San Jose State suspends online courses
sfgate.com
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But I teach at a college that is good but not (by various measures) first tier. I've been teaching for more than 30 years, and I teach Calculus, and while I have many students who do well, the majority of my folks find Calc to be hard, very hard. So I perceive from the statement in the first paragraph that many HN readers may have some trouble understanding who is in these seats.
Perhaps half of the people in my class would have trouble writing down, say, what an arctangent is. An even larger issue, it seems to me, is that they do not have enough experience to know whether or not they understand something. They are not incapable dopes, but for instance if you go over homework numbers 11, 13, 15, and 17 and say "Do you understand?" they will nod. But you often find that if you ask them to do number 19, their pencil just hovers over the page.
I see a couple of notes that argue something like "Well, they were given the opportunity .." but that is too hard a line, for me, personally. They are good people but they need support or guidance, over a medium-term period.
TLDR: for first-rate performers this is great stuff. For the middle of the bell curve, not so much.
I'm not even a middle of the bell curve kind of student, going as far as being outright rejected from all of colleges I applied to. However, there is something I have learned over the years about learning hard topics:
First, dive in and be totally confused. It doesn't matter if you do not understand anything. Your brain will still start to form relationships from what you took in. Revisit the topic again in a week, a month, whatever seems appropriate. You will probably still have a lot of confusion, but the idea is to just refresh those aforementioned relationships. Take a period of time away from it again, and by the third time you visit the subject it will "magically" make sense.
But this does not really fit the traditional education model. If you try to revisit the topic in a couple of months, the course will probably be over. When you are directing your own learning, however, learning these hard topics really turns out to be not that difficult at all.
I meant to vote it down.
Calculus is not basic math. And many students find it difficult. I remember Calculus 3, in particular, was hard for me. Now I look back at Green's Theorem, Lagrange multipliers, Vector fields and surface integrals and it all seems so basic. But that was NOT the case for the 17 year old me sitting in that big lecture hall.
Many students find It difficult because they have bad teachers, bad textbooks, or both. Also, in the future, spouting off math-related terms doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Anyone can open a book and look at the table of contents and copy some unfamiliar words down.
As a rule, whenever I accidentally up or down vote someone, I leave a message explaining the mistake and my reasoning. Doesn't happen often... but I always thought of it as a courtesy. Again... no offense was intended.
On the question of math topics not adding anything to the discussion. Well, we'll need to agree to disagree. The point was that Calculus... is NOT an easy subject to learn. And you get a sense of how esoteric it seems to an initiate by looking at the topics it encompasses.
Finally, try to relax a little man... no need to get snippy on HN. We should be able to have a discussion on a, relatively uncontroversial topic, without getting emotional.
As for calculus, it's incredibly easy to learn - you just need the correct book. Most students don't know that unfortunately. Inventing calculus on the other hand isn't easy, but fortunately most of that has been done for us.
I followed the more typical educational path of taking calculus in college. Some of it was easy, some of it was hard, but I seriously doubt that I would have been self-motivated enough to go through the entire sequence of calculus course material on my own. The pressure induced by being part of an in-person class, for a grade, and not for free, made me feel like I had to learn the material, and avail myself of whatever resources I needed, be it asking questions of the professor, going to tutoring sessions, reading extra books, whatever, to make sure that I learned it.
I totally wish I was so self-motivated that I could learn absolutely anything at any breadth and at any depth without any external reason to do so. But on my own, there are limits to what I make myself study. Which isn't to say that I'm stupid on my own, but rather, I appreciated the in-person college experience mainly for applying pressure on me to learn things that I wouldn't have otherwise. (And as a result, I did become more inclined to study broader and deeper on my own.)
In my cursory experience with MOOCs thus far, I don't see them applying that same pressure. Maybe they can; I'm not sure. But unless they do, I think that a lot of people (especially outside of HN, etc.) will find value in actually going to school.
This is despite hundreds of years of effort by well-meaning, perceptive, and hard-working teachers and students to refine the presentation to make the subject as clear as possible. Because most teachers and most texts are not the dipshits of the world. In short, Calculus is hard.
