The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course
npr.org
npr.org
Obviously there are issues the MOOC providers need to resolve. It's not clear how they will make money, and if they really want to go the volume model they probably need to lower the level of the courses offered -- more Udemy than Udacity -- or offer some kind of recognised accreditation so that students can justify devoting the time required to really learn material. In the language of startups, with which I'm sure we're all familiar, they haven't found product-market fit. It may be the case that people like me are not considered useful by MOOC providers -- I'm unlikely to ever give them money. That's fair enough and I have no problem with it.
I find articles like the one linked rather annoying. It's clear that MOOCs are a thing, and what we really need is discussion of how they're going to integrate with the educational landscape, not sniping from the sidelines. In this case it's ok, as it's a journalistic organisation reporting on what happened. However I read the same thing from academics, which is a real shame. Many seem to get joy from the failures of MOOCs, no doubt because they see them as a threat to their livelihood. I'd rather see some engagement with the issue.
Also would like to see how they are going to survive financially, and if the universities will keep supporting them.
I'm curious why these organizations are pushing a sort of virtual class model at all. Wouldn't it be more useful to provide lecture series on topics alone? Perhaps add some social interaction but in a way more fitting of the medium.
Right now, I went to investigate your behavioral economics class and found that I wasn't able to view the lectures until some time in the future. Why hobble themselves and their users? Is it about a monetization model they envision in the future?
It's quite frustrating because there is some real value here. I'd love for MOOCs to start making big institutions sweat just a little.
If I pay $2,000 and have a 4% chance of completion, that sucks. If I pay $0 and have a 4% chance of completion, that's pure win.
I find it odd MOOC's are being held to such a high standard, when the status quo alternative is failing so hard [2].
1. https://www.quora.com/Business/What-is-a-typical-conversion-... 2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/30/p...
First, it is important to understand the OMI is a school politicized through and through. Jerry Brown has deep connections to the school, having financed much of the schools on-goings and involving himself continually in the school's decision making. The school has performed alright but not as well enough, it seems, for Jerry Brown. The governor's displeasure does have some merit considering the copious resources the school possesses in areas like staffing and technology.
It appears now that the governor personally approached Udacity in hopes that they might be the solution to the school's lackluster performance. The folks at Udacity appear to me to have been genuinely naive and unfamiliar with the urban charter school world. They apparently accepted straight out what the school told them about student skill and motivation levels. So I believe they were genuinely confused when algebra repeater students turned out not have the pre-algebra skills they were supposed to possess but instead had skills often not much beyond elementary school level. I also think they were truly stumped by the student data that resulted from the school secretly asking adult student-aids to do the work for them, a commonly practiced form of cheating throughout the country in online credit-recovery courses.
Sometime after the whole Udacity experiment went south, I spoke with one of the faculty members more involved in the courses. This faculty member suggested that the Udacity representatives did realize at some point the reality of the mess into which they had allowed themselves to be led. However, also being aware of the politics of the situation and not wanting to offend the govenor, they permitted themselves to be scapegoated.
In the end, I suspect that Udacity is just happy to get back to it's original noble mission of providing free, high-quality, career-oriented online-education to the world and forget this small ill-fated diversion.
I couldn't expect to have access to courses like Probabilistic Graphical Models and Neural Networks by Hinton at probably any of the universities in my country. By popularizing science, by being able to reach such a massive population, even if it inspires a 1% of those taking the course, it is absolutely better than Hinton or Kohler teaching a course to 50 - 250 students at UoT and Stanford per semester.
This is long term we are talking about. Yes, the whole thing must be sustained by business, but I find a moral objective too here.
A plus is that several of the teachers were absolutely world class.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-drops-plans-to-co...
MOOCs would have existed decades ago, but the cost of distribution of the content was high. With the arrival of YouTube and cheap content delivery networks including Amazon's, MOOCs suddenly eliminated the distribution problem.
But it turns out that wasn't enough. When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. MOOCs are not working.
For example, with regards to the MITX 6002x course:
"MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,000 tried the first problem set, 9,000 passed the midterm, and 7,157 passed the course as a whole. According to MITx: "… if the number is looked at in absolute terms, it had as many students as might take the course in 40 years at MIT.”"
http://www.nebhe.org/thejournal/disruptive-innovation-changi...
