Brief
The First Adaptive MOOC: A Case Study on Pedagogy
Framework and Scalable Cloud Architecture—Part I
Nishikant (Nish) Sonwalkar
Founder and Managing Director, Synaptic Global Learning, LLC,
and Adjunct Professor of Physics, University of Massachusetts,
Boston, Massachusetts.
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Abstract
The opportunity to learn from the best educators of the top univer-
sities at no cost has captured the imagination of millions who have
registered for MOOCs across the United States and abroad. As
MOOCs have gained momentum, critical debate is brewing on the
pedagogical effectiveness of MOOCs. The high attrition rate of stu-
dents who register at the beginning of a MOOC is a major cause of
concern regarding the long-term success, impact, and sustainability
of MOOCs. Having conducted many experiments and studies on the
application of adaptive learning in personalized online learning,
Synaptic Global Learning set out to develop the first adaptive MOOC
(aMOOC) platform, providing a strong pedagogical framework and a
personalized learning experience in a MOOC learning environment.
In partnership with the Center for Innovation and Excellence in
eLearning of the College of Advancing and Continued Studies, Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Boston, Synaptic Global Learning developed
the first aMOOC in the area of computational molecular dynamics
(CMD). This article describes the design, development, and deploy-
ment of this aMOOC. Part I of this case-study is focused on the
pedagogical framework that allows four dimensions of learning and
dynamic rendering of the content to accommodate five distinct
learning strategies using the adaptive mobile learning (AMOL)
platform. The AMOL platform is then implemented on the Amazon
Web Services (AWS) cloud architecture and load-tested for the use of
aMOOCs. The results indicate that even with dynamic rendering of
the fine learning strategies and real-time feedback, the AWS-based
scalable architecture is sufficient to provide high throughput and
acceptable response time.
Key words: adaptive learning, cloud architecture for MOOCs, in-
structional design, learning strategy intelligent systems, MOOC,
online learning, pedagogy.
Introduction
T
he MOOC movement has grown in a short duration.1,2,3 The
MOOC movement has arisen to provide access to high
quality education to the remote corners of the Unites States
and the world. The early pronouncements regarding MOOCs
22 MOOCs Forum
have given rise to expectations that MOOCs will have a major impact
on the educational world.4,5 However, much is needed to improve the
pedagogical effectiveness of the MOOC offerings. Adaptive learning
systems that customize content to the needs of individual learners
have potential to provide personalized learning experiences to the
large number of learners who intend to take the MOOC courses.
Adaptive learning systems can provide the interface necessary for
individual customization of content delivery on a massive scale,
allowing each learner to reach the necessary competency.6,7
Adaptive learning requires development of differentiated learning
strategies and intelligent feedback for building learner competency.
The adaptive mobile learning (AMOL) system described herein
presents content in five distinct learning strategies. Differentiated
learning strategies and dynamic rendering of the content are
provided, building competency for each individual learner.1 The
pedagogical framework that supports dynamic rendering requires
appropriate computational and web services architecture that can
accommodate delivery of web pages within an acceptable response
time and requires substantial throughput.8,9
Some MOOC courses deployed for worldwide audiences are ex-
pected to serve large numbers of concurrent users, in some cases
more than 50,000 to 150,000 users. The problem becomes intractable
for conventionally hosted adaptive learning systems. In this article
we discuss a scalable cloud architecture that marries Amazon Web
Services (AWS)9 with AMOL adaptive learning architecture to sup-
port the dynamic rendering of web pages leveraging service-oriented
architecture of the AWS servers. The data indicate that even with
large loads and stress applied to the system under load-testing con-
ditions the throughput and response time remains within acceptable
limits for the adaptive learning platform, with the auto-scaling of the
AWS instances that add computational power as the stress linearly
increases with the increase in the number of connections.
Adaptive Learning Methodology for MOOCs
Adaptive learning systems originate from the substantial contri-
butions made in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent
tutors, and adaptive controls.10,11,12 In these fields, adaptive learning
systems are generally referred to as technological systems, with the
ability to learn and adapt based on received input signals. Gener-
ically, educational adaptive learning systems organize content based
on the learning preferences of individual learners with a goal to
maximize learning performance through continuous intelligent
feedback.
The first task for adaptive learning systems is to allow for different
ways to organize content, offering different context and perspective
DOI: 10.1089/mooc.2013.0007

