72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit | Hacker News Reader

72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit

m.techcrunch.com

92 pointsdenzil_correa57 comments

72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher.

They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low.

The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they shouldn't be accompanied by credit.

It's also worth noting that most current MOOCs were designed and implemented before there was any chance of getting college credit through their platform. Many of them chose to dilute their content in order to make it more approachable, and not to focus on delivering 1:1 parity with the in-person class.

If I ever return to school, I'd certainly be willing to consider online courses in combination with testing at an approved location.

If I ever return to school, I'm going to want what I didn't get nearly enough of in my undergraduate degree: in-person access to professors.

I don't want college credit for browsing the web and watching videos. I want coaching, feedback and interaction from people with deep knowledge in their field.

But doing the gruntwork online, and focussing on quality interaction with professors? I can see real-time lecturing dying out: that's time that could be more profitably spent doing the coaching and feedback that as you point out has much greater value.

Exactly, like the flipped classroom: covering the material is through videos, questions and discussions are in person.

@blahedo: True, it doesn't have to be video. Personally I prefer reading to watching a video.

Don't put the cart before the horse: videos are only one way to cover the material, and not always (or even usually) the best one. The people that are strongly pushing videos as an integral component of flipping the classroom are in fact still stuck in a lecture mode---but why use videos of lectures if the complaint about lectures is that they're less efficient than just reading the book? Video is appropriate for some things, but other modalities (such as books, viz software, practice problem engines, etc) are more appropriate for much of the "before you come to class" material.

Sounds like you want apprenticeships and mentors, not professors.

I do think apprenticing needs to come back, big time, to complement a digital learning curriculum for the grunt work. In my undergrad, I'd say 2% of my time was actually professor-engaged, and the rest was assembly line rote work read-the-book-repeat-the-answer.

> Sounds like you want apprenticeships and mentors, not professors.

Sounds like a PhD program where you really are an apprentice and the professor is really a mentor.

In fact, the article they reference cites that the vast majority of the professors actually think MOOCs are WORTH THE HYPE!

This article is sensationalist for sure.

"The issue is one of accountability, not quality."

The issue is also one of dilution of the institution granting the credit and branding.

If someone is able to take an online course and receive credit they will then be able to infer an affiliation with the institution that will dilute the value of an existing degree from that institution.

This already of course can and does happen (just like locks don't prevent everyone from breaking into your home or office) but opening up the floodgates to people who will most certainly claim and fudge that they attended or are somehow affiliated with top shelf universities is definitely an issue.

Case in point is what happened with the Wharton Evening School. Although the link I provided certainly tells a different spin and story the real reason is that it was trivial to get into the evening school (compared to Penn as a regular undergraduate) and Penn had a bunch of those graduates running around with BBA's as students who graduated from Wharton. (Which of course they did but not of the same caliber as the regular graduates).

http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n23/WhartonEve.html

Doesn't surprise me at all. In the race for profit schools are diluting their own brand. Around DC I constantly see advertisements for Harvard/Georgetown/American University/etc Night/Online/Extended Learning classes. There is a big land rush when it comes to "legitimate" online learning institutions. But they are going to seriously dilute the value of their brand in the process. I find it amazing that these schools aren't more hesitant in offering these backdoor ways at getting a Harvard, etc "degree" just for a few extra bucks.

And they are right. They are many ways to cheat. And there are no ways to prove you didn't.

The system on Coursera (the one I tried) is actually very "relax". You have weeks to do your weekly tests, and weeks to do the final exam. You can edit as much as you want your answers, and you can re-do a test which is usually the same questions but with different answers (and also, when every time you submit a test they tell you what you could have done wrong).

If you wanted to give real credits for that, then you'd have to put a real limit of time to those tests first.

But I like the way it is. We don't learn something for credit anymore. I hate going to a test because that's not what I want to do when I go to university. If you don't get real credit when you pass a course on Coursera, then why would you cheat? You can just learn for the pleasure of learning.

It's not just cheating, it's also the fact that when you have to use automated grading, it's much more difficult to create good tests.

I hope in the future they offer you the option of taking a real test at a testing center, which is graded by a human being.

You missed the point, the idea wasn't to pass a test. The idea was to follow the course for the sake of learning.

