MOOCs after Udacity's refocus
November 27, 2013 11:36 AM Subscribe
Udacity, who, along with Coursera and edX, has been one of the "big three" MOOC providers is stepping back from its initial vision, to refocus on corporate training.
Now that we've had a bit of time to think through the potential offered by MOOCs, and to assess how well they live up to them in practice, what conclusions are people drawing?
Is it possible that MOOCs have value, but just aren't the same sort of animal as a traditional "bricks and mortar" course? Jonathan Freedman, from the University of Michigan, thinks so, and calls them "usefully Middlebrow." John Covach of the University of Rochester talks in depth about his own experiences, and frames MOOC courses as more akin to a public lecture series than a college course.
It wasn't for the students at San Jose State University.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 11:42 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 11:42 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
this will be comforting to the economics lecturers who are so good at explaining the efficiencies gained from manufacturing layoffs
posted by moorooka at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by moorooka at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2013 [3 favorites]
I don't think that MOOC's are a good replacement for college classes, if those are available. I bet it's better than giving people a library card and wishing them luck, though.
posted by empath at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by empath at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
It's really just a clear example of a classic problem: over promising and under delivering.
posted by 2bucksplus at 11:45 AM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by 2bucksplus at 11:45 AM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'd also argue that it's better than those for-profit, exploitative diploma mills.
posted by empath at 11:46 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by empath at 11:46 AM on November 27, 2013 [5 favorites]
There are two plausible interpretations of "refocussing on corporate training", either (a) corporate training doesn't do very much, making it's a respectable way to adopt the fraudulent practices of large online degree mills like University of Phoenix, or (b) students are more motivated in corporate training.
Assuming (b), there are many tricky factors involved in teaching young people, but no mysterious "only a human can understand this" bullshit. In the long run, we'll likely develop techniques for software to teach, motivate, etc. students more effectively than humans do. Yes, it'll take a while, but it'll happen. I therefore still expect variations on MOOCs to replace most university education, but maybe not for anyone currently alive.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:51 AM on November 27, 2013
Assuming (b), there are many tricky factors involved in teaching young people, but no mysterious "only a human can understand this" bullshit. In the long run, we'll likely develop techniques for software to teach, motivate, etc. students more effectively than humans do. Yes, it'll take a while, but it'll happen. I therefore still expect variations on MOOCs to replace most university education, but maybe not for anyone currently alive.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:51 AM on November 27, 2013
According to a U. of Pennsylvania survey of Coursera users, most MOOC users are well-educated: "Far from realizing the high ideals of their advocates, MOOCs seem to be reinforcing the advantages of the 'haves' rather than educating the 'have-nots'," said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, the study's author.
posted by needled at 11:58 AM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by needled at 11:58 AM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
When employers start accepting "badges" instead of degrees, then the bottom will fall out of higher ed. Specifically, the non top 100-research or top-100-elite-undergrad schools will be fighting over a very small pool of people.
I say this as a college professor at one of those schools.......
posted by lalochezia at 11:58 AM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
I say this as a college professor at one of those schools.......
posted by lalochezia at 11:58 AM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
Employers matter. Or, say--can I get into Google's Summer of Code as a student learning programming from MOOCs? Nope. Can I get into any of the myriad internships that are only for students? Nope. They'll rail about how poorly universities prepare students to do practical stuff, but if even the tech industry isn't prepared to treat this sort of thing as even vaguely equivalent, I don't know how they expect anybody else to jump on board.
posted by Sequence at 12:02 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by Sequence at 12:02 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
I'm glad Udacity is figuring out what it's good at and moving towards that and stuff. There's a very interesting perspective brought forth about Udacity's SJSU experiment though. Basically using a class of students as your company's experiment without express consent and without any protection offered to the students is unethical by any current scientific research standard.
The issue being that, in research done on humans, those humans are made aware of the potential consequences and are allowed to back out at any time without consequence. It turns out it's really hard to back out of this experiment if you're an at-risk college student who needs to pass this required class or else will probably fail out or drop out.
It's one thing if you're an educated person just taking a MOOC on the side for fun - not passing the class literally has no impact on your life. But I hope that future efforts to test MOOCs with real students try to do so without inadvertently harming young futures.
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 12:08 PM on November 27, 2013 [3 favorites]
The issue being that, in research done on humans, those humans are made aware of the potential consequences and are allowed to back out at any time without consequence. It turns out it's really hard to back out of this experiment if you're an at-risk college student who needs to pass this required class or else will probably fail out or drop out.
