[ricklamers]

It might not be the most useful answer given the context of your question. But in my experience the thing that made the best courses stand out were the depth of understanding of the instructor and their basic didactic skills. Are they able to explain the concepts clearly to a novice student? Are they able to structure the course into a logical progression of topics?

To me, what I consider to be secondary aspects such as interactive quizzes or homework assignments never really made a difference. One thing I noticed that really did not work well for me was asking quiz questions in between that did not require understanding just memorization of what was just said 30 seconds ago. It's like you're checking if they're paying attention v.s. are grasping underlying concepts.

I would recommend you check out CS50 by David Malan (if you haven't already) as it's somewhat of a gold standard for MOOCs in my book.

Good luck with your MOOC! The world needs more of them, make sure you make them as publicly accessible as possible.

[madhadron]

> One thing I noticed that really did not work well for me was asking quiz questions in between that did not require understanding just memorization of what was just said 30 seconds ago.

Be careful of saying what works well versus what doesn't work well based on perception. I pretty much always use this kind of inline question in lectures, usually gauged to require the student to make a single deductive step from the material just presented. And they all look at me like I'm an idiot for expecting something that simple...except that then some of them get it wrong and have to reintegrate the knowledge, and the number of queries after the fact from misunderstandings of the material went down dramatically when I started doing it.

So I actually tell the students up front that this seems absurd, but play along, because it really does help the integration of knowledge.