I think the best solution is to have students learn at their own pace using MOOCs and supplement that with teachers in classrooms. I remember that I was way behind in classes until I hit 2nd or 3rd grade, and then our teachers allowed us to work through various workbooks at our own pace. Within a couple weeks I not only had caught up to my peers, but I was outstripping them at a very fast clip. I think that a lot of really smart kids probably have similar issues... the pace of lowest common denominator teaching which dominates both public and private classrooms can cause really bright kids to be frustrated and ultimately apathetic.
There is a social aspect to schooling that causes a lot of hangups with both teachers and parents alike. Kids who are smarter than their peers have no recourse other than being pushed up grade levels, which brings about its own set of negative challenges. By creating a system where students can learn though MOOCs and have teachers who can aid them, the 3rd grader who should be learning at an 8th grade level can stay with his age group and get that social education which is ultimately just as important as the mathematical and science education.
From a "job credentials" / "factory-based education" approach, MOOCs may not fit the bill, but I think they provide something really useful just by making knowledge of different concepts available to more people.
Previously, to change your goal in the course was considered a personal fault. But, now the lectures are recorded and the tests mostly graded by computer. The deadlines are almost artificial constraints. (This assumes the goal of the course is to master the material, and not credentialing.)
I have failed to complete numerous Coursera courses and other MOOCs, not out of missing motivation, but out of scheduling, life, and complexity. I normally end up downloading the lectures, after the fact, to gain exposure to the subject matter, because my goal had to change from mastery to just understanding the subject matter. I no longer consider that failure.
I tend to agree. Actually, I don't see much improvement over a book. I rather have a well-written book in my hand rather than having to go through so many videos.
For me, the main advantage is easy and free access. Also, they make it easier to pace oneself, which is one of the hard part with self-teaching.
"When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. "
What is the percentage of dedicated students, that have the right background to understand the material, complete the course?
"MOOCs are not working."
If working is defined in term of completion rate, they are not. But it's not the right metric.
> What is the percentage of dedicated students, that have the right background to understand the material, complete the course?
What we have now is too much marketing. The reason 90% of students fail to complete the course is because 90% of them aren't really students. But the MOOC purveyors insist on calling them that despite the fact that a lot of people enroll in a course they don't have time/ability for. And people do that because there's no reason not to.
When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. MOOCs are not working.
Since graduating, I've enrolled in a handful of MOOCs. I've finished less than half of these courses, but they have satisfied my curiosity and have given me something new and different to learn. I most certainly would not have paid for the experience, but I feel I'm better off because of it. I'd say this is working and far from an epic failure.
The thing about MOOCs is that to attract funding, media attention, and participation from big-name universities and top teaching talent -- all the things you'd desperately want to have if you were the one pitching them, in other words -- they really need MOOCs to work as something bigger than just a sideline for the intellectually curious, because the market for "a sideline for the intellectually curious" isn't big enough to attract any of those things on its own. It's a niche market at best.
Higher education as a sector, on the other hand, is anything but a niche market; so if MOOCs could be positioned as The Future of Higher Education, the thing that is going to replace universities in the 21st century, that would suit their advocates' interests nicely. But the data coming out of the MOOC experiments to date make them look less and less like the sort of thing you'd want to bet your kid's future on exclusively if you had any alternatives at all, which undermines that positioning.
With MOOCs, a ton of the takers are not full-time students. I've taken some MOOC courses and only completed one (probabilistic graphical models). The main reason is that I have much higher priorities now, and the courses are on a strict schedule. The first time there's a choice between getting a piece of code finished that I need for a business deal done and finishing a problem set, that problem set is not getting finished.
I've signed up for a few courses now with no intent of using them as a school, just as supplemental material to augment my own personal learning venture. I don't really care about the tests or homework prescribed by the service, and I certainly don't care about any kind of certificate of completion.
I don't consider my usage habits a failure though. In each case I came away with what I had hoped to learn when signing up.
But I've still learned a lot, and I've been using some of the stuff I've learned in those side projects.
The only one I completed, the instructor was engaging and interactive in the sense, he didn't show just the slides and read, he interacted with the slide. By the time, he finished the video, the slides were all written over in his handwriting.
