Thomas Staubitz

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at German University of Digital Science

Teamwork is an an important topic in education. It fosters deep learning and allows educators to assign interesting tasks, which would be too complex to be solved by single participants due to the time restrictions defined by the context of a course.Furthermore, today's jobs require an increasing amount of team skills. On the other hand, teamwork c...

This Research-to-Practice paper examines the practical application of various forms of collaborative learning in MOOCs. Since 2012, about 60 MOOCs in the wider context of Information Technology and Computer Science have been conducted on our self-developed MOOC platform. The platform is also used by several customers, who either run their own platf...

The ability to work in teams is an important skill in today's work environments. In MOOCs, however, team work, team tasks, and graded team-based assignments play only a marginal role. To close this gap, we have been exploring ways to integrate graded team-based assignments in MOOCs. Some goals of our work are to determine simple criteria to match t...

Lifelong learning plays an increasingly important role in many societies. Technology is changing faster than ever and what has been important to learn today, may be obsolete tomorrow. The role of informal programs is becoming increasingly important. Particularly, Massive Open Online Courses have become popular among learners and instructors. In 200...

In the report innovative formats for online teaching are described which are used in the German University of Digital Science, the first digital university in Germany.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a popular form of online education that often attracts a huge and heterogeneous group of learners with diverse interests and backgrounds. However, most MOOCs follow a one-size-fits-all approach, providing a fixed order of learning materials and expecting all learners to follow this recommended path. Thus, the...

From June 14 to June 16, 2023, Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, hosted the eighth European MOOC Stakeholder Summit (EMOOCs 2023). The pandemic is fortunately over. It has once again shown how important digital education is. How well-prepared a country was could be seen in our schools, universities, and companies. In different countries, the probl...

Nowadays, there are many online courses like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) available from different providers (e.g. edX, Coursera, openHPI, OpenWHO, iMOOX). To support learners, aggregators like Class Central or MOOChub were established. These aggregators hold catalogs with the offerings of the providers making them a central entry point for...

Der Abschlussbericht des KI-Campus stellt zum Ende der ersten Förderphase (Oktober 2019 - Dezember 2022) die zentralen Ergebnisse des Projekts vor und gibt einen Ausblick auf zukünftige Entwicklungen. Der KI-Campus (www.ki-campus.org) ist die Lernplattform für Künstliche Intelligenz mit kostenlosen Online-Kursen, Videos und Podcasts zur Stärkung vo...

The MOOChub is a joined web-based catalog of all relevant German and Austrian MOOC platforms that lists well over 750 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Automatically building such a catalog requires that all partners describe and publicly offer the metadata of their courses in the same way. The paper at hand presents the genesis of the idea to e...

With the growing number of online learning resources, it becomes increasingly difficult and overwhelming to keep track of the latest developments and to find orientation in the plethora of offers. AI-driven services to recommend standalone learning resources or even complete learning paths are discussed as a possible solution for this challenge. To...

World Health Organization's (WHO) emergency learning platform OpenWHO provided by Hasso Plattner Institut (HPI) delivered online learning in real-time and in multiple languages during the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge was to move from manual transcription and translation to automated to increase the speed and quantity of materials and languages...

Massive Open Online Courses, kurz MOOCs, sind Online-Kurse mit einer großen Zahl an Teilnehmer:innen, die zumeist auf speziellen Plattformen kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Mit dem Kurs zur Künstlichen Intelligenz von Sebastian Thrun mit über 160.000 Lernenden fanden MOOCs zunehmend Verbreitung. Spätestens seit der COVID19-Pandemie sind si...

Der MOOChub ist eine Webseite, die weit über 700 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum von insgesamt neun unterschiedlichen Partner:innen listet. Damit eine solche Seite automatisiert aufgebaut werden kann, ist es notwendig, dass alle Partner:innen die Metadaten der Kurse in gleicher Weise beschreiben und verfügbar mach...

Anlässlich des 10-jährigen Jubiläums von openHPI informiert dieser technische Bericht über die HPI-MOOC-Plattform einschließlich ihrer Kernfunktionen, Technologie und Architektur. In einer Einleitung wird die Plattformfamilie mit allen Partnerplattformen vorgestellt; diese belaufen sich inklusive openHPI aktuell auf neun Plattformen. In diesem Absc...

On the occasion of the 10th openHPI anniversary, this technical report provides information about the HPI MOOC platform, including its core features, technology, and architecture. In an introduction, the platform family with all partner platforms is presented; these now amount to nine platforms, including openHPI. This section introduces openHPI as...

Many participants in Massive Open Online Courses are full-time employees seeking greater flexibility in their time commitment and the available learning paths. We recently addressed these requirements by splitting up our 6-week courses into three 2-week modules followed by a separate exam. Modularizing courses offers many advantages: Shorter module...