It's one thing if you're an educated person just taking a MOOC on the side for fun - not passing the class literally has no impact on your life. But I hope that future efforts to test MOOCs with real students try to do so without inadvertently harming young futures.
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 12:08 PM on November 27, 2013 [3 favorites]
When employers start accepting "badges" instead of degrees, then the bottom will fall out of higher ed.
I have a lot of great badges from cub scouts. I've been leaving these off my CV. Until now.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 12:14 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
I have a lot of great badges from cub scouts. I've been leaving these off my CV. Until now.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 12:14 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
I was required to take a mooc db course at work, and they definitely cared if I passed or not.
posted by empath at 12:22 PM on November 27, 2013
posted by empath at 12:22 PM on November 27, 2013
This Salon article offers a good perspective on the political aspect of MOOCs. I think they're fine for the "middlebrow" education (I hate that term, but it's the one used in the FPP, so there you go), but I've been suspicious of the evangelical claims that've been made since the start about 'fixing' higher education. I think the hype cycle is mostly bunk that Gartner makes up to sell consulting services, but it sort of applies here. MOOCs are crashing, and after people have had a few years to figure them out then they can become a compliment to the existing ecosystem of credentialing and training.
posted by codacorolla at 12:32 PM on November 27, 2013
posted by codacorolla at 12:32 PM on November 27, 2013
empath: I love them and take them all the time. Is it the equivalent of a university education? No, but it's probably equivalent to auditing a big class at a university, which is good enough, no?
Is auditing a big class at a university 'good enough'? Well, no, not if you intend to use any of it.
First of all, auditing a class means you have no skin in the game, so you can screw off or not and nobody but you will ever know the difference. Your brain knows this and will be fighting you every step of the way. , if it becomes difficult. Worst-case, you totally waste your time. Best-case, you learn, but what you learn might be skewed toward the parts of the class you enjoyed. Well, more than it would be normally, anyway.
Also, big classes are just the starting point for most disciplines, and they're pretty crappy starting points. The real useful learning comes later, in upper-level classes with smaller class sizes and a greater workload (and even more so in grad school, if you make it there). The real point of the early classes is to make you able to handle the later courses and also make you a little bit more well-rounded.
Plus, you're dramatically undermining any science by taking out the labs and any language class by taking out the paper writing (even if you write them, you need someone to check them over).
So, while I think it's great that you're taking them online, it really isn't the same as taking serious classes. It's more like endlessly surfing wikipedia or reading general-audience books on the subject - you learn a lot, but it tends to not be the kind of information that would let you actually work within the field.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:37 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
Is auditing a big class at a university 'good enough'? Well, no, not if you intend to use any of it.
First of all, auditing a class means you have no skin in the game, so you can screw off or not and nobody but you will ever know the difference. Your brain knows this and will be fighting you every step of the way. , if it becomes difficult. Worst-case, you totally waste your time. Best-case, you learn, but what you learn might be skewed toward the parts of the class you enjoyed. Well, more than it would be normally, anyway.
Also, big classes are just the starting point for most disciplines, and they're pretty crappy starting points. The real useful learning comes later, in upper-level classes with smaller class sizes and a greater workload (and even more so in grad school, if you make it there). The real point of the early classes is to make you able to handle the later courses and also make you a little bit more well-rounded.
Plus, you're dramatically undermining any science by taking out the labs and any language class by taking out the paper writing (even if you write them, you need someone to check them over).
So, while I think it's great that you're taking them online, it really isn't the same as taking serious classes. It's more like endlessly surfing wikipedia or reading general-audience books on the subject - you learn a lot, but it tends to not be the kind of information that would let you actually work within the field.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:37 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
See also Wisconsin's School of the Air, college lecture series broadcast statewide on the radio beginning in the 1930s. Survives as the WPR program University of the Air, a name used in the 1950s and 1960s by both the UK and Canada for similar material.
posted by dhartung at 12:54 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by dhartung at 12:54 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
Is auditing a big class at a university 'good enough'? Well, no, not if you intend to use any of it.
Use any of it for what? Learning stuff doesn't have to be about training workers.
posted by empath at 1:08 PM on November 27, 2013 [10 favorites]
Use any of it for what? Learning stuff doesn't have to be about training workers.
posted by empath at 1:08 PM on November 27, 2013 [10 favorites]
Fair disclosure: I've currently been running the academic program at a smaller MOOC for web designers/developers for almost 9 months, but I'm convinced this model has the potential to disrupt all sorts of things. However it is definitely a grand experiment of sorts that involves a lot of adjusting and adapting to the data of student behavior. This naturally takes time but meanwhile has made easy targets of certain events like the San Jose/Udacity brouhaha and other stories.
