An Experience Report Assessing A Professional Development MOOC For CS Principles

CS Principles is a new AP course being developed by the College Board and introduced into high schools across the nation. To aid and encourage the adoption of the new CSP course, we have developed a Massively-Open Online Course (MOOC) over the past two years that serves as a professional development (PD) offering for CS Principles. Additionally, we have provided a parallel face-to-face workshop for a smaller group of MOOC participants. In this paper, we discuss our experiences conducting PD using a MOOC. We investigated the impact of the face-to-face event and online community on participants' completion and performance in the course. Our analysis suggests that participants who have even just a few days of face-to-face engagement tend to be more successful in completing a multi-week MOOC.