As for the option of taking a real test at a testing center, I don't see the point since it would be US only.

What's a credit worth, anyways? Unless its from a top university, it's worth a steaming pile of non-dischargeable student loans and a McJob.

This is pessimistic: anything in the top 50 is good enough for many jobs.

Copied from my comment on an earlier posting of the same story-

From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science, and engineering." Which makes sense, those are subjects which are probably best suited to this kind of approach.

I've taken a number of MOOCs, from EDx, Coursera, and Udacity. I'm an addict, always in at least one and plan to pretty much permanently keep doing them as long as it's possible to do so.

The 6.002x from EDx was probably the most rigorous of the ones I've done, and I felt a solid sense of accomplishment when it was over. But I don't think I should be awarded MIT credit for it, mostly due to the limited substitutions for lab work.

In fact, I don't think college credit would be appropriate for any of the classes I've done. However, the certificates for most of them do have meaning, and should be taken by employers as a sign that someone is likely to have some competency in the area.

Yes, cheating is possible, so it's not automatic, but you should always be evaluating someone's actual skills that matter to you anyway. An A in a class on their college transcript also doesn't guarantee mastery in any way whatsoever. It's just an indicator that the person may have such.

Exactly. I've done some from Udacity and not cheated (what would be the point in taking it otherwise?), but though they were hard enough and I felt a sense of accomplishment, I don't think I deserve actual credit. It's on my CV, but in the 'miscellaneous' section, not where my actual qualifications are - exactly where (I imagine) I'd put a class that I audited, US-style.

72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit from their home institution.

The headline makes it sound like they don't think MOOC students deserve any kind of credit, which is a much stronger statement.

I agree with this. I was a bit indignant at first, but, when I realized what they meant, I thought it makes sense.

Article has huge spin on it, claiming "This is not a good sign for online education".

Phrasing of question is do they "deserve formal credit from your home institution." No of course not, the class is free and they are not enrolled in the school. If the free class gets full credit, the university falls apart.

Also, giving real credit means you have to have money coming in, proctoring on site in their country for the tests, and id card checks. This will massively increase costs and completely eliminate the ability of people in most parts of the world from being able to take the class. One of the reasons for these classes is to open up western college style education to people throughout the world. Switching it to a pay model that validates identity just converts the whole thing into online extension courses, which they have already, and those certainly have never been MOOCs, enrollment numbers have been modest not in the 20,000-200,000 enrollment range per session (yes, with 10% passing but that means little, they still have huge numbers passing).

This. People confuse education with accreditation. Online courses (should) provide education very cheaply. I hope the US accreditation system gets fixed so that it is cheap too or not so important for employment.

Hey The Chronicle and techcrunch: even this ◕ is closer to the actual numbers than your plainly wrong pie chart[1]. 72% is less than 3/4. You show something about 77%. Please get some more editors.

good luck i'm not alone: http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4

Yet it's kind of scary that for 4 days, of this being published on The Chronicle[2] with it's supposedly well educated audience nobody seems to have noticed it. Guess that shows that charts are even less relevant and precise to transport information than I imagined.

[1] http://imgur.com/UtIm43c

[2] http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

A few points after reading the original article from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

They spend a bit of time talking about how much work went into creating the courses. Of course it takes a lot of time, but you get the payback when you run it the second time, the third time etc. I'm surprised this was not mentioned.

Also, they mentioned that Robert Sedgewick of Princeton didn't wanted to be beaten to the punch creating a MOOC algorithm course. But he already was. Tim Roughgarden of Stanford gave the first course as far as I know. I took both part 1 and part 2 of his course, and both were excellent (more here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...)

Finally, Clay Shirky wrote a good piece on MOOCs a while a go: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the... One of the points he makes is that producing "live" lectures (as opposed to using MOOCs) at a university is a little like only assigning books that the professor giving the lecture has written. Of course you want the best book on the subject, regardless of who wrote it. The same goes for a lecture on the subject. His article is well worth reading.

I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams. But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its taught in a major university.

I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive introductory courses freshman take. How is it worse than 500 students taught by a grad student in a state university lecture hall?

