Are MOOCs an appropriate pedagogy for training K-12 teachers computer science concepts?

Abstract

Many K-12 teachers want to incorporate computer programming topics into their K-12 curricula but have no idea where to start. Few K-12 state learning standards include computer science standards and most university teacher preparation programs are lacking as well. Many universities and industry partners have offered face-to-face workshops and provided materials online to support the K-12 community in their endeavor to incorporate computing programming concepts into their curricula. Few groups have used Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) to train K-12 teacher's computer programming concepts. This paper briefly looks at the history of MOOCs, reasons for offering MOOCs to K-12 teachers, shares our experiences of teaching three Google-funded MOOC courses to K-12 teachers, incentives utilized to motivate the K-12 teachers, survey results of our K-12 communities reaction to our MOOC and our lessons learned working with a MOOC.