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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

"...making the case for human intervention in teaching, at least for those students who are not 100% self-motivated and self-assured (that is, those students who actually need to be educated, rather than left to educate themselves). Two relevant notes of today."

This is really important. The discussion about education in this community (HN), and the a lot of the discussions I've seen related to the MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students.

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> MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students

I think MOOC's could benefit from face-to-face coaching. Students need someone to see them, to acknowledge their efforts, to monitor their progress and give them encouragement or advice when needed. This is the job of a coach, or educational counselor, not a teacher.

The teacher can very well be teaching the course on video, but the student needs to be observed by a real person in order to get that special feeling that motivates and makes the whole process efficient. A bunch of counselors distributed to major cities could serve a lot of students taking online courses, but they need to feel accountable to a person, not just a website. It's easy to do that and fits well with the online delivery model.

MOOC's could be a great solution to life-long learning and keeping up to date with relevant skills. Especially in computer science, a 4 or 5 year college program is too long - by the time the students finish, many specific technologies they learned might be already obsolete. Instead, coming back for a course or two every year might work much better in the long run.

MOOC's might still work out if they could be coupled with employment from the start - let Coursera or Udacity partner up with various companies and create relevant courses, and use this opportunity to teach and rank the participants and in the end, offer jobs to the ones that are up to par with their skills. This would make MOOC's much more valuable than what they are now.

"Students need someone to see them, to acknowledge their efforts, to monitor their progress and give them encouragement or advice when needed."

I agree with this wholeheartedly. It is always important to remember that students are people and that most people are extremely social creatures who want to interact with other people directly, in a bidirectional, real-time way.

But does that interaction have to come in the form of a rigid and traditional teacher to student series of interactions? Or could study groups fill that need?

In 100 or 200 years from now, I think we can be certain that teaching won't even resemble what we do today. Not to mention just how little we've applied scientific research to modern education. We have a long way to go before we see how usable and powerful our tools for information become.

I am not certain of that. Not even a little bit. I don't think teaching will be identical, but I don't see how it can change that much. Human contact is important, that necessitates a "teacher" of some kind. One-on-one instruction isn't efficient, that necessitates classes. I mean, teaching is basically the same today as it was 200 or even 400 years ago despite truly massive increases in technology. I don't see how another hundred years or so will really change human nature enough to necessitate a paradigm shift in teaching.

True. I think the focus on self-direction is a tangent. The real potential for MOOCs is individually tailored pacing and material at scale. Self-direction is all well and good for the students who are capable of such. But even for those who aren't, there's great promise in the idea of "custom" curricula and even "custom" pacing of standard courses.

Our current education system is based on standards and Gaussian distributions. Some aptitudes appear to be distributed that way. But a lot of things aren't, like learning styles, speeds, comprehension methods, imagination, specific interests and aptitudes, and so forth. We can't dream of assigning an individual tutor to every student in the country. But we can dream of a world in which technology enables every student in a standard course to learn in a personally optimized way.

I agree with the main point - that MOOCs work best for students who are self-motivated - but I think you're not giving the average college student enough credit.

From my experiences as a student in both environments, I think the motivation required to successfully complete a college course is about the same as completing a MOOC. I don't think that an increase in the amount of content delivered online at a college level would increase the failure rates, because the students who aren't self-motivated would fail out anyway.

The fact that you're here discussing this matter indicates that you're not 'average'. You probably don't associate with many 'average' college students.

That may be true, but that's not what I was trying to get at. My observation is that the external motivating pressures are the same, whether the material is delivered via traditional instruction or online. In both environments, there are lectures to attend, assignments or essays to hand in, and a final exam to write. I suspect that anyone who has enough motivation to complete that work in a traditional setting would also be able to complete it online.

I strongly disagree. I have three college degrees but my completion rate on MOOCs is hovering around 10% right now. Obviously I'm a sample of one, but I just wanted to give a personal account to match your own.

The classroom setting is important because it sets up social expectations and accountability. I tend to blow off MOOCs partly (there are obviously other reasons as well, including the fact that they are free) because there is no scheduled time. There is less pressure and it is up to me to make time, it isn't blocked out for me. I also get bored more easily in MOOCs because the communication only flows in one direction, from the teacher to the student. I can't ask questions or challenge assumptions during lectures. To me, that isn't as interesting, so I'm more likely to drop out.

Interesting! I don't have any college degree - I left in fourth year and joined a startup. I mostly hated college classes. I felt that many instructors either didn't want to be teaching, or weren't very good at it, and didn't work at getting better. Taking a class on a subject I was interested in was a guaranteed way to destroy all my enthusiasm for the topic (with the one exception of a great computer graphics course). I couldn't imagine completing three degrees.

My MOOC completion rate is also fairly low. In total I've signed up for 16 MOOCs, and successfully completed 6 of them (with 1 more in progress). I don't consider this a failing of the MOOC style - I actually consider the freedom to drop courses without punishment a great joy compared to my previous college engineering degree program. I've stopped "attending" MOOCs because I didn't like the instructor, or because I didn't enjoy the material, or just because I had too many other things going on to set aside 6 hours a week to work on a course.