The thing about massive courses is that they are massive. When you get big, you cannot help but get average. In my experience average students (say at the schools I mentioned above) need support, including reasonably intensive personal attention from an experienced and knowledgable teacher. I don't believe the typical person in my course can pick it up on their own. (Not to dismiss the potential; I think there is a lot of exciting stuff happening that can help people learn. But I've seen nothing that would make attention unneeded.)
I do perceive that many HN readers could just pick Calc up, and frankly so could I, which is a good reason to read HN. People here pique my interest every day. But often in the discussions following articles like the one here missing is an understanding that you (speaking to a typical reader) are not average.
My unscientific observation is that some people find the analytical/continuous parts of math difficult but can still do really well with stuff like abstract algebra, combinatorics, linear algebra, and so forth. Other people (i.e. physics & engineering majors) are the exact opposite.
Then of course there are a select few who are good at both.
My brother is a math teacher and was more of a physics guy and his claim is that people who struggle with calc generally had poor instruction in trigonometry in their youth. I'm not sure how true this could be but I definitely hated my trig instructor the most out of any teacher I've ever had.
Students should absolutely be able to pick it up on their own, but most classes use crappy textbooks and the teachers recite from the crappy textbooks. Stewart's Calculus is used by a ton of schools and that book is utter garbage. The guy is using it as a way to print money, which is fine, but you'd think after 10 versions, he'd eventually get things right.
Many price points, many products.
The way it sounds to me, SJSU and Udacity and are going to take the time to study the data and figure out why it is that so many students failed. If, and this seems pretty likely to me, it turns out that the students were confused about the product (the courses) then I would imagine that steps will be taken to clarify things so that people can make choices that will lead to the best-possible outcomes.
Many price points, many products doesn't work if people don't understand the products.
The latest round of MOOCs are not really monetizing educational content (which is and has been online elsewhere, often for free). They are packaging institutional prestige, the same dynamic Facebook used to drive student adoption. Khan Academy is the exception.
I also think Udacity is more in between Khan Academy and Coursera, in that Udacity tries to find new ways of online instruction.
Also, just because some people are unable or unwilling to absorb and understand some knowledge does not make that knowledge and the way it is presented invalid or useless.
So every time a course like this is canceled because "half the customers are rejecting the product", another nail is driven into the coffin of education.
On the other hand, the course material that online classes are making available for free is tremendously valuable. I've never finished an online course but I have begun to regularly use online course materials as a supplemental resource to books I'm reading and to projects I'm working on.
I'm concerned that enthusiasm for publishing course materials online will dry up if evidence shows it's not a silver bullet for the world's higher education problems. In other words, I'm concerned that expectations are far too high and that educators and institutions are going to lose interest in a fantastic innovation just because it doesn't solve all our problems.
On the other hand, if all your peers in your offline world don't care for your courses at all, then solo studying is better than nothing...
It is shockingly absurd how easy and dumbed down they make classes in California's lower echelon schools. They basically hand you everything you need to know on every test on a silver platter: you don't need to read the book; they give you a study guide and EXPLICITLY tell you what will and will not be on the test; they sometimes will outright give you the exam questions, and students STILL screw that up. I took an abnormal psychology class where the instructor gave EVERYONE the exam questions, and students STILL did not show up for the exam or got questions wrong. I was like, HOW THE HELL IS THIS EVEN HAPPENING???!?!
I don't find this system of learning at fault. I find the students at fault. I think they should fail these kids as a costly lesson: study or lose out on $2000 bones. Bunch of nit wits.
This may not be what happened in your situation, but giving students every possible exam question – with the caveat that there's a ton of them and they have open-ended answers – is actually a really smart thing to do. Anyone who wants to pass the exam will spend an inordinate amount of time crafting the perfect answers (either by themselves or in groups, which is fine) and then memorizing those. You could even say it gamifies the learning process, as every day of study you're keen to get through as many questions as possible. It's almost like being asked to write a 100 mini-essays. You end up learning more, not less.
The incentive structure for lecturers is weighed very heavily towards easy classes. The only way to counteract this is for the entire institution to take pride in being difficult and create a culture where students value that difficulty as much as the institution does. That takes a heck of a lot of effort and prestige: Harvard, Oxbridge, Stanford, these are the sort of schools that can make such things happen. SJSU? Not so much. This is not to say SJSU isn't a good school. It actually is a good school with good staff. It's just very hard to stop things going out of alignment.