I've been in the education field over 20 years and was also educated in a graduate program in 1999-2000 which had a pretty unique online component for its time. So while a lot of this discussion is much ado about nothing as far as I'm concerned, the drama surrounding online education is fascinating to watch and be a part of.
It's always been a mistake to group the big "players" (Udacity, Coursera, EdX) into the same category. EdX, for example, has always been clear that they are just as interested in the research into what works and what doesn't in online education as anything else. Udacity and Coursera are for-profit and VC-funded and it is this fact that caused a lot of the drama in higher-ed world.
What's interesting to me is the passion around online education from the opposite sides of the fence. On one hand you have folks in traditional higher ed who have raced to attack the Mooc model(s) and to write it off immediately. On the other hand you have some of the original Mooc hipsters (sorry!) who were into online education before it was cool and have attacked the same models from other angles: they're not collaborative or radical enough, they rely too much on old systems of pedagogy and so on.
A key component that continues to come up is the metric of completion rate. The fact that these rates are typically between 2% and 10% raise a lot of questions (rightfully so!). It's one of the reasons that Udacity is adjusting their model a bit, although a lot less than that Slate article portrays. (FWIW, I find a great deal of the Slate coverage on MOOCs to be slanted and lazy journalism). There are some valid issues relating to completion rates, for sure, but sometimes I wonder if the completion rate issue is a feature not a bug.
Here's what I mean by that: in our MOOC we had very typical completion rates for our first course (around 7 or 8%) but that's based on an enrollment of around 12,000 people. The interesting data is that 86% of the people who completed the course did well enough to pass the final exam (which itself was not easy) and get a certificate. For our very specific purposes this is actually great news because it filtered out the less-motivated students and yet thousands of people still learned something they didn't know before. We are in the position to place people into jobs right out of "graduation" if they have the other experience we're looking for, but that's our model and our organization isn't in the business of claiming we're trying to replace higher ed. We're working on finding our niche and have some pretty clear ideas of what we need to do to get there.
tl;dr There's still a lot of experimenting to do with MOOCs, but they have value today and a lot of potential for tomorrow.
posted by jeremias at 1:27 PM on November 27, 2013 [12 favorites]
I've been in the education field over 20 years and was also educated in a graduate program in 1999-2000 which had a pretty unique online component for its time. So while a lot of this discussion is much ado about nothing as far as I'm concerned, the drama surrounding online education is fascinating to watch and be a part of.
It's always been a mistake to group the big "players" (Udacity, Coursera, EdX) into the same category. EdX, for example, has always been clear that they are just as interested in the research into what works and what doesn't in online education as anything else. Udacity and Coursera are for-profit and VC-funded and it is this fact that caused a lot of the drama in higher-ed world.
What's interesting to me is the passion around online education from the opposite sides of the fence. On one hand you have folks in traditional higher ed who have raced to attack the Mooc model(s) and to write it off immediately. On the other hand you have some of the original Mooc hipsters (sorry!) who were into online education before it was cool and have attacked the same models from other angles: they're not collaborative or radical enough, they rely too much on old systems of pedagogy and so on.
A key component that continues to come up is the metric of completion rate. The fact that these rates are typically between 2% and 10% raise a lot of questions (rightfully so!). It's one of the reasons that Udacity is adjusting their model a bit, although a lot less than that Slate article portrays. (FWIW, I find a great deal of the Slate coverage on MOOCs to be slanted and lazy journalism). There are some valid issues relating to completion rates, for sure, but sometimes I wonder if the completion rate issue is a feature not a bug.
Here's what I mean by that: in our MOOC we had very typical completion rates for our first course (around 7 or 8%) but that's based on an enrollment of around 12,000 people. The interesting data is that 86% of the people who completed the course did well enough to pass the final exam (which itself was not easy) and get a certificate. For our very specific purposes this is actually great news because it filtered out the less-motivated students and yet thousands of people still learned something they didn't know before. We are in the position to place people into jobs right out of "graduation" if they have the other experience we're looking for, but that's our model and our organization isn't in the business of claiming we're trying to replace higher ed. We're working on finding our niche and have some pretty clear ideas of what we need to do to get there.
tl;dr There's still a lot of experimenting to do with MOOCs, but they have value today and a lot of potential for tomorrow.
posted by jeremias at 1:27 PM on November 27, 2013 [12 favorites]
key component that continues to come up is the metric of completion rate. The fact that these rates are typically between 2% and 10% raise a lot of questions (rightfully so!).