I think at least some of the opposition is by professors worried about protecting their jobs and not wanting to lose the comfortable path they have trod so many years. But they will likely have no choice. I'm not sure how it will end up, but academia can no more avoid the massive changes in our world brought on by the internet than bookstores or newspapers could. If higher education was a free market and not so massively subsidized, the changes would have already happened. Given a choice would anyone want to pay the $200,000 full price for a four year university degree in say something like English lit if it were coming out of their own pocket?

That chart is misleading. Since when is 28% less than one fourth of a circle?

When Fox news present the data....

http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2...

Personally I don't care about credit, I do it for the learning and opportunity to work together with people from all around the world.

However, I do think there should be a possibility to earn credits or certificates as it is important for some.

Even if you don't get "real" MIT credit, a certificate of completion from some of the courses is worth more than credit people get at some universities.

I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly - but at least taking and completing the course shows a certain determination... maybe that's what needs acknowledging instead.

> I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly

In the technology sector, sure. Here we do not even concern ourselves with credentialing to begin with because the work we do is out in the open and easy to evaluate.

Other industries, however, are not so lucky and struggle to sniff out the unqualified even with a strong credentialing system. I'm not sure an evaluation of determination helps them any more than what they have to go on today. People determined to get the job will always find some way to slip through the system without any real understanding of the underlying fundamentals.

With that said, I think MOOCs open up a whole new way to find talent, which could make the entire idea of credentials a thing of the past.

Yeah, I guess in tech we're lucky enough to be able to say check somebody's GitHub and see if they actually can write code...

Original article - which is a much better read:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

What percentage of professors who teach offline courses think their students deserve credit?

MOOCs have been a blessing to me. However, I understand that credits are not possible until they solve the issue of cheating. But lets not be naive and think cheating doesn't happen at plenty of standard university's around the world.

"I think universities are completely obsolete. There’s very little that goes on at a university that can’t be done better otherwise. The biggest raison d’être for the present system is the security of the professor. Once you eliminate the obsolete structure and the emphasis on earning a living, people will go to the university because they want to use themselves and explore their wonderful capabilities. Humanity will carry on beautifully if you don’t mix them up with earning a living. We’ll make wonderful use of those buildings and all that equipment. They’ve been living on the idea of monopolizing the information, but now they see the time coming when the big idea will be to proliferate it and try to see that everybody gets to share it." -- Buckminster Fuller (1972)

I had to laugh out loud when I read this headline. My guess is, most professors don't think most of their students deserve credit these days, thanks to grade inflation and consistently decreasing standards.

Did anyone else notice that the pie chart wedges are sized incorrectly? The one labeled "28%" is clearly less than a quarter of the chart. Not really sure why they felt the need to try to make the numbers appear more skewed than they already are.

Edit: Should note that it's not TC's fault, it's grabbed from the source article: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

I haven't taught a MOOC but I have "taught" a more traditional online course with 20-some students and I don't think it was really all that great. The reason I put "taught" in quotes is because it was a standardized course where all the sections taught at the state-wide community college had to be exactly the same so I was basically just a grader. I didn't have any opportunity to actually "teach" anything so when a student turned in an assignment that was totally wrong, there was no opportunity for me to intervene and give the student a chance to redo it or to give the student any substantial guidance.

Moreover, because most students would wait until the last minute to do the work, they might turn in the next assignment before I had a chance to grade their previous assignment so they would not only do one assignment wrong but then the next one and the next one and I can't do anything about it. I feel for the person, so I'm not going to fail the student. So the student gets a C in the class, doesn't learn anything or even worse learns the wrong thing and my hands are basically tied.

Having studied at a university, I think Online Courses are not (yet) a replacement for university courses. They still need work. On Coursera for instance I noticed a lack of advanced and even intermediate courses. It seems almost all courses there are introductory. A paranoid person might say this goes well with professors being afraid of online courses. I say this is just not very elaborated yet.

Anyway it's ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't get credit from online courses. Top universities all over the world give you credit for stuff you do at home, in particular when it comes to advanced courses.

I'm not saying you should be able to do your whole Master or whatever from home -- it's definitely necessary to have tests where you physically attend -- but this survey result seems stupid. Maybe the question is just stupid. They asked about the status quo, not about online education in general.