Der KI-Campus ist vor zwei Jahren in einer Beta-Version online gegangen. Anlässlich dieses Jubiläums stellt das Konsortium zentrale Arbeiten und Ergebnisse des Projektzeitraums 2019-2022 vor. Mit einem starken Netzwerk an Partnern konnten vielfältige innovative Lernangebote entwickelt und zahlreiche Lernende und KI-Interessierte erreicht werden. Üb...

In 2017, Geoffrey West published his book "Scale" in which he examined universal laws of scale in different contexts. Inspired by his keynote in 2021's Learning@Scale conference, we investigated the applicability of these laws in the context of Massive Open Online Courses and learners' behavior. We tested these laws on different learning platforms...

Since the Covid19-pandemic, digital teaching in higher education institutions has taken on an unintended but all in all a significant momentum (Pausits et al., 2021). Overnight, institutions were forced to switch at least partly to exclusively full distance teaching. This also helped MOOCs to gain further momentum, as it was precisely these courses...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) remarkably attracted global media attention, but the spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of English-language providers. While Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn received most of the attention and scrutiny, an entirely new ecosystem of local MOOC providers was growing in parallel. This ecosystem is h...

Im Zuge des zweiten Universitätssemesters unter Pandemiebedingungen war nicht nur die Durchführung von digitalen Veranstaltungen eine Hürde, sondern auch die Frage nach den Prüfungen und Klausuren. Losgelöst von Institut, Fachbereich und Standort mussten Lehrende eine Antwort auf technische, organisatorische und rechtliche Fragen finden. Die vorlie...

The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented global demand for learning about the disease and how to manage it. This paper draws on the World Health Organization (WHO)'s experience of COVID-19 knowledge-transfer to a worldwide audience of millions of learners registered on OpenWHO, WHO's massive open online course platform. It aims to illustrat...

The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented global demand for learning about the disease and how to manage it. This paper draws on the World Health Organization (WHO)'s experience of COVID-19 knowledge-transfer to a worldwide audience of millions of learners registered on OpenWHO, WHO's massive open online course platform. It aims to illustrat...

Conference proceeding of the EMOCs 2021 confernce in Potsdam (Germany)

Online learning environments, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), often rely on videos as a major component to convey knowledge. However, these videos exclude potential participants who do not understand the lecturer’s language, regardless of whether that is due to language unfamiliarity or aural handicaps. Subtitles and/or interactive tra...

We report on a systematic review of the landscape of peer assessment in massive open online courses (MOOCs) with papers from 2014 to 2020 in 20 leading education technology publication venues across four databases containing education technology-related papers, addressing three research issues: the evolution of peer assessment in MOOCs during the p...

The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) successfully operates a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform since 2012. Since 2013, global enterprises, international organizations, governments, and research projects funded by the German ministry of education are partnering with us to operate their own instances of the platform. The focus of our platform...

Our digital and geographically distributed society faces great challenges nowadays in managing communication between people—who in most cases—have never met each other before. This is particularly relevant for institutions working with peers that interact in remote environments where team collaboration is an essential driver of strategic innovation...

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in various regions of the world through the years. Since 2008, this phenomenon has received plenty of attention from higher education and universities across countries began to produce these courses. The countries of Europe and the United States are the world's leading producers of MOOCs and r...

This workshop proposes specifically soliciting contributions and presentations from initiatives, programs, and platforms around the world. While many of these may already be pre-sented at the full conference, we are also interested in more casual experience reports, case studies, and background presentations from individuals more closely acquainted...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of global, English-language providers, but there are a growing number of regional providers of MOOCS in languages other than English. In this work, we have partnered with...

2020 Association for Computing Machinery. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of global, English-language providers, but there are a growing number of regional providers of MOOCS in languages other than Engl...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are an interactive eLearning course format, originally focussing on social collaboration and interaction. Considering this, why do most of the nowadays MOOCs provide only few interactive course elements, but instead resemble classic teaching methods? Gameful learning is one possible option how to employ more enga...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened new educational possibilities for learners around the world. Numerous providers have emerged, which usually have different targets (geographical, topics or language), but most of the research and spotlight has been concentrated on the global providers and studies with limited generalizability. In this...

Eine digitale Lernplattform, die Kompetenzen zu Künstlicher Intelligenz stärkt: Das ist ein neues Pilotvorhaben des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung. In den ersten drei Jahren sind Studierende eine Hauptzielgruppe – und Hochschulen sind aufgefordert, sich zu beteiligen.

