Demystifying the MOOC

I feel compelled to cite my own Ivy League professional degree every time a discussion on education comes up. I'm not speaking from envy or resentment. 99% of the education I received was doodling during unbelievably inefficient lectures and handing in token papers blaming the holy trinity of colonialism, race, and gender for every possible subject matter -- literary analysis, cultural study, or virtually any field where the professor wouldn't dare to mark down politically correct answers. I can only imagine how much more worthless the experiences have been of students studying less rigorous majors at less rigorous universities.

Without default-proof student loans, few students would be stupid enough to borrow such vast sums of money for such useless degrees. Nobody has ever deemed an author or a poet worthwhile on the basis of their certificates rather than their body of work. There was a time not so long ago that nurses, cops, and teachers didn't need infamously pointless certification to do their job. Even professional fields, like my own career in law, was traditionally an apprenticeship rather than a three-year slog through relatively pointless studies in exchange for (based on a ten-year repayment plan) more than a half-million dollars in debt.

But at least I received a professional degree. Undergraduate degrees outside of STEM fields (which may reasonably require certification) are increasingly justified by the mystique of "teaching you how to think" or, in William Deresiewicz's language, building a self and developing a soul.

To quote Steven Pinker's excellent takedown of Deresiewicz: "Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it. I submit that if “building a self” is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time." 1

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Let's take down this article point by point.

(1) "There are several reasons for the disillusionment. First, the average student in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job."

It takes remarkable inculcation of the "whitey is bad" mindset to think that intelligent, driven people studying in their free time is bad if they're educated white men. Would the author condemn MOOCs if they were instead dominated by impoverished African women?

Nor does this argument in any way mean that since white people are studying, nobody else may study. Young white men are overwhelmingly the early adopters of ANY revolutionary technology, including the Internet and cell phones. Every time access to knowledge was pioneered by young white men, the resulting benefits were quickly taken up by the rest of the world as soon as infrastructure was established.

(2) "A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail."

Yes... that's what happens when you study a subject in your free time, which vanishingly few of us have. Most of my colleagues can barely sleep, much less have dinner with their girlfriends or sustain marriages with their increasingly dissatisfied wives.

And we're the lucky ones! Poor and middle-class Americans work absolutely ridiculous hours at multiple jobs for virtually no pay and certainly no benefits or savings. Worse, the bottom 85% of the country have increasingly abandoned marriage and important social support structures in favor of having children without partners or with a rotating cast of partners... with all the consequent dysfunction that you might imagine.

I myself have signed up for a number of MOOC courses in computer science that I've barely started, for lack of time and focus. I'm hoping to transition soon to a job that allows me regular hours and secure employment so I can spend my free time learning for its own sake... but until then, my MOOC courses will remain incomplete (and failed) and my favorite books will remain unread.

If this point argues anything, it's that leisure time is valuable. I don't see why a teenager would be better off paying $50k+/year to attend lesser quality artisanal lectures from lesser professors than they would be simply spending those years living in a city and studying Harvard's MOOCs at Starbucks.

(3) "What’s more, for many instructors, the courses are on-the-job training in online education. Two-thirds of MOOC professors surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013 said they had never taught a fully online course before their first open online class."

Jesus christ. Really.

In the first place, MOOCs have barely entered their first couple years of existence. No kidding you don't have many people experienced in broadcasting lectures online. Why would this negatively impact the quality of these experienced professors' lectures?

In the second place, the author says the solution is to introduce certification in teaching MOOCs. Can't cut out that institutional middleman, can we?

In the third place, inexperienced adjunct professors absolutely DOMINATE college teaching. The tenured professor who earns six figures is vanishing quickly in favor of bloated administration and harried graduate students who waste their youth on useless doctorates and burn out on underpaid teaching positions. If Selingo wants experienced senior professors teaching courses, I can't imagine a better source than any given MOOC.

(4) "Coursera and edX, the two main MOOC providers, are essentially acting as gatekeepers for American higher education online, replicating in their virtual world the pecking order in the physical world as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings."

INCREDIBLE. In an effort to decry free access to the best educations, Selingo complains that MOOCs generally pursue the best professors from the best universities, as defined by the best students. Because in the absence of MOOCs, anyone could attend Harvard courses for free from anywhere in the world at their own schedule. Calling MOOCs "gatekeepers" rather than educational institutions requires the highest level of intellectual dishonesty.