I don't understand why this is surprising. Free class + no screening = a lot of dilettantes in the class. They aren't really taking up any resources or hurting anything. I sign up for 10 classes at a time and actually end up finishing 1 or 2 usually, because why not? I don't always know which ones I'll enjoy or find useful.
posted by empath at 1:30 PM on November 27, 2013 [7 favorites]
I don't understand why this is surprising. Free class + no screening = a lot of dilettantes in the class. They aren't really taking up any resources or hurting anything. I sign up for 10 classes at a time and actually end up finishing 1 or 2 usually, because why not? I don't always know which ones I'll enjoy or find useful.
posted by empath at 1:30 PM on November 27, 2013 [7 favorites]
empath: Use any of it for what? Learning stuff doesn't have to be about training workers.
Well, at some point, you're hoping to apply the knowledge - either as a building block in learning other things, as a career, as a hobby, or to make better life decisions. MOOCs strip out a lot of the practical ability colleges teach and leave in the facts; the facts are important, no doubt, but you really need to be able to work problems or handle lab equipment or write competently if you're hoping to make a career or even a hobby out of a subject, or get beyond the enthusiest level.
posted by Mitrovarr at 1:54 PM on November 27, 2013
Well, at some point, you're hoping to apply the knowledge - either as a building block in learning other things, as a career, as a hobby, or to make better life decisions. MOOCs strip out a lot of the practical ability colleges teach and leave in the facts; the facts are important, no doubt, but you really need to be able to work problems or handle lab equipment or write competently if you're hoping to make a career or even a hobby out of a subject, or get beyond the enthusiest level.
posted by Mitrovarr at 1:54 PM on November 27, 2013
>> key component that continues to come up is the metric of completion rate. The fact that these rates are typically between 2% and 10% raise a lot of questions (rightfully so!).
> I don't understand why this is surprising
It was never surprising to me for many of the same reasons you mention.
I think the questions it raises are interesting, just one example: as an instructor how do I know what's working and what isn't? When some students are just dropping by and other students are committed, it becomes tricky to identify instructional problems. I.e. are students dropping out because they got what they needed or because the video sucked and was confusing?
posted by jeremias at 1:57 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
> I don't understand why this is surprising
It was never surprising to me for many of the same reasons you mention.
I think the questions it raises are interesting, just one example: as an instructor how do I know what's working and what isn't? When some students are just dropping by and other students are committed, it becomes tricky to identify instructional problems. I.e. are students dropping out because they got what they needed or because the video sucked and was confusing?
posted by jeremias at 1:57 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
Udacity, EdX and Coursera are just LMS platforms with a clever marketng strategy. They don't seem to offer anything more in terms of an online education experience than Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, D2L, etc. I know that Blackboard has been trying to push into corporate training for a long time. Corporate training is a huge industry, but it is like advertising and marketing. There are low barriers to entry, the "software" compontent is not as important as the content from the buyers perspective. The platform opportunities have less to do with content / instructional delivery (the LMS' core feature) and more to do with talent management and regulatory compliance.
I am skeptical that Udacity will find any substantial revenues from this latest pivot.
posted by humanfont at 2:33 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
I am skeptical that Udacity will find any substantial revenues from this latest pivot.
posted by humanfont at 2:33 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
Udacity, EdX and Coursera are just LMS platforms with a clever marketng strategy.
Apart from that, The Open University (which covers the 'open' part of the acronym) is something that's been in existence since 1969. MOOCs as a concept aren't much more than marketing hype drummed up by people looking to bite into public university education.
posted by codacorolla at 3:20 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
Apart from that, The Open University (which covers the 'open' part of the acronym) is something that's been in existence since 1969. MOOCs as a concept aren't much more than marketing hype drummed up by people looking to bite into public university education.
posted by codacorolla at 3:20 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
I think that MOOAs are really underestimated.
posted by edheil at 3:43 PM on November 27, 2013 [8 favorites]
posted by edheil at 3:43 PM on November 27, 2013 [8 favorites]
Can I get into any of the myriad internships that are only for students?