This paper presents the process and results of applying a qualitative learner-centered approach in redesigning the Collab Space, a virtual space for groups and teams to work on their assignments at the German MOOC provider openHPI. We followed the Stanford design thinking model in assessing the functionality of the Collab Space and prototyped and t...

Since their inception, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have generated significant attention from students and particularly lifelong learners. This has led to increased interest from academic institutions to develop their own online platforms or to collaborate with other existing platforms, such as edX, to offer their MOOCs. This chapter focuses...

Like many other sectors, today's education and training system is heavily disrupted - digitization, new technologies and changing learning needs pose immense challenges, particularly to the higher education sector. In this context, the popularization of online education has strongly accelerated in the past few years, especially through new technolo...

Presentation for my 2019 Learning@Scale paper

Computer science education in German schools is often less than optimal. It is only mandatory in a few of the federal states and there is a lack of qualified teachers. As a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) provider with a German background, we developed the idea to implement a MOOC addressing pupils in secondary schools to fill this gap. The cours...

A typical problem in MOOCs is the missing opportunity for course conductors to individually support students in overcoming their problems and misconceptions. This paper presents the results of automatically intervening on struggling students during programming exercises and offering peer feedback and tailored bonus exercises. To improve learning su...

With the increasing use of graded team-based assignments on our MOOC platforms-openHPI, openSAP, and mooc.house - we see the need to consult the opinion of our course participants about their perception of these tasks and the sufficiency of the platform support. Since we introduced the feature in May 2016, seven courses that included team-based ass...

MOOCs are arriving to the business sector. Especially within Human Resource Development and customer training. While some companies offer their own MOOCs, a few companies use external MOOCs to complement their HR offers. However, the awareness and perception level among HR managers in general is still lower as expected. On the other hand, many lear...

MOOCs, and open education in general, are providing new learning opportunities for millions of people. Investments in and the uptake of MOOCs are more and more significant worldwide. The 2018 OpenupEd trend report on MOOCs presents the latest innovations and developments in MOOCs from a European perspective.

This work presents insights about the long-term effects and retention rates of knowledge acquired within MOOCs. In 2015 and 2017, we conducted two introductory MOOCs on object-oriented programming in Java with each over 10,000 registered participants. In this paper, we analyze course scores, quiz results and self-stated skill levels of our particip...

A typical problem in MOOCs is the missing opportunity for course conductors to individually support students in overcoming their problems and misconceptions. This paper presents the results of automatically intervening on struggling students during programming exercises and offering peer feedback and tailored bonus exercises. To improve learning su...

Teamwork and collaborative learning are considered superior to learning individually by many instructors and didactical theories. Particularly, in the context of e-learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) we see great benefits but also great challenges for both, learners and instructors. We discuss our experience with six team based assignm...

The article outlines five findings and seven key trends for (potential) corporate MOOCs based on a recent study and the evaluation of pilot runs of three corporate MOOCs in 2017 and 2018. MOOCs and their digital successors could become a game- changer in business education and disrupt the way how companies grow talent and employees improve career p...

Auto-gradable hands-on programming exercises are a key element for scalable programming courses. A variety of auto-graders already exist, however, creating suitable high- quality exercises in a sufficient amount is a very time-consuming and tedious task. One way to approach this problem is to enable sharing auto-gradable exercises between several i...

Programming tasks are an important part of teaching computer programming as they foster students to develop essential programming skills and techniques through practice. The design of educational problems plays a crucial role in the extent to which the experiential knowledge is imparted to the learner both in terms of quality and quantity. Badly de...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have left their mark on the face of education during the recent years. At the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, we are actively developing a MOOC platform, which provides our research with a plethora of e-learning topics, such as learning ana- lytics, automated assessment, peer assessment, team-...

Despite the importance of competencies in computer science for participation in the digital transformation of nearly all sectors, there is still a lack of learning material and technically experienced teachers in German schools. In the paper at hand, we investigate the potential of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for secondary education. School...

Programming tasks are an important part of teaching computer programming as they foster students to develop essential programming skills and techniques through practice. The design of educational problems plays a crucial role in the extent to which the experiential knowledge is imparted to the learner both in terms of quality and quantity. Badly de...

Die Glaubwürdigkeit und Überprüfbarkeit der Zertifikate ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil von jeglicher Form von zertifiziertem Training. Diese Aussage gilt natürlich auch für MOOCs. In diesem Kontext kommt allerdings erschwerend hinzu, dass eine individuelle, persönliche Beaufsichtigung der Prüfungen tausender TeilnehmerInnen offline nur schwer zu...

In many MOOCs hands-on exercises are a key component. Their format must be deliberately planned to satisfy the needs of a more and more heterogeneous student body. At the same time, costs have to be kept low for maintenance and support on the course provider's side. The paper at hand reports about our experiments with a tool called Vagrant in this...

