• A click and point experience for teachers to create classes
• On page discussion for students which supports the standard discussion system in Mediawiki
• a nice modern navigation which adapts to users while interacting with the page

For me with this system our videos, quizes and scripts content shines in a much brighter light than it did before. For the first time I have fun consuming our the content of the MOOC.
For me this was an important step towards my goal of freeing educational content. Not only that our MOOC is completely OER we now also create core infrastructure for any teacher to create more classes that are OER. If you consider doing such a class feel free to drop be a message and receive free support. You could also start reading the documentation of the MOOC-Interface or see the slides(: 

I am looking forward to hear back from you.

• Ethernet
• Internet Protocol
• Transfer Controll Protocol
• Domain Name System
• URIs
• HTTP
• HTML
• RDF
• Javascript / CSS

The Ethernet lessons can be found at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/Internet_Architecture/Ethernet
 
The Internet protocol lessons can be found at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/Internet_Architecture/Internet_Protocol
 
Since wikiversity in comparison to other MOOC platforms is truely open you might also want to watch some of my introductory videos. They are in particular helpful to show how to make the best use of wikiversity as MOOC platform and how one can really engage into the discussion.  You can find the videos at: 
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/New_here
 
but maybe your are already interested in watching some of the content right here right away: 
 

Background:

According to my former blog post there are  3 ways for creating a MOOC that is truely OER:

• khan academy
• wikiversity
• selfhosting

Out of these I would love to discuss what possibilities exist in the context of Wikiversity and how such a MOOC could benefit from the ecosystem of other Wikimedia projects (e.g. books, commons, wikipedia and of course wikiversity itself)
I would also love to create a list of requirements for wikiversity software with functionalities needed (e.g. access to multiple choice results of students) to create an OER MOOC. This list could be present to the wikimedia foundation in order to extend the wikiversity software.

My experiences:

• I have created a German online course in Wikiversity on how Computers work
• Currently I am creating an English MOOC on Webscience which we will use in our university together with flipped classroom for the Web Science lecture. The content of the first block is almost ready: 

• google file system (implemented in hadoop file system)
• map reduce (implemented in hadoop)
• google big table (implemented in hbase)
• google pregel (implemented in giraph)
• amazon dynamo (imiplemented in cassandra)
• On the way we will probably dig into some basics like: Message passing interface or the gossip protocol or the CAP-Theorem

Along these lines we want to understand

• Why do these technologies scale? 
• How do they handle concurrent traffic (especially write requests)?
• How performance can be increased if there is another way of building up such highly scalable systems?
• What kind of applications (like titan or mahout) are build on top of these systems?

As stated above the reading club will be much more hand on in future than before I expect us to also deliver tutorials like that one on getting Nutch running on top of HBase and Solr. 
Even though we want to get hands on in current technologies the goal is rather to understand the principles behind them and find ways of improving them instead of just applying them to various problems.
I am considering to start a wikipage on wikiversity to create something like a course on big data management but I would only do this if I find a couple of people who would actively help to contribute to such a course. So please contact me if you are interested!
So to sum up the reading assignment for the first meeting are the Google file system and the map reduce paper.

• Response times for requests are usually less than 10 milliseconds (+network i/o e.g. TCP round trips coming from HTTP)
• The Graphity News Stream Server is a free open source software (GPLv3) and hosted in the metalcon git repository. (Please also use the bug tracker there to submit bugs and feature requests)
• It is running two Graphity algorithms: One is read optimized and the other one is write optimized, if you expect your application to have more write than read requests.
• The server comes with an REST API which makes it easy to hang in the server in whatever application you have.
• The server’s response also follows the activitystrea.ms format so out of the box there are a large amount of clients available to render the response of the server.
• The server ships together with unit tests and extensive documentation especially of the news stream server protocol (NSSP) which specifies how to talk to the server. The server can currently handle about 100 write requests in medium size (about a million nodes) networks. I do not recommend to use this server if you expect your user base to grow beyond 10 Mio. users (though we are working to get the server scaling) This is mostly due to the fact that our data base right now won’t really scale beyond one machine and some internal stuff has to be handled synchronized.

