each year since has presented the award to an educator with a track record of improving student achievement and making a difference in the lives of their students.

“I'm simply thrilled about receiving this,” Fowler said. “Crestron is providing a great opportunity to spread the news about online math education; the content that we're building is stuff that I wish I had as a kid, certainly, but we have to get the news out there that this is available.”

“The overall goal in building MOOCulus was to keep providing students with exercises difficult enough to be fun and educational, but not so easy as to become boring and repetitive,” Fowler said.

“For me, personally, I like the fact that we can use technology to make it possible for ordinary people to interact with abstraction, to play around with geometry, and to explore numerical relationships.”

Designing and running a MOOC is no easy task; the thirteen team members tracked their time—and racked up an astounding number of hours—1350, for Fowler alone. Fortunately, a lot of work to develop content could be reused.  

And it turned out to be a learning process for everyone. Despite their labor intensive nature, online math classes have the advantage of being very fluid. Fowler paid close attention to what visuals and videos worked and what did not. Student feedback was both useful and surprising.

“The most surprising thing for us was the realization that we were building a community—it seems counterintuitive, but people felt very strongly connected to the class and to the teaching staff. I had a lot of contact with students talking to me—and to each other. Actually, lots of people took the course to talk about math.

“The students feel engaged and help us improve content. It is a forum that allows students to be partners in the process.”

The level of student engagement extended beyond Fowlers’ wildest dreams:

One MOOCulus fan wrote that the way the course was taught inspired him to quit his job—

“When I saw the lectures, I was moved and motivated. It never feels that we are studying through videos; it feels as if we are personally guided. It affected me so much that I left my job to present the concepts in the same way to my students.”

—Another wrote to say his 11-year-old daughter beat him on the final exam—

—But perhaps the greatest tribute of all was from parents who said their five-year-old can't fall asleep without the calculus videos.

The world has spoken and it has said “More Calculus.”

So—this spring the world is getting more calculus. Jenny George is the instructor of record for Calculus One while Fowler is running Calculus Two.

“And then we're running a very experimental multivariable calculus course called ‘M2O2C2: Massively multivariable open online calculus course.’ This is up at ximera.osu.edu, which is a platform that we're building as part of the NSF grant that Herb Clemens, Bart Snapp and I were awarded last September,” Fowler said.

“Our short-term goal is to build ‘self-paced’ versions of the Calculus courses. Right now, a lot of people want to take them, but our schedules are often not well-aligned with their schedule.  I hope that ximera.osu.edu can be one place where we'll deploy these courses.”

The long-term goal is to inspire more students to look at calculus in whole new ways.

And Fowler can’t imagine being able to do this anywhere else. “There aren't really other institutions where I can both be doing pure math ("big data") while also being so involved with "big teaching," he said.

--Sandi Rutkowski, Arts and Sciences Communications

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