AAEE2016 CONFERENCE Coffs Harbour, Australia This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1 Through Engineers’ Eyes: a MOOC Experiment Robin Ford a , Lorenzo Vigentini b,c , John Vulic b ; Mahsa Chitsaz b and B. Gangadhara Prusty a School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering a , Portfolio of the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) b , School of Computer Science & Engineering c - UNSW Australia Corresponding Author Email: G.Prusty@unsw.edu.au CONTEXT Like the dog that caught a bus, when we caught a MOOC we wondered what to do with it. We decided to invite people to develop 'Engineers' Eyes' through learning basic engineering mechanics. MOOC participants come from a love of a topic or interest in it, but they have other competing interests. They sign on at the click of a mouse, and can just as easily bail out. We had to make our offering interesting. We aimed for friendly, authoritative and fun. PURPOSE We wanted to find out about MOOCs from the inside, and see how they could be used, for example for promotional material, or as a part of blended learning. APPROACH Although we looked briefly at other MOOCs, we minimised constraints in the creation process and followed where our own thinking led. We assumed that participants would also follow their interests and not be looking for a qualification – "a piece of paper". We would like people to stay in our course, but if they discontinued there was no thought of failure on either side. This provided a wonderful lightness of spirit. RESULTS As we finalise this paper we have almost finished the second offering of our MOOC. We have analysed student responses to the first run and they are positive, but there is always room for improvement and we made changes accordingly. We have yet to analyse student responses to the second run, but at first glance it seems that our changes have been well received. CONCLUSIONS Our MOOC has been hard work, exciting, instructive, and an insight into the globalisation of learning. It looks good at present, but time will tell. But we have done it and have much experience from practice to share with the educational community on what it is like and how we plan to improve it. KEYWORDS MOOC, adaptive tutorials, mechanics, engineering.