Koding.com is currently thinking to implement Graphity like algorithms to power their activity streams. It was for Richard from their team who pointed out in a very fruitfull discussion how to avoid the neo4j limit of 2^15 = 32768 relationship types by using an overlay network. So his ideas of an overlay network have been implemented in the read optimized graphity algorithm. Big thanks to him!
Now I am relly excited to see what kind of applications you will build when using Graphity.

If you’ll use graphity

Please tell me if you start using Graphity, that would be awesome to know and I will most certainly include you to a list of testimonials.
By they way if you want to help spreading the server (which is also good for you since more developer using it means higher chance to get newer versions) you can vote up my answer in stack overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202198/whats-the-best-manner-of-implementing-a-social-activity-stream/13171306#13171306

How to get started

its darn simple!

1. You clone the git repository or get hold of the souce code.
2. then switch to the repo and type sudo ./install.sh
3. copy the war file to your tomcat webapps folder (if you don’t know how to setup tomcat and maven which are needed we have a detailed setup guide)
4. and you’re done more configuration details are in our README.md!
5. look in the newswidget folder to find a simple html / java script client which can interact with the server.

Get involved

There are plenty ways to get involved:

• Fork the server
• commit some bug report
• Fix a bug
• Subscribe to the mailing list.

Furhter links:

• git repository
• originial graphity blogpost
• graphity paper
• Stack overflow discussion on social activity streams (for voting thanks!)
• issue tracker

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

I go a little further than the definition and really require an open licence and also open formats of the documents:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be is an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

Taking this into account I’ll now compare OER platforms which offer services to host a MOOC. The upshot is that I would suggest to host your MOOC either on Khan Academy or on Wikiversity.

Kahn Academy

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational website created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The stated mission is to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere”. It is strongly supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and won the Google 10 to the 100 award giving them 2 million dollars. Currently the content is translated to various languages including German. You can find more information for instructors on the website at https://www.khanacademy.org/about

1. Overhead: You have to learn the Khan academy software
2. Open: Anyone can create courses on Khan academy. I am note quite sure about including videos since khan academy seems to require some standard branding.
3. Licence: CC 3.0 by Share alike
4. Hosting time: As long as the project is founded.
5. Open Format: The website provides an API to obtain data at http://api-explorer.khanacademy.org/ also all (?) source code of Khan academy is available: https://github.com/Khan
6. Feedback:Various Feedback mechanisms are provided as explained on the website
7. Quizes: Yes
8. Community:As far as I understand instructors cannot collaborate within the software
9. Audience:Yes: more than a quarter billion lessons have been delivered.
10. Support: There are a lot of online courses training the coach
11. Online Meetings: There are Q&A style discussions related to every content created
12. Account Management:
13. Risk: Besides Khan Academy running out of money I don’t see any risks

Recommendation: Khan Academy is a very good platform to choose once you want to host a massive open online course. The material as free and open. The platform and community is very active and there is a lot of outside support. Exporting data doesn’t seem to work yet but there seems to be the will to be open in the future. Anyway Khan Academy is the only open educational resources platform that offers you a user experience that is closest to the otherwise commercialized MOOC format.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content. Like Wikipedia it is offered in several languages. The English version of wikiversity seems quite active where as the German version is currently being restructured.

1. Overhead: Wiki markup language is very easy to learn. also there is the network of wiki tutors that can come to your place and teach you how to use mediawiki
2. Open: Anybody can contribute to Wikimedia projects
3. Licence: CC3.0 SA BY
4. Hosting time: Forever as long as Wikimedia exists
5. Open Format: Data base dumps are available and the software is open source
6. Feedback: So far there is little feedback for instructors but there are potential ways of changing this.
7. Quizes: yes
8. Community:Instructurs help each other out and also share content among each other. Minor mistakes in the material are quickly corrected.
9. Audience:There is a large audience, if the video content is uploaded to wiki commons and included into related wikipedia articles there is a high visibility of the MOOC at the targeted audience.
10. SupportEspecially in Germany there is the Mentoring network of Media wiki users who teach best practices of using media wiki software.
11. Online MeetingsHolger Brenner also uses media wiki on wikiversity to create online meetings but this is rather tricky
12. Account ManagementThere exist different user roles in media wiki but those are not really reflecting a student / teacher relationship
13. RiskBasically there are none. The data base dumps as well as the software are available for download. Even if the platform closes oneself can still easily host the content.