Aren't student-only internships that way mostly because employers can get free labor while the worker gets "paid" in college credit rather than because they value college educations so much? As soon as there's some way for online certificates to count as credit for internships, I would expect a lot of places to drop the student requirement. Of course, student status requirements are also a legal way to advertise for young workers, so that aspect of it may not change.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:16 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
Aren't student-only internships that way mostly because employers can get free labor while the worker gets "paid" in college credit rather than because they value college educations so much? As soon as there's some way for online certificates to count as credit for internships, I would expect a lot of places to drop the student requirement. Of course, student status requirements are also a legal way to advertise for young workers, so that aspect of it may not change.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:16 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
I think that MOOAs are really underestimated.
That's hilarious. I just have to quote this section:
That's hilarious. I just have to quote this section:
For example, after a major and costly rebranding effort, the University of Chicago School of Medicine declared that its brand would be "University of Chicago Medicine." After working with consultants, the Johns Hopkins Medical School decided that its brand would be "Johns Hopkins Medicine." And, the University of Pennsylvania Medical School was helped by its consultants to coin the brand, "Penn Medicine." A MOOA might have identified a brand that all medical schools would be happy to use, such as "[School's Name] Medicine."posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:24 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
tyllwin: "refocus on corporate training."
codacorolla: "Apart from that, The Open University (which covers the 'open' part of the acronym) is something that's been in existence since 1969"
Back in the mid-90s I went to work for a startup that was a skunkworks funded by a 1980s corporate training behemoth that wanted to create networked college education (and had to keep it quiet lest its value be decimated by news that its corporate LAN deployment model was obsolete). tech for that was virtually non-existant at the time and data rates were so constrained that the startup had to use a hybrid of CDs (for data) and Internet (for interactivity, scoring, etc). They were in stealth mode until Larry Ellison and Michael Milken came along with Knowledge Universe making noise and buying up stuff. One of the things that startup did get really wrong was to evaluate FutureSplash positively during the stealth period, only to have the board vote against making efforts to acquire it, preferring to develop their own tech. That didn't work out so well, and I will treasure for all time one of the blowhards doing his best Khrushchev "We Will Bury Them!" imitation while every one of our engineers looked at him like he was deranged. The other thing it did was blow through an impressive amount of cash getting faculty on board and arranging content into what today would be called a MOOC. After several years of patchy MOOC results, chasing real profits and student engagement meant veering away from the student model and right into the corporate skills market. But even as late as 2000, Knowledge Universe was still pushing MOOCs. It speaks volumes that nearly half a decade later, and multiple Internet generations later, a company like Udacity is demonstrating convergent evolution.
But one thing that did come out of it for me was that to "audit" the competition, I got enrolled into probably the most effective of the massive distance educational companies: the Open University, with 250,000 annual students and "real" degrees. For me, it triggered an itch to return to education, which didn't go away, eventually ending up as an MD. So good things can come out of MOOCs. Sometimes.
posted by meehawl at 4:44 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
codacorolla: "Apart from that, The Open University (which covers the 'open' part of the acronym) is something that's been in existence since 1969"
Back in the mid-90s I went to work for a startup that was a skunkworks funded by a 1980s corporate training behemoth that wanted to create networked college education (and had to keep it quiet lest its value be decimated by news that its corporate LAN deployment model was obsolete). tech for that was virtually non-existant at the time and data rates were so constrained that the startup had to use a hybrid of CDs (for data) and Internet (for interactivity, scoring, etc). They were in stealth mode until Larry Ellison and Michael Milken came along with Knowledge Universe making noise and buying up stuff. One of the things that startup did get really wrong was to evaluate FutureSplash positively during the stealth period, only to have the board vote against making efforts to acquire it, preferring to develop their own tech. That didn't work out so well, and I will treasure for all time one of the blowhards doing his best Khrushchev "We Will Bury Them!" imitation while every one of our engineers looked at him like he was deranged. The other thing it did was blow through an impressive amount of cash getting faculty on board and arranging content into what today would be called a MOOC. After several years of patchy MOOC results, chasing real profits and student engagement meant veering away from the student model and right into the corporate skills market. But even as late as 2000, Knowledge Universe was still pushing MOOCs. It speaks volumes that nearly half a decade later, and multiple Internet generations later, a company like Udacity is demonstrating convergent evolution.
But one thing that did come out of it for me was that to "audit" the competition, I got enrolled into probably the most effective of the massive distance educational companies: the Open University, with 250,000 annual students and "real" degrees. For me, it triggered an itch to return to education, which didn't go away, eventually ending up as an MD. So good things can come out of MOOCs. Sometimes.
posted by meehawl at 4:44 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
My experience with MOOCs has been rather discouraging