Selingo also implies that these talentless schmucks from Harvard are crowding out more talented professors from no-name schools. Not only is there literally nothing keeping a competing no-name from publishing their own course, there's nothing keeping them from publishing their own PLATFORM to rival Coursera or edX. It's not as though Udacity has a long brand history or a monopoly on competent teaching.

Nor are existing platforms hostile to non-Ivy courses in the first place. I'm currently working my way through some UToronto courses in computer science, an opportunity I would never have had otherwise. Of course, I could have attended a vastly inferior course at a local college at amazing expense in terms of time and money... but at least I would have employed inferior institutions and kept the student loan money rolling in.

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To Selingo's credit, he acknowledges that MOOCs allow students to study their passions at their own pace. To introduce that obvious fact after this series of libelous attacks on MOOCs doesn't feel particularly redemptive, but... let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

I actually purchased Selingo's book when it was published, in aspirational hopes of working through my enormous backlog of unread books in the near future. Of course, by Selingo's calculations, my failure to complete his book signals the pointlessness of book publication. I should instead pay enormous sums to have vastly inferior writers cobble together their own inadequate interpretations on the subject of MOOCs three times a week, in a schedule that prevents me from maintaining worthwhile employment and forces me to take out predatory student loans that fund such middlemen institutions.

We should expect these attacks to continue as the value of worthless degrees is called into question. There are going to be a LOT of unemployed doctorates and administration in the coming decade, most of whom have no practical skills except professional outrage. Allow me to state the obvious: MOOCs are an unqualified blessing on the world, and impart the best parts of an education without the cost of kids' youths and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are the future of education. And that is a wonderful, wonderful gift to every generation to come.

1. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league...

Advancements in AI and automation are going to replace a lot more jobs, and MOOCs are a great way to quickly/affordably retrain for a new profession. The end goal of my current project is to reach a point where we can actually pay people a livable wage to educate themselves with MOOCs as they pursue their desired professions. MOOCs have already been incredibly helpful for me personally, and I believe that they'll be considered one of the most important innovations in the future.

This blog is written by one of the Coursera Course(Computational Investing) instructor. I will quote him "Much of the criticism of MOOCs centers on supposedly low completion rates. And these rates do seem low when compared to completion rates of regular university courses. But the comparison isn’t apples to apples. Let’s dive in by considering what does it mean to start a course. "

Online courses are just that: courses + the internet. Anyone can load up on MIT OCW, Coursera, and Udacity lectures that have a value of ~$0 on a resume. What does a 10x improvement upon education look like? What happens when we stop watching talking heads in a video and start taking part in individualized tracks that can prove our knowledge of a subject to a certain degree of certainty, as it evolves over time, for any subject. The issue has never been learning, it's been proving that you know what you've learned.

As it stands now, college degrees serve as a signal for what someone knows. No matter how outdated that notion is.

[1]: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-...

For 1, as a person with ADHD I struggle to get work done. The deadlines and social pressure to meet them are sometimes the only thing forcing me to actually do work. If people formed local communities to push each other to finish their MOOCs, that would help, but this isn't built-in to MOOCs directly like it's built-in to traditional universities.

For 2, I think people only learn when actively doing something. Passively listening to a lecture does nothing; the lecture only becomes knowledge when you think about it or use it in some way. Active learning exercises are harder to build in to MOOCs because one of the best ways of evaluating learning - having someone "qualified" look at your work and provide feedback - isn't scalable. Multiple-choice questions are too easily gamed and rarely encourage deep thinking. Things like discussions, or iterative feedback on problem-solving, or essay critiques are much more useful, but again, not easily scalable.

It might be that forums where other students critique your work or help you through difficult assignments could be a good substitute. But maybe not. I'm a teaching assistant for a computer science department, and it's difficult to encourage a student in just a right way to help them get the answer for themself. It's tempting to just give out the answer, which isn't helpful for the student but is much easier for me. The collective wisdom of a forum might not be a good substitute for the subtle patience of a professor.

However, neither of these concerns mean we shouldn't pursue MOOCs. I want MOOCs to one day be a complete substitute for a university education. But to do that, concerns like these will need to be addressed.