for learners.12 The second task is to identify the way a learner would
like to learn by conducting diagnostic assessments on the learning
preference. The third task is to use assessment results to provide
continuous intelligent feedback that motivates and provides guid-
ance to overcome concept deficiencies and maximize learning per-
formance. Figure 1 illustrates the four iterative processes involved in
an adaptive learning cycle that rapidly converge to the learning style
of an individual student.
The research conducted by cognitive psychologists13–17 indicates
that the differences in learning styles originate from the difference in
the learning strategies each learner develops based on his/her pre-
vious learning experiences. Within the AMOL system, learning
strategies are related to the five learning pedagogies; apprentice
(learning through mentor–student interaction), incidental (learning
through case study), inductive (learning through example), deductive
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(learning through application), and discovery (learning through ex-
perimentation).18,19
The ‘‘learning cube’’ pedagogical model suggested by the au-
thor18,20 in Figure 2 provides a multidimensional framework to or-
ganize learning objects developed in text, graphics, audio, video,
Fig. 1. The learning cycles for self-improvement in the adaptive learning system.
THE FIRST ADAPTIVE MOOC
animations, and simulations in the five learning pathways con-
forming to the pedagogy of apprentice, incidental, inductive, de-
ductive, and discovery learning models. The third axis of the cube
indicates increased interactivity between student and teachers, and
the fourth axis is for social learning via blogs, wiki, podcasting, and
YouTube to name a few. Details of the ‘‘learning cube’’ pedagogical
framework are presented elsewhere.20,21,22
Within the AMOL system, content is presented to students based
on the learning style of preference. For example, in the incidental
learning study, learning happens primarily within a context of case
studies. Content provided by the expert is sequenced in ways that
explain the events involved in the case study. For students who like to
learn this way, the content makes sense. For students who prefer to
learn inductively, deductively, or through discovery, AMOL se-
quences content in ways that best facilitate the given style of
learning. These learning strategies allow students to pursue the study
of difficult subjects within the pedagogical environment that works
best for them. The five learning strategies used in the adaptive MOOC
pedagogical framework—apprentice, incidental, inductive, deduc-
tive, and discovery—adhere to learning models representing
ª MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. MOOCs Forum 23
 SONWALKAR
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Fig. 2. The four-dimensional learning (4DL) framework for adaptive
MOOCs.
cognitive approaches from behaviorist, constructivist, and coagni-
tivist learning theories.1–5
A student using the adaptive learning system determines which
strategies work best through interaction with an inference engine
that administers diagnostic tests for making the assessment. The
methodology involves using the assessment to measure performance
in real-time and providing continuous intelligent feedback necessary
for online learning assistance.6,7 Diagnostic quizzes are embedded
within each concept to assess the level of competency that a learner
has achieved. Based on the student’s results, an accelerated revision
path with intelligent suggestions may be provided to each individual
learner.
As illustrated in Figure 1, a learner circles through this powerful
learning and revision cycle until the learner achieves the desired level
of competency. The adaptive learning systems:
- Provide instructional support to faculty to create multiple
teaching pathways.
- Deliver content with different learning pathways and reduce
the dependency on ‘‘sage-on-the-stage’’ faculty lectures used in
most of the MOOCs today.
- Allow students to learn better by customizing their own
learning strategies in a MOOC environment.
- Provide increased cognitive opportunity to students to learn
difficult concepts by presenting multiple perspectives on each
concept.
- Provide continuous feedback to students, freeing faculty to be
involved with student learners in the role of ‘‘guides on the
side’’ on social media interaction sites—blogs, chats, discus-
sions.
- Monitor learning progress of the students and provide remedial
content in real time.
Adaptive learning systems thus support instructional learning
strategies,20 pedagogically driven instructional design, pedagogical
24 MOOCs Forum
effectiveness for online education, and learning technology stan-
dards, including accessibility best practice and ADA compliance.18,21
A Molecular Dynamics MOOC
THE COURSE: MOLECULAR DYNAMICS FOR
COMPUTATIONAL DISCOVERIES IN SCIENCE
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation has become a method of
choice for researchers in the area of applied physics and engi-
neering, material science, molecular biology, biochemistry, genet-
ics, computational drug design, and many more areas.22–24 The
molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods have gained sig-
nificant popularity in the last two decades for solving physics and
engineering problems. The phenomena, such as phase transition,
deformation, melting, crack-tip progression, and dislocation
movement—all conventionally studied by engineering disciplines at
macroscopic scale—can now be studied from microscopic and at-
omistic points of view.25–27 Computational science is a critical and
highly desirable skill in growing sectors of advanced manufactur-
ing. An increasing number of engineering and science curricula are
now including modeling and simulation courses as part of under-
graduate and graduate programs. However, access to quality in-
struction in molecular dynamics remains hard to come by due to the
shortage of well-qualified instructors and of practitioners trained in
the field. Dr. Sonwalkar brings to this course both his years of expe-
rience teaching molecular dynamics and the benefits of his own on-
going practice in the field. As the only public university in the city of
Boston, The University of Massachusetts Boston extends its public
education mission by offering this free, globally available course.
This course was designed to help learners develop a deep under-
standing of the fundamental concepts of computational molecular
dynamics while gaining experience with the most popular methods
for atomistic simulations leading to discoveries in science. After
completing the course successfully, learners were able to:
. Understand and apply statistical mechanics and thermo-
dynamics and concepts of thermodynamics applied to MD.
. Learn computational algorithms for ordinary differential
equations (ODE).
. Understand software programming and packages behind MD
simulations.
. Apply MD simulation methods for property calculations.
. Select thermodynamic ensembles for complex physical problems.
. Analyze MD simulation data for complex science experiments.
. Prepare yourself for a career in computational science.
The course consisted of twelve modules, each made available at the
beginning of the week. In each week, MOOC participants explored
two main topics consisting of text content, short video lecture seg-
ments with accompanying transcripts, practice quizzes, and weekly
quizzes. In addition, students were required to practice and simulate
the concepts learned using various (free) simulation software pro-
grams. Discussion forums were available through which MOOC
participants were encouraged to communicate and collaborate with
other learners in the course.2
 THE FIRST ADAPTIVE MOOC
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Fig. 3. The aMOOC scalable architecture diagram.