But what if you had to complete the MOOC in a college environment, where you didn't have the freedom to just stop working on the material without punishment? I agree that having the lecture times blocked out is a motivating factor - I take "classes" at the gym to motivate myself to go every day. But when it comes to assignments, or studying for the final, that's still time you need to set up for yourself. Since you've been so successful at self-motivating yourself to do that already, do you think you'd be able to motivate yourself enough to watch the video lectures in a college setting?

Thanks for sharing your data point, even if it's just a small sample size. I'm really enjoying reading about other's experiences.

I actually took a for-credit online class last year and I did rather poorly in it, at least by my normal standards. There were several problems. First, I didn't find the material very interesting (it didn't cover what I thought it was going to cover).

But second, and maybe just as important, I just hated watching the video lectures. I had a lot of trouble motivating myself to spend several hours watching lectures, and when I did watch them I often found I got very little out of them because I couldn't ask questions in real time. So, for instance, if I wasn't completely clear on a point in minute 10, I might be lost for the next 40 minutes and my only recourse was to watch the part that confused me over and over again in the hope that it would become clear (which is boring).

I think I simply can't learn well from video lectures. When I was in school I was the type of student who would always engage the lecturer. I asked a lot of questions, sometimes when I was confused, sometimes when I wanted more information, and sometimes when I thought I had something to add or wanted to know about some special case. This just doesn't work with video lectures.

So I think the answer to your question is that I probably wouldn't do very well in a MOOC, even if there was some kind of consequence behind it.

Edit: I do think that MOOCs are a great thing and I hope they stay a part of the "scene", partly because it is nice to have the option (I enjoy participating in them even if I usually don't get very far), but mostly because they seem to "work" for a lot of people, like yourself. More options is good, just don't take away my in-person lectures! :)

Something I see overlooked is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. If you were getting real academic credits for participating in MOOCs, if your degree completion depended on successful completion of a MOOC, I'd wager that your completion rate would hover somewhat north of 10%.

It's also overlooked that most college courses look more like MOOCS than not. Much ado is made about the importance of teacher intervention for struggling or marginal students. Is anyone under the impression that such interventions actually happen at scale (or at all) at your typical large university? Especially the lousy ones most directly threatened by MOOCs?

Thanks for this. At least when I went to college, the explicit difference in style between it and high school was that nobody was going to hold your hand and you would have to take ownership over your own education. And that was my experience of it. Higher education in general works best for the self-motivated.

On the other hand, Very few people can learn math on their own; you need a gun at your head in the form of a course...

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.5.htm...

I took way more math courses than my CS degree required just because I wanted to -- so I enjoy math -- but I still benefited from the pressure exerted on me by being in a formal course. I don't believe I would have studied as deeply on my own just with the textbook, nor do I believe I would have studied as deeply with today's MOOCs.

I don't know if it was the threat of wasting tuition money, or the concern about getting a bad grade on my transcript, or the camaraderie of my in-person peers, or what, but for some topics I know good and well that the traditional college course helped me stick with learning the material.

I guess YMMV. I tend to work harder at MOOCs now than I did at classes in college, making sure I understand derivations of formulas rather than just memorizing the formula for use on a test. I don't really know how my college-aged self would have behaved though. I've also found the for-pay structured certificate-granting aspect of what Coursera calls "specializations" is a decent motivator, along the lines of tuition and grades at college. Definitely, camaraderie (and similar: networking) is a major component of the college experience that is missing (or spoken to in a very token way) from the online experience.

Much of the discussion I've seen of MOOCs is how the format enables more interactivity by enabling learning where lecture and associated self-check exercises are delivered purely online, and interaction time with other live humans -- whether co-students, individually-selected tutors, or formal group classrooms with faculty instructors -- is used to provide direct Q&A and support on substantive assignments (which may also be delivered and graded online) -- and a significant subset of that discussion has centered around use of existing MOOCs or custom online courses built on their open platforms as support for "flipped classrooms".

But the best time, for me at least, to ask questions is during the lectures. That's when my mind is working to understand the material, so that's when I am most likely to have questions. The same process happens during labs and the like. I also need to be able to ask questions during lectures because if I fail to understand something it may negate the entire value of the lecture.

I agree with you. In my startup (marketplace for face-to-face teachers) we see clearly that most of the students are not self-motivated and self-assured when in difficulties. It is the rigor of the schedule appointments, the expertise of the face-to-face teacher to adjust the learning progress and his direct feedback that are helping efficiently our students. MOOC’s are still experimenting on the best way to massively transmit knowledge and it will take time for them before being as efficient as a human teacher.

You're implicitly assuming that education can actually do something for the group that needs "intervention".

There is very little evidence that university education actually does anything other than act as a signal for students' already-present aptitude.

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