Brian Winn and Casey O'Donnell, Associate Professors in the Department of Media and Information
The Department of Media and Information will soon be the first at MSU to offer online courses through Coursera, an open online education provider.
A Game Design and Development Specialization taught by MSU Media and Information faculty is set to launch Tuesday, Sept. 15, on Coursera. Accessible to anyone, this online program will include a series of four courses – modified versions of Game Design and Development courses taught in person on MSU’s campus – and end with a final capstone project.
The MSU team – including Brian Winn and Casey O’Donnell, both Associate Professors in the Department of Media and Information, and David Wheeler, Director of Media Sandbox – competed against other institutions for the opportunity to partner with Coursera on the Game Design and Development Specialization and won the contract.
“We’re taking part of what we do physically here at MSU with our Game Design and Development minor and turning it into a specialization on the Coursera platform,” Winn said. “It’s not the complete experience of what we do here, because obviously there are certain things you can do when you are together physically that you can’t do online, but its borrowing a lot of the things that we’ve built and refined over the last 10 years in our top-rated program.”
These will be the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) in Game Design and Development offered by Coursera, and the first time MSU has partnered with the company.
“We are thrilled to offer a Specialization in Games Design and Development from Michigan State University, a leader in this field,” said Daphne Koller, President and Co-Founder of Coursera. “This specialization is expected to quickly reach hundreds of thousands of the 14 million registered learners from around the world on Coursera, many of whom would never have had access to MSU’s high quality instruction.”
Winn and O’Donnell are developing the courses. Students from the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab and the Media Sandbox are helping with the project.
“We’ve got a really solid curriculum here that only touches about 80 people a year, so we are scaling from 80 to thousands and potentially more,” Winn said. “One of the huge differences between our physical program and the online program is I’m not there. In the online version, I have to make sure it’s a complete course experience that stands on its own.”
David Wheeler, Media Sandbox Director
The first class will be available Sept. 15. The second on Oct. 15, the third Nov. 15 and the fourth on Dec. 15. The capstone course is expected to launch in January. One or more companies will be partnered to offer the capstone. Wheeler is helping develop industry partnerships for the capstone course. The first confirmed partner is the online game portal Kongregate, which will provide an avenue for distribution and even monetization for aspiring game developers taking the course.
“I think this will really will help push MSU’s brand as a location that does game design and development and teaches about it, out to the world,” Winn said. “It is sort of staking our claim over that area. I hope it will build a lot of positive PR for the university and our program. I also think it has the potential of attracting students to MSU in the future.”
The courses will be offered on demand, so students can start them at any time.
Students will receive grades based on two types of assessment – multiple choice, computer graded quizzes and peer review where others in the class grade your projects. Students won’t earn college credit, but can receive a certificate for completing the entire specialization.
The ComArtSci team sees the target audience as professionals, including programmers, designers and artists, who already have a college degree who want to move into the game industry, or high school students who are curious about making games.
“I think this will really appeal to high school students,” Winn said. “It’s a way to get their toe in the water, decide if they like making games, and then hopefully some of them will decide to come here to MSU to pursue it as a degree.”
Anybody can take the courses for free, but to take the capstone and to get the Michigan State University certificate learners need to pay for them.
Coursera has partnered with more than 120 universities and educational institutions to offer hundreds of online courses and specializations in topics ranging from computer science to social psychology and beyond.
For more information, visit the Coursera website.
Written by: Kimberly Popiolek, Communications Manager
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