Recommendation: Mediawiki software is very flexible and offers a lot of opportunities. The software itself is not best suited for the “commercialized” massive open online course format. The biggest drawback is the missing analytics for instructors to see how the course is proceeding. On the other side if one actively uses wikiversity (which I did on my last course) one gets a lot of personal feedback. Wikiversity has a lot of trust (provided by wikipedia) and users to explore content and attract many new people. Also wikimedia really follows the concept of free content without any limitations. Finally Mediawiki is open source and also extensions can be included into Wikiversity if the community agrees to that.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library located at www.oercommons.org that provides a web-based infrastructure for teachers and others to search and discover Open Educational Resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials. OER Commons is a project created by ISKME, an independent non-profit organization based in Half Moon Bay, California, founded by Lisa Petrides in 2002. Launched in 2007, OER Commons aggregates Open Educational Resources, which are teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed for anyone to use and reuse, in order to support a global network for engaging with flexible, adaptable curriculum

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: to anybody. I don’t know about content moderation
3. Licence: Creative commons
4. Hosting time: hosting can be on any website.
5. Open Format: all formats supported
6. Feedback: No
7. Quizes: No
8. Community: Yes
9. Audience:not of students but rather of teachers collecting teaching material
10. Support: No
11. Online Meetings: No
12. Account Management: No
13. Risk: No

Recommendation: OER Commons is a very interesting approach since a lot of content that is needed for an open MOOC can be drawn from OER commons. All of the MOOC content can be integrated into OER commons and from this hub being spread to other instructors again. The platform itself doesn’t seem suitable to host an entire course. I think anybody who does a MOOC should submit his material to OER commons. This works really easily even if the content is just provided as a web link. I did this with my last course which was hosted on wikiversity

European MOOC platform open up ed

The european union created its own mooc platform under www.openuped.eu/.

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: only selected partners
3. Licence: partner choice
4. Hosting time: you host the mooc yourself
5. Open Format: your decision
6. Feedback: possible
7. Quizes:possible
8. Community: There is a network of partners but it’s hard to say how much collaboration exists
9. Audience:your own students
10. Support: n/a
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: possible
13. Risk: None

Recommendation: This platform seems interesting since there is political will behind. Right now it seems to only aggregate MOOCs from various partners so there is no hosting service offered. On the other side you maintain the licence of everything and can probably add an existing MOOC to the index of the platform ==> Nice to have but for now it cannot work as a standalone hosting service. Also it is not clear if you can participate since they work only with selected partners.

P2P University

Peer to Peer University (P2PU) is a nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. Peer 2 Peer University was started in 2009 with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The main learning management system for P2PU courses is called Lernanta (the Esperanto word for “learning”). P2PU also hosts a wiki and an OSQA server for questions and answers.

1. Overhead: low
2. Open: Anybody
3. Licence: CC SA BY
4. Hosting time: I did not spot video content
5. Open Format: As far as I see there is no standard format used
6. Feedback: through discussions
7. Quizes: no
8. Community: there are strong partners like mozilla connected to the project
9. Audience: doesn’t seem too large
10. Support: there is a lot of teaching about the platform in courses on the platform. since courses are p2p I assume there is quite some support
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: probably not
13. Risk: This platform doesn’t seem to be mature yet. Will it survive?

Recommendation: I like the approach of this learning platform but I have the feeling it is much more targeted towards learning groups from students. It also doesn’t seem to be very mature and it is not quite clear to what place it will develop. Also I could not find data base dumps on the website which decreases my trust into the platform.