I was surprised to learn that most chose to do them online so that they can cheat on the tests. Free from instructor supervision all tests were open book and thus were much easier than taking them in person.
While many of us have high ideals for online education, I've learned that the majority of students get a degree for the diploma first and the education second.
I think that it really depends on the class. I know that the finals for certain MOOC courses I took were very difficult indeed, and it was absolutely impossible "google" the answers. Even with the open book and notes, the tests were challenging enough that these cheating mechanisms were pretty worthless.
Also note that there is a wide diversity in the course quality. Many of them are super easy and watered down to the point that it is meaningless, while others are quite challenging. While I wouldn't expect an interviewer to know which class falls into which category, just realize that many of these certs are virtually meaningless regardless of the results.
I've pondered creating a site for ranking the MOOCs that are available now, to serve both the students who take these courses and the employers who are facing these students.
Either way, the complaint of "diploma first" feels a bit off-hand. If people are finishing college without knowing how to program fizzbuzz, what is the difference between the good and the bad? Clearly it isn't the quality of the class: it is the quality of the person regardless his or her background.
What's surprising is that three months ago we've heard a completely different story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/education/colleges-adapt-o...
"Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
...
The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class."
Not everyone is suited to some of the rigours of higher education, and when you make it freely available, more people are going to try it out, and more people are going to fail. I wouldn't call a 58% failure rate a bad thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644421
http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_23320596/online-educ...
I'm sure this is entirely unrelated...
I wish schools would restructure to be serial with context-dependent branching, much like learning on the job tends to be, that way you can spend Y weeks focusing intently on a small spectrum of topics, then move on. Some classes are 3 hours every week for 12ish weeks, if you serialized that you could be done in 12 days. Plus the student and the professor would be in harmony, each having the other's undivided attention.
Source: I attend SJSU.
This is a serious problem that goes well beyond the supposed student 'laziness' theory that's so popular here on HN. Clearly our lower levels of education are screwing students up. Most of the students that get into college are seriously ill-prepared, and universities have taken it upon themselves to compensate for this by offering several remedial courses and lowering grading standards.
It may be tempting to suggest that universities just stop doing this, but we've got to remember that our society values that degree way too much to ever let them get away with that (just imagine the revolt if all the colleges across the country started drastically lowering their acceptance rates). This sort of mindless degree-worship is silly on it's own, but it allows universities to grab money from otherwise under-qualified students, and who's gonna make a peep about that?
http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
Presumably, the fee charged led to many borderline cases sticking out the course, but then flunking the final.
I completed half of an MBA program in the classroom (1+ yrs), then moved out of state and had to switch to an online program at another university, both of which were AACSB accredited.
I must say, the online program was much more challenging, from almost all areas like personal responsibility, participation and academic rigor. The only area that could use improvement is testing, where some professors would prefer multiple choice questions, but this is a problem in any program.
Regarding the San Jose classes, I think a lot of undergraduate courses essentially run on autopilot so if a student isn't interested, of course they aren't going to learn anything.
It also means 36.4% probably didn't receive credit.
A "3" sits on the bubble. Since AP scores are "recommendations of proficiency", not final exam grades in the traditional sense, students with "3's" are often advised to reconsider taking the course again. It depends on the school of course, but nobody complains. That's how it works.
Adding the 15.6% of students with a "3" to the 36.4% means 52% of students might not be "proficient" by definition.
The San Jose State numbers aren't shocking, they're about right given the total population. Plus, looking at the courses and the material, I'm willing to bet 40% drop the traditional class before the final anyway. Are they included in SJSU's comparative statistic?
If it's a couple hundred I wouldn't consider it failure.
Plus has anybody considered the fact that some people (like me) consider exams just way for professors/everybody to keep stats on how the class is doing and me taking the exam doesn't help me at all with learning what i wanted to learn from the course.
I have taken a lot of online courses because i was interested in the subject did the small tests sprinkled in because i found the vaguely useful never took the exams.
I like the small details/intricacies being pointed out to me in the tests but I'm not going to bother remembering it all just the knowledge of it being there is enough I'll look up the details when i need it.
Lulz.