Adaptive learning strategy. At the beginning of the course, learners
were presented with a diagnostics quiz and were required to answer a few
questions about how they learn. This process identified each learner’s
preferred learning strategy, based upon which each learner then was
guided on an adapted learning path throughout the course, by which
process designers hoped to accelerate learning and improve score results.2
COURSE ASSESSMENT
The assessment rubric for MOOCs required special consideration as the
large number of participants would not allow the instructor to grade
students manually. Hence the assessments both formative and summative
had to depend on weekly autograded assignments, practice quizzes, and
graded assessments. The continuous improvement of competency was the
goal of the current adaptive MOOC; hence, there were two forms of as-
sessments that were provided to the students: (1) Nongraded practice
quizzes that allowed students to self-test their competency with a real-
time intelligent feedback system that dynamically rendered revision
content in different learning strategies, and (2) graded assessments of
competency. There was no provision for a proctored exam for this course.2
Practice quiz. The course included a graded practice quiz after
each lecture segment. Practice quizzes were designed to assist

Table 1. Response Time and Throughput for Adaptive Mobile Learning Cloud Server for Adaptive MOOCs
RESPONSE RPS RPS THROUGHPUT THROUGHPUT TOTAL
(AVERAGE) ERRORS REQUESTS (AVERAGE) (PEAK) (AVERAGE) (PEAK) TRANSFER
HTML 0.848 0 10,090 6 11 73 KB/s 130 KB/s 111 MB
a
Other 0.341 0 92,782 59 103 2,464 KB/s 4,258 KB/s 4 GB

Total 0.391 0 102,872 66 115 2,537 KB/s 4,388 KB/s 4 GB

a
Other includes javascript, CSS, images, pdf, etc. (any content type except html and xml).

ª MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. MOOCs Forum 25

 SONWALKAR

learners to master the concepts taught in each segment. Each practice
quiz was worth 10 points, and completion of all practice quizzes
comprised 20% of a student’s overall course score. Practice quizzes
could be taken multiple times until a satisfactory score was achieved,
with the highest score being counted toward the overall course score.
Adaptive feedback. At the end of each quiz attempt, the learner
was provided immediate feedback through the adaptive learning
system in the course. The instructor highly recommended MOOC
participants take all segment practice quizzes and score more than
80% on practice quizzes before taking the weekly graded assessment.
Weekly graded assessment. In addition to the practice quizzes, a
weekly assessment was made available at the beginning of each
week. Each weekly assessment was worth 20 points. The combined
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course. The course curriculum was divided into weekly modules that
included 2 hours of lectures presented in 12 modules of 10 minutes
each. The 10-minute modules were video recordings including in-
structor lectures, slides, text, graphics, and presentation of the virtual
molecular dynamics laboratory. Video segments were captioned by
the Liberate Learning Consortium in a two-step process involving the
use of voice recognition software followed by hand editing accom-
plished by staff caption-writing editors.
The converted and edited video caption text was then used by the
instructional design team members to create the concepts and sub-
concepts that became the core aMOOC content. The course content
thus derived for each 10-minute video segment was then transliter-
ated to provide five learning strategies, namely, apprentice, inci-
dental, inductive, deductive, and discovery. The details of the
learning strategies and the differentiated instructional model for the

