1. There is a file rank.tsv (334 kb) that displays for every course on an hourly basis the rankings
2. There is a file vote.tsv (113 kb) that contains for every course on an hourly basis (between may 20th and today) the number of votes the course did acquire. The period of time for vote.tsv is so short since the votes have only been available in the html files during this time. 

Skimming the data with my eyes there are already some facts that make me very curious for a deeper data analysis:

1. Some courses gained several hundred votes within a short period of time (usually only 2 or 3 hours) whereas most courses (especially those gaining such a large amount of votes) often stayed far under 1000 votes at all. 
2. Also it is interesting to see how much variation has been going on in the last couple of days. 
3. Also I haven’t crawled the views of the Youtube videos of the courses and even now after observing the following I did not take a snapshot of them it is interesting that there is such a large difference in conversion rate. Especially the top courses seem to have much more votes than they have views of the application video. Where some really high class and outstanding applications like the ones from Chrstian Spannagel (Math) or  Oliver Vornberger (Algorithms and data structures) have two or three times as many views on Youtube as votes. Especially they have about the same amount of views on Youtube as the top voted courses.

I am pretty sure there are some more interesting facts and maybe someone else has collected a better data set over the complete periode of time and including Youtube snapshots as well as Facebook and Twitter mentions.
Since I have been asked several times already: here are the final rankings to download and also as a table in the blog post:

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.

Course context (level, students, discipline, etc.)

The course was designed for 16 highly gifted high school students (11th and 12th grade). The level was supposed to be manageable for a second year undergraduate student. Since our students came from different grades and schools we were forced to sacrifice some course time to teach some basic programming skills. Thus we could not cover all the aspects of Web Science. Instead we focused on three main course objectives:

Course objectives and targeted competencies

By the end of the course our students should…

1. understand the current web architecture in particular the decentralized and open aspects.
2. gain the ability to form and defend a solid opinion on currently ongoing ethical discussions related to the Web.
3. realize that the study of the Web needs much broader skill set than knowledge about Computer Science.

Course content (Structure, sections, topics, references)

All students were asked to prepare a talk and read the book ”Weaving the Web” by Sir Tim Berners-Lee before the summer school started. Ten of the talks included the technical foundations starting with binary numbers going all the way to the application layer and all the necessary protocols. This included the theoretical study of IP, TCP and HTTP as well as routing algorithms (BGP ) and DNS. To ensure a better understanding the students had to form groups and implement a simple Web Server and a Web Client that were able to process HTTP1.0 GET requests during course time. This was done using the Java Programming Language and the socket classes from the Java API. These topics have been covered in the first week of the course. In the second half we focused on the ethics of the web. After each talk on an ethical topic which was supposed to give an overview for about 20 minutes we entered a 2 hour group discussion. For example for the discussion on net neutrality we knew the following groups of interests from the overview talk: Large internet providers, big web companies, small web companies, politicians, consumers. Students were randomly assigned to one of these groups. Within 10 minutes they had to prepare a list of arguments that would reflect the interests of their particular group as well as arguments they would expect from other groups. While discussing the issue on a round table they had to find a good solution respecting the technical nature of the web and the interests of their group.

Evaluation methods (Tests, projects, papers,etc.)

Even though the Summer School is very competitive participation is voluntary so there can’t be an exam or something similar in the end. Also all work had to be completed during the 50 hours course time without any home work assignments. We had three evaluation methods to ensure the comprehension of the course content.
1. Hacking Project: As already mentioned students implemented a Web Server and Web Client during the first half of the course. Being in groups of 2 or 3 students and being new to programming we teachers helped students out which gave us a nice feedback whether or not students understood the content.
2. Oral presentation: After the middle of the course students had to prepare and give a presentation to be consumed by an interdisciplinary audience i.e the students from other courses of the summer school, which are all not covering any IT topics. We asked the students to create a theatre role-play of what happens if someone types www.wikipedia.org into a web browser and hits the enter key. All students placed routing tables on the seats for the audience, created TCP / IP packets (filled with candy that represented the time to live) and routed DNS requests as well as HTTP requests together with the TCP handshake around the audience in the class room demonstrating that the basic decentralized web architecture was understood by everyone in the course.
3. Paper Writing: During the last days of the course the students were expected to collectively prepare a 25 pages documentation with scientific standards of what they have learned during the summer school. The process of creating this documentation is not only guided by us teachers but gives also a nice feedback loop to see if the goals of the course have been achieved.
Overall we can say that the concept of the course worked really well. Especially putting such a high focus on the Web Architecture and actually letting students implement protocols helped to gain a deeper understanding.