Murdoch's AP Computer Science MOOC Goes Live

theodp writes "Friday saw the launch of Rupert Murdoch's AP Computer Science MOOC. Taught by an AP CS high school teacher, the Java-centric course has students use the DrJava lightweight development environment for the exercises. 'If this MOOC works,' said Amplify CEO Joel Klein, 'we can think of ways to expand and support it.' Only the first week's videos are posted; course content is scheduled to be presented through March, with five weeks thereafter set aside for AP Exam prep. Might as well check it out, you may have helped pay for it — a MOOC-related Amplify job listing notes that 'This position may be funded, in whole or in part, through American Recovery & Reinvestment Act funds.'"

Comments

Re:Was Java a good choice for the AP requirement?

[Trepidity]

As best I can determine:

It was Pascal for many years, which had once been widely used as an introductory language. But by the late-'90s Pascal was starting to be seen as an obsolete choice, and the exam was switched to C++ in 1999, with the justification being that C++ was widely used and more practlcal than Pascal.

However this move was seen by many educators as producing significant teaching complexities, since the classes (partly exacerbated by what material the exam chose to test) ended up spending an inordinate amount of time on accidental complexity that obscured real issues for novice programmers, like how iostreams works. I took AP CS in 1999, and we spent weeks on iostreams, along with miscellaneous other C++-specific nonsense. Dissatisfaction was high enough that the exam fairly quickly abandoned C++, but wasn't willing to go back to Pascal, which was still seen as obsolete. So they moved to Java in 2003, with the justification that Java could exercise many of the same concepts as C++ (you could teach OO and whatnot), but with less up-front complexity for novices. And it's stuck there since.

Re:MOOC

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nothing on the site explained what "MOOC" stood for"

and your not going to tell us either.

I guess the MO stands for Massively Online
And C stands for Course

I can't guess what the other O is for

Some wear "O" for the rainbow
Weigh a pie