score of all weekly assessment accounted for 80% of the grade. brain-based adaptive learning can be found elsewhere.
Weekly assessments could not be retaken. The production was successfully completed by a video production
and instructional design team from the College of Advancing and Pro-
Hands-on simulations experience. Learners used virtual molecular fessional Studies (CAPS) at the University of Massachusetts and by the
dynamics lab (VMDL) and MATLAB to derive the answers of the weekly adaptive learning development team of the Synaptic Global Learning.
questions. Software packages used in this course were made available to
registered participants at no cost for the duration of the course. A Scalable AWS Cloud Architecture
The adaptive learning module was deployed on the AMOL plat-
TEXTBOOKS form SaaS tools. An existing patented AMOL platform was modified
There weren’t any required textbooks for the course. Several books to accommodate the adaptive learning pedagogical framework and to
were suggested for reference in the course. provide ample social interaction. The AMOL software technology
platform leverages EC2, S3, and RDX web services on the LAMP stack
CERTIFICATION for the deployment of online programs worldwide.8,9 The course
Students who completed the course successfully were provided was deployed on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing with
with one of three types of certificates. The type of certificate granted auto-scaling option.9
will depend on student’s scores in the weekly assessments: The primary architectural consideration for a mission-critical ap-
. Certificate of Success: An average of 80% or higher achieved plication is to make the system completely fault tolerant. The fault
on weekly assessments with all assessments attempted and tolerance allows systems to function even if there are components in the
submitted on time.
. Certificate of Completion: An
average of 50% or higher (but
less than 80%) achieved on
weekly assessments with all as-
sessments attempted and sub-
mitted on time.
. Certificate of Participation: An
average of 35% or higher (but
less than 50%) achieved on
weekly assessments with all as-
sessments attempted and sub-
mitted on time.

Development of Adaptive
MOOC Weekly Modules
The most ambitious task for this
project was to create the adaptive
learning modules for the 12-week Fig. 4. The loading chart for AMOL aMOOC server.

26 MOOCs Forum
 THE FIRST ADAPTIVE MOOC

number of available instances that

are auto-scaled to meet the user
demands based on the auto-scaling
protocol, elastic computing (EC2) in
AWS application services. The HITE
application server is connected to the
cloud simple storage service (S3) and
relational database service (RDS) as
the master database. The scalable S3
and RDS along with EC2 are also
stored in Amazon Machine Image
(AMI), which is replicated based on
the increasing user demand by the
virtue of auto-scaling protocol. This is
the underlying cloud-based scalable
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architecture for AMOL platform used

for the first adaptive MOOC.
Fig. 5. The response time chart for the aMOOC server cloud architecture. The fail-over is then distributed to
Zones 3 and 4, which are located in
different geographical locations from
system that fail during the operation (see Figure 3). The secondary Boston, to make the AMOL completely fault tolerant for large num-
critical requirement is to develop a scalable architecture to accommo- bers of students. Testing indicated the design could have auto-scaled
date increasing numbers of users connecting without any prior notice to accommodate 500,000 registrations.
and increasing numbers of processes that in a normal case can crash an The following AWS components were used for the AMOL scalable
entire network. A scalable architecture will increase required resources aMOOC architecture:
to automatically meet any increased demand for web services.
Fault tolerance and scalability are accommodated by the cloud 1. EC2 (elastic cloud computing)
computing architecture. The main differentiators for cloud architecture 2. RDS (relational database service)
as compared to the conventional server-based architecture are: 3. S3 (simple storage service)
4. Could Watch (cloud monitoring service)
1. Automation of processes involved in the running, back-up, 5. Elastic Load balancer (load distribution service)
and fail-over of the web services. 6. Auto-scaling (auto-scaling using Amazon Machine Images)
2. Auto-scaling of application instances based on the growth of
demand using Amazon Machine Image processing.
Load and Performance Test Results
3. Fault tolerance with distributed zone deployment of the application.
and Discussions
4. Cost savings because of AWS infrastructure.
Load and performance testing was conducted on application software
5. Reliability of AWS services over the period of time for 99.9% uptime.
by simulating requests from concurrent users. Normally the concurrent
As shown in the attached schematic of the cloud architecture users represent 10–20% of the total registered users. The load test showed
diagram, the front end connectivity for the Hypermedia Instruction the response time of the server when numbers of users increased and
and Teaching Environment (HITE) server is a load-balancer that has related requests from the users for the HTML pages and other multimedia
a dedicated IP address. HITE server is the back-end technology of increased. While the load test ensured stability of the systems under
the AMOL platform. The load balancer then sends requests to a concurrent connections, the response time indicated the performance of
the systems against the load patterns
for users to access the content.
Table 2. Load Test Data for Concurrent Users SGL used LoadStorm.com as the
CC USERS RESPONSE(S) ERROR (%) THROUGHPUT (KB/S) EC2 INSTANCES simulation tool for extensive load
testing. Almost 25 different test
10000 1.74 0.53% 15121.71 5
scenarios with 1–10 steps were
50000 2.67 0.84% 25635.04 7 simulated, and the AMOL cloud
100000 3.07 0.97% 30162.88 8 architecture was subjected to rig-
orous tests to support 100,000 to
150000 3.30 1.04% 32811.50 9
500,000 users and with 10,000 to
250,000 concurrent users.