Summary

I hope I did not oversee any platform. My advice is to go for either Khan Academy or Wikiversity and submit your entire course as well as pieces of the material to OER Commons. In that way I would also suggest to add part of the content of your course to wiki commons if can enhance any given wikipedia article. I think it is probably personal choice whether to go for Khan Academy or for Wikiversity. Personally I would probably go for Wikiversity since I already had good experiences and my trust to this platform with respect to long term sustainability is higher. Also out of the box more languages are supported. In any case: When you want to create a MOOC don’t let yourself be blinded by commercialized platforms and offers just because they look nicer. Education is something that belongs to the citizens!

1. Free content: The focus of these platforms (Khan Academy, Wikiversity, OER Commons, P2P university,…) lies in freeing educational content from the publishing industry. In most cases the focus seems to be on content and not so much on learning paths or didactics or pedagogy. The argumentation seems to be like: “first we need the content, next we can think about how to use it”. Have alook at my blog post: http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/comparison-of-open-educational-resources-services-to-host-your-mooc/ to see which open platforms perform well.
2. Commercial: There is a rising industry (Coursera, Udacity, edX, iversity,..) trying to commercialize massive open online education. Commercial platforms usually have high quality content and strong relationships with universities (most often ivy league) serving a lot of classes in this new format. Courses are usually not available under an open licence. So far most content is available at no cost and the business model is related to certification but also sometimes to tuition fees.
3. Self hosted with the use of a learning management system: There are various learning management systems (OLAT, Moodle, Google Course Builder, ILIAS,…) available as open source software which enables one to host a MOOC oneself. Most of these systems are made for eLearning and but lack this MOOC feeling of excellent usability. Often their intent also is not primary to be open.

This means besides this article I will publish three blog articles comparing platforms for each of the 3 different approaches. There is a German list of Learning platforms on Wikipedia as well as the MOOC Template in the English wikipedia from which I extracted the following lists

Platforms for online education

• MIT OpenCourseWare 
• Khan Academy 
• China Open Resources for Education 
• OpenCourseWare 
• Peer to Peer University 
• Academic Earth 
• Edulanka 
• ALISON
• Udacity 
• Coursera 
• Duolingo 
• edX 
• Canvas Network 
• Futurelearn 
• OpenHPI

People related to online education

• Anant Agarwal 
• Stephen Downes 
• Salman Khan 
• Daphne Koller 
• Peter Norvig 
• Andrew Ng 
• George Siemens 
• Sebastian Thrun

Not all of the platforms are relevant for a Web Science MOOC but still I extracted some of the most relevant sites and added a fiew others. As for the evaluation methodology we did a little survey and identified some possibilities. Since there are so many hosting services and possibilities we tried to find some dimensions that are important to us in order find which hosting service makes the most sense. We will use the following dimensions for our evaluation:

1. Overhead: How much overhead is associated providing the content for a certain platform infrastructure?
2. Open: Will the platform accept our course?
3. Licence: Who has the copyright and how is the licencing model?
4. Hosting time: How much time of hosting does the platform guarantee?
5. Open Format: Will the course content be in an open format so that we can easily export the data from the host and take it to some other service?
6. Feedback: Feedback for instructors like how long do people interact with some content?
7. Quizes: Will quizes be supported in the Platform
8. Community:Is there an active community and exchange of instructors?
9. Audience:Is there a large audience using the platform?
10. Support: is there active support from the platform?
11. Online Meetings: Does the platform support meetings of students and teachers on the cyberspace?
12. Account Management: Is it possible to have different roles for the accounts (e.g. student, tutor, creator,…)?
13. Risk: What are the risks of using this particular platform?

At least my goal would be to find a service with the following answers to our dimensions:

1. Overhead: Little overhead to submit the course material.
2. Open: The platform should be open to any course.
3. Licence: We should maintain the copyright or the licence should be at least creative commons
4. Hosting time: forever
5. Open Format: data export of the material is needed. e.g respecting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMS_Global
6. Feedback: In order to improve we need Feedback
7. Quizes: We need various forms of quizes
8. Community:A community of instructors with which one can exchange and from which one can learn would be amazing.
9. Audience:In the end good content will win but the larger the audience the better
10. Support: A platform that offers support with problems is preferable
11. Online Meetings: It would be nice if the platform supports online meetings of users with Q&A systems or even with video chat.
12. Account Management: Multiple account roles would support the learning process.
13. Risk: Obviously we want the risks to be minimized

I am looking forward to your feedback of missing platforms or other dimensions for the evaluation of the learning platforms.