The paper at hand introduces CodeOcean, a web-based platform to provide practical programming exercises. CodeOcean is designed to be used in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach programming to beginners. CodeOcean’s concept and implementation are discussed with regard to tools provided to students and teachers, sandboxed and scalable code e...

This paper at hand describes the design and implementation of an analytics service to retrieve live usage data from students enrolled in a service-oriented MOOC platform for the purpose of learning analytics (LA) research. A real-time and extensible architecture for consolidating and processing data in versatile analytics stores is introduced.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have revolutionized higher education by offering university-like courses for a large amount of learners via the Internet. The paper at hand takes a closer look on peer assessment as a tool for delivering individualized feedback and engaging assignments to MOOC participants. Benefits, such as scalability for MOOCs...

In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a phenomenon offering the possibility to teach thousands of participants simultaneously. In the same time the platforms used to deliver these courses are still in their fledgling stages. While course content and didactics of those massive courses are the primary key factors for the su...

We have addressed the problems of independent e-lecture learning with an approach involving collaborative learning with lecture recordings. In order to make this type of learning possible, we have prototypically enhanced the video player of a lecture video platform with functionality that allows simultaneous viewing of a lecture on two or more comp...

Credibility is a central feature for every certified training. The same applies for MOOCs. Individual supervision of participants in study centers reaches its limits when having thousands of students. Thus online proctoring as a means to handle the amount of participants in MOOCs seems to be a suitable way to increase certificate valuation. We comp...

In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a phenomenon presenting the prospect of free high class education to everybody. They bear a tremendous potential for teaching programming to a large and diverse audience. The typical MOOC components, such as video lectures, reading material, and easily assessable quizzes, however, are...

In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs—particularly, platform-based or so called xMOOCs) have become a phenomenon presenting the prospect of free high class education to anyone by offering the possibility to teach thousands of participants simultaneously. MOOCs are a highly effective and valuable tool in the context of life-long learni...

The paper at hand evaluates the Massive Open On- line Course (MOOC) Spielend Programmieren Lernen (Playfully learning to program), an effort to scale the youth development program at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for a larger audience. The HPI has a strong tradition in attracting children and adolescents to take their first steps towards a car...

Massive Open Online Courses have gained more and more popularity in the recent years. Video Content contributes a vital aspect of the learning experience in MOOCs. The paper at hand proposes ways to optimize the video experience in MOOCs. Single stream videos will be considered as well as the openHPI's dual stream video player. openHPI is the MOOC...

This paper presents our findings of a comparison study conducted on three iterations of a MOOC run on our platform openHPI. We present the main facts shared by the courses and the planned as well as occurred differences. Additionally, we discuss the added technical features such as user groups along with the expected and actual outcomes. We relate...

High dropout rates and poor user participation are some of the major challenges for xMOOC providers. Similar to others, openHPI also faces these problems. Gamification is a mechanism that recently has been successfully employed to raise user motivation in web applications. A concept to gamify the openHPI platform has been proposed and implemented....

Particularly in the context of education and e-learning, the topics social interaction and collaboration have been a little strained during the recent decades. Particularly, stakeholders1 with an educational background often criticize that xMOOCs follow an approach that is too close to traditional frontal instruction; that they lack sophisticated o...

Particularly in the context of education and e-learning, the topics social interaction and collaboration have been a little strained during the recent decades. Particularly, stakeholders1 with an educational background often criticize that xMOOCs follow an approach that is too close to traditional frontal instruction; that they lack sophisticated o...

A lot of research has been done in maintaining and increasing the intrinsic motivation of learners within online courses. Especially in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), where, due to the high amount of course participants, personal supervision cannot be offered this is crucial to avoid high dropout rates. The users’ journey into the world of on...

The process of assessment grading does not end on publishing the grades and assessment results. Often, discussions about single grades arise in post-exam reviews. While in traditional teaching and smaller online classes this can be handled on a per-user based approach, in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with thousands of e-assessment submission...

There is a great demand for hands-on training in engineering education. In the context of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), assessing these experiments manually by teaching assistants is not possible owed to the high number of participants and the resulting workload for the teaching team. Systems for machine-based assessment of coding tasks are...

openHPI is the educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), Potsdam. The HPI offers massive open online courses covering different subjects in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on the platform. Five courses have been concluded after one year of operation in German as well as in English language, each wit...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been one of the major trend topics of the last years within the e-learning community. Many companies, such as Coursera, edX and Udacity, launched MOOCs offering a broad range of topics. In this paper, the authors will take a look at the mobile support of different MOOC providers. Use cases and benefits of mo...