ª MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. MOOCs Forum 27

 SONWALKAR
Table 1 indicates the response time in seconds, which is less than 1
second with 0% errors in responses made as results of request per
second during the run from 5 users to 200 users with average requests
per second as 6.
As indicated in the chart of Figure 4, the load test simulation shows
a linear increase in the user login, which also has linear increases in
the requests per second made to the AMOL server and the throughput.
The trend indicates a very healthy growth in throughput response from
the servers in response to the requests made.
Figure 5 shows that the performance of the AMOL server remains
error-free even with the request growing from 5 rps to 115 rps, re-
presenting over 6000 requests made to the server with responses
within an average of 1 second and few requests taking longer.
This load test data indicates excellent performance of the AMOL
server as the errors to the request response remains at 0% even when
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the load is increased from 5 concurrent users to 200 concurrent users.
LOAD TEST MATRIX FOR LARGE CONCURRENT USERS
Numerous load tests were performed with over 25 test conditions
and scenarios. Load test data for 10,000 to 300,000 concurrent users
indicates following trends:
As shown in Table 2, the auto scaling feature of AMOL cloud
architecture scales very well with the need for large number of
concurrent users. The EC2 instances grow from a base line of 5 to over
9 to accommodate concurrent users from 10,000 to 150,000. The EC2
instances are also accompanied by database replications and load
balancing, which ensures that the response time remains within an
acceptable limit of 5 seconds and the errors remain within 3.3% level.
It is important to note that auto-scaling does not create spikes when
reaching the desired threshold, which prevents hick-ups in the response
time. The replication is made available before the peak loads are reached,
ensuring smooth transitions of users to higher number of instances.9
Conclusions
The adaptive MOOC platform developed for the deployment of
the first adaptive MOOC course in the areas of molecular dynamics
for the computational discoveries in science was successful in han-
dling the large loads of the Massive Open Online Course and con-
current user stress. Following conclusions can be drawn from the first
part of this case study:
1. The pedagogical instructional design was modeled to accom-
modate five learning strategies.
2. The AMOL tools were effective and adequate for the rapid
production of the adaptive MOOC course in a very difficult
subject matter.
3. The cloud architecture was necessary to accommodate ex-
pected large loads for a MOOC, where the number of concur-
rent users is a cause of concern for acceptable throughput and
page return time for a dynamic rendering of content.
4. The pedagogy and technology developed for the adaptive MOOC
shows great promise for the future creation and conversion of
the one-size-fits-all MOOC into effective adaptive MOOC.
28 MOOCs Forum
The author and his research team are currently analyzing the learner
behavior data collected during this case study, which will be pre-
sented in Part II of this research article.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Philip DiSalvio, Dean of Center for
Advancing and Professional Studies (CAPS), and Dennis Maxey,
Associate Dean of CAPS, for providing partial support for the design
and development of the first aMOOC. The dedicated team from the
University of Massachusetts under the leadership of Alan Girelli, the
team at Synaptic Global Learning under the leadership of Mamta
Sonwalkar and Eric McDonald, and the team at the Liberated
Learning Consortium under the leadership of Keith Bain are ac-
knowledged for their respective contributions to the project. Special
thanks to Allan Girelli for providing editorial feedback, revisions, and
contributions to this article.
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
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Address correspondence to:
Nishikant Sonwalkar
Synaptic Global Learning

educational systems. New Horizons 2008; 16(1):44–47. 76 Canal Street #403

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ª MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. MOOCs Forum 29