Why creating such a cours?

The web has become important to its 2.3 billion users. Yet only a small group of people understand the processes that take place on it and quickly steer its development into new directions.

Novelty of the subject

Web Science is an upcoming academic field. Much information about the web already exists online, but no course that comprises all of it.

High value for every web user

The MOOC would be of high value and of relevance for anybody using the web e.g:

• A programmer who is building the next web application
• A company deciding their web strategy
• A judge who has to decide a case regarding net neutrality or copy right infringements
• The Government as well as public authorities which have to make decisions on how to regulate the web
• …

The web is the right place to learn about the web

The web itself is the best platform to educate people about the web since you can always point directly to the object of study. By creating a MOOC we will be able to aggregate, organize and filter much of the available information.

Integration within our institution

The MOOC will be a core element for the web science lecture of our web science master program. The goal is that students will work with the material provided by the MOOC and the instructors will replace classical lectures with public Q&A sessions. Additionally the Web Science lecture of 2013/2014 will serve as an internal testing of the MOOC such that the improved MOOC can launch on iversity in 2014.

Course content

This MOOC consists of ten lessons divided into three parts.

1. Lesson 1 – 3: Foundations of the web
2. Lesson 4 – 7: Theoretical results of web user behavior
3. Lesson 8 – 10: Web & society

Lesson 1 & 2: History of the Web & Web Architecture

You will understand the historical development of the web and see how the cold war in combination with advances in technical developments led to the Internet Protocol suite.

On each Layer you will know one protocol and understand how these protocols build an open, inter operable and decentralized system. Furthermore you will learn about the domain name system and find out why the concepts of URI and Hypertext were crucial for the success of the web.

Lesson 3: Structure of the Web

You will learn about the six degrees of seperation and understand concepts like small world networks by studying ‘the other’ Milgram experiment. You will be able to use power law distributions to describe the structure of the web, its content and its users.

Lesson 4 & 5: Micro and Macro behavior of web users & Social Network (Analysis)

You will be introduced to theories from Microsociology and see how applying them to the behavior of people on the web leads to macro structures such as:

• Influence
• Information Propagation
• Viral effects

Analyzing social network data from the Koblenz Network Collection using Octave you will gain a deeper understanding of social theories and social networks.

Lesson 6 & 7: Information Retrieval & Recommender systems

Completing this section you will understand the basic architecture of a (web) search engine. You can name the fundamental (non technical) difficulties one has in order to create a good information retrieval system. You will learn about the connection to recommender systems that are (not only!) used by large web shops to increase cross selling.
You will be able to discuss the danger of such algorithms like the relevance paradox and the filter bubble.

Lesson 8: Trust and Security

You will learn how third parties act as trust providers on the web and how this issue is related to markets with asymmetric information. You will see that trust issues in the online word differ from the offline problems. You will know of ways like cryptography, secure communication and certificates to resolve trust issues and how those techniques can even lead to a new currency.

Lesson 9: Web Economics

You will know of e-commerce models like online shopping & auctions as well as online advertising and marketing. You will be able to interpret and apply metrics for web analytics such as

• Conversion rate
• Click through rate
• Bounce rate

Lesson 10: Web Governance and Web Ethics

Finally you will understand the important role of institutions like W3C, IETF and ICANN . You will use your understanding of the web architecture to discuss and explain the connections between

• Net neutrality
• Piracy and copy right infringement
• Internet censorship and the freedom of speach

So please go to https://moocfellowship.org/submissions/web-science an learn more about the course and vote for it.

• Our application for the web science mooc (<-- vote now!) which I already blogged about this morning
• Teaching web architecture and web ethics to high school students

• the slides of the talk just given in at Rigour and Openness in Oxford
• the original product requirement document for the related work project
• technical slides about related work at FOSDEM 2013
• the source code
• the data

Btw it will be build on graphity to achieve scaling of the newsfeed