I have been taking MOOCs continuously since the Stanford ones started (and took some non-video online classes years back at my University) and I am rather concerned about the affect directly giving credit for MOOCs could have on them.

If physical University classes were free and easy to join I do not think I would participate much, and I think the bad taste I get stems from the people who are there just for the credit. Similarly, I wonder about the quality of peer reviews in MOOCs where most people are there for an external incentive.

Personally, I would rather see independent test centers replace the accreditation process for everyone, removing that pressure from the teaching system all around.

Also, I would love to hear thoughts from an Actuary on how the independent test system affects their profession and their expectations when meeting a new colleague.

At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and what is it really good for, anyway?"

At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.

The appropriate course credit for online classes is to finish a project demonstrating publicly that you know the material. This option is available right now.

Completely agreed - plaigiarism is rampant because collaboration is so natural and doing work for its own sake does nothing to advance one's understanding of the material.

All subjects, to the greatest extent possible, should be heavily based on collaborative projects that give back to society. Demonstrate your knowledge by contributing original research and ideas to Wikipedia. Contribute to an open source project on github using algorithms and methods you've learned in the classroom.

Society should benefit from the education system, not just through run-of-the-mill degree programs, but from the fruits of the labors of its students.

There is so much untapped potential.

Seriously, just imagine if a fraction of the students taking the massively popular ML class on Coursera had created a project on Github.

Well, that's fine. If students want to receive credits, they must take some tests for accreditation. And these tests should probably be administered on site, so as to ensure the test-taker didn't cheat. I think that, over time, universities will move from teaching classes to being centers of accreditation, tutoring and socializing.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108

Sensationalist headlines aside, I received my degree online from the University of Phoenix in 2004 and I had to worked freakin' hard for it. Way harder than I had to work when I attended a 4 year California State University brick-and-mortar college.

So I can't help how others feel about my online degree, but I'm proud of it.

The professors were asked about courses they designed to not be accredited. Of course they would respond that way. It says nothing about the future of online education.

Since when is "MOOC" == "online course"?

Oh, right. Techcrunch.

Maybe the professors don't deserve their paycheck... as outcomes reflect all parties involved!

well online courses by deemed universities is still in its infancy, so yeah it will take time before people will only take lessons from home.

then why do they teach it?? bs

This isn't just bureaucratic self-protection. MOOCs really aren't ready for that yet. They're awesome, but much of the educational problem is social (tutoring and study groups, group projects, evaluation that can't be automated) and even though "social" is the buzzword of the 2010s, we as a technological society aren't good (at scale) at that stuff yet.

I think that the next step of evolution is free coursework and flat social features (forums with voting, programmatic expert discovery) while the gold-stamped examinations, coursework reviews by PhD'd humans, and tutoring sessions from vetted experts will cost money. If you take the free version, you're matched by an ML algorithm with a volunteer tutor and 95% of the time, you'll get quality. The paid version sets up with a TA at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, and you pay $40 for a half-hour video session.

MOOCs will get there. There's another way to look at this: 28% of professors do think MOOCs are ready for prime time. That's much higher than I would have thought.

The social part is difficult. I did attend a Coursera Coursera and at the beginning I though, cool, so now I make a study group. They have a dedicated forum for that. So I said, look, here's my study group and I got more feedback than I thought, someone even nearly begging to get in. ;)

Then I created a Google Group and posted it in the thread. Guess what: 3 people joined the Group, one was active. (So 2 in total including me.) Lesson for me: when suggesting a study group, have the Google Group link ready.

That said, I think the social part is fine, we have social networks for that. Users just need to learn how to socialize online. This is becoming more important everyday even outside Coursera and friends..

Tutors would be cool, but IMHO they are not necessary for successful learning. I remember a dutch math professor saying basically: "I am unnecessary, you just need to ask the right questions." I.e. if you ask the right questions, you will find the next steps best case by yourself.

Well, yes. Everything you learn in education was something someone came up with on their own without being educated first. The point of education is to facilitate that process.

I think the point of structured education (school, university) is to guide you through a topic. When you learn completely autonomously, you can end up with knowledge that is not as relevant as you wished. University courses provide a collection of stuff you can learn.

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