The new studio setup features a lighting grid.

The Faculty Advisory Committee for Online Education (FACOE), chaired by Judy Raggi Moore, is a newly-formed committee that handles Emory’s various online education offerings. Comprised of about a dozen faculty members from different disciplines, the committee possesses a broad mix of interests and backgrounds that lead to challenging discussions from a variety of angles. Although Coursera course selection was the first official act of the committee, the guiding mission of the group is to advise the provost to help shape our broader vision for online education.

Following last year’s initial Coursera offering at Emory, the FACOE began the process of selecting the courses for the 2013-14 academic year. The application process began late last spring and interested faculty provided information about course learning objectives and how the classes could benefit and support their residential courses.

The slate for 2014, which can be seen at coursera.org/emory, includes another session of last year’s Digital Sound Design class, as well as a broad mix of subjects from a variety of disciplines.

For the Coursera team in Faculty Services, the first three classes served as a potent learning experience. The team learned what the platform could and couldn’t do and helped hone best practices for upcoming courses. Timing is a major factor and the team is now better able to plan and create complete and useful schedules.

The team has expanded significantly since the first slate of courses, with an intent on expanding and improving our production capabilities. We’ve recently added three new members: Ray Jones, Stephanie Parisi, and Dina Warnock (Academic Technology Services).  Ray bolsters our video production capability, Stephanie performs instructional design and guides faculty in the development of their course structure and Dina crafts the footage into course modules.

Steve Bransford and Shannon O’Daniel (Academic Technology Services) also continue to provide expert production guidance as we begin work on our 2014 slate of courses. We also just finished a professional renovation of our studio space, including a lighting grid and upgraded cameras. Our plan is to have the best-looking, best-organized courses on the Coursera platform and to be able to bring that expertise to video content produced for residential courses.