Creating new worlds online

Dr Karsten Lundqvist was eight or nine when the first home computers hit the market in his native Denmark. “When a computer arrived in the house on my birthday, I was thrilled. I was like a kid in a candy shop,” he says.

“My passion was for games, but my dad told me that couldn’t be a job.”

Despite his father’s warning, Dr Lundqvist has indeed turned his passion for gaming into a job. As a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, he uses games development in his research.

Dr Lundqvist’s primary research interest involves continuing to develop a pioneering e-learning course he founded to teach computer programming.

More than 180,000 people from 197 cultures have been through Dr Lundqvist’s massive open online course (MOOC), set up while he was working for the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

MOOCs enable unlimited numbers of people to access online lessons at any time or place using a web browser or mobile device. Dr Lundqvist’s programming course, now also available through Victoria in a new collaboration with the University of Reading, ran in 2016 for the eighth time.

Much of Dr Lundqvist’s research involves understanding how to teach so many people at one time, especially when students have a varying range of capabilities and resources. The MOOC has to appeal to very high-tech users as well as to the Nigerian student who contacted Dr Lundqvist to request low-res videos of the course videos because viewing high-res versions at internet cafes was using up all his data.

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