The one course I dropped because instructor was reading the slides in the videos. I can read slides faster myself, I don't need to watch a lengthy video and listen instructor read the slides.
The second course dropped because instructor wasn't very good at explaining things. He will just show the slides but then ramble on. Though expert in his field, I got the impression that he wasn't a good teacher. Teaching is an art and not necessarily every expert can teach.
The MOOCs need to be engaging, not just the topic wise but also instructor wise.
During the courses I took, I noticed certain trends. Students with Indian-looking names were often most concerned about the certificate of achievement given out after the course. In each course I'd see students asking if it were available yet well before the end of the course! I suspect that this may be due to the high importance that Indian society today places on the possession of credentials, even if there's insufficient knowledge and experience to back up those credentials.
Likewise, questions about the marking scheme and grading were often coming from students with Asian-looking names. I suspect that this is due to the high degree of emphasis in many Asian societies that is placed upon obtaining extremely high grades in academic studies, even if these grades don't truly reflect understanding.
And questions asking about exact midterm or exam content tended to come from students with Western European or American names. These societies tend to place a lot of emphasis on getting work done with minimal effort, including getting exam questions in advance to avoid unnecessary, from a grading perspective, studying.
Bring together all of those students, and those types of questions can easily take up 70% or more of the discussion. That doesn't leave much room for other discussion. Even that discussion was usually lacking, due to many students not having a good grasp of the course's language of instruction. Bringing together students with different backgrounds may be a good thing, but too much difference is just as bad as extreme uniformity, if not worse. At least in the case of uniformity there is the similarity that the students have in common.
- Pacabel
The future of education is probably not MOOCs alone, or brick and mortar schools alone. The future is allowing students to learn however they want to learn without barriers. That will truly be transformative.
I personally like to learn in isolation, I have a tendency to quickly ~plagiarize ideas of others thinking I understand, so learning alone in my room is better.
Inspiring teachers I've met fits on one hand fingers.
I enrolled on many MOOCs, dropped right away from 50% of them (acute click-itis), got late halfway and dropped 25% (but what I could got was solid improvements), finished the rest with many worthy discoveries and good exercises, surrounded by interesting encounters interactions on IRC.
[1] I'd like to add that an unconfident student will have difficulties with teachers too. Small politics, personal preferences and shallow details will play against you. Think submitting a shitty looking but concise self-critical .pdf summary of your project vs a nicely printed and shiny report but full of fluff.
I work as an assistant teacher every now and then and it is mostly small group teaching and going over the homework exercises. What I have seen is that the first couple of sessions are totally worthless subject wise. But they are extremely critical. During those sessions the students learn to know each other and me. When everyone is comfortable attending the sessions can the actually learning begin.
From this perspective I think MOOCs would need the following. Firstly, you need to create small enough groups of people that are comfortable discussing the subject with each other. Encouraging local study groups is a one way of doing this. The other thing is to encourage discussion through anonymity with forums or IRC. And you need to acknowledge that you don't reach all of your students with these methods and not rely on them too much.
> I personally like to learn in isolation, I have a tendency to quickly ~plagiarize ideas of others thinking I understand, so learning alone in my room is better.
There's nothing wrong with self-study per se, but it has a one great flaw. It is easy do the kind of plagiarization I think you are talking about without knowing. This can be remedied by getting feedback from an instructor, or going through the material with someone else and then cross checking how you understood the ideas.
That sais I think my paragraph about copying others idea came out wrong. When I'm with people, learning by osmosis often lead to superficial repetitions of some of their findings, something that is not deep learning. I like to reach the enlightening phase, ability to find solutions from blank slate, hence being alone helps avoiding this to an extent.
I think we are on the same page about your last paragraph. You are right, you face a problem of a same kind that I wrote about when learning in a group. Someone seems to know the material well, they are confident and maybe even charismatic. They go through their solution and everyone just nods and agrees.
The trick is to get everyone tell their solution (maybe not for the same problem) and have an atmosphere where people feel comfortable correcting and getting corrected. That is a key responsibility of a small group teacher.
The "peril" in self-study is a bit different. You may find your enlightenment but how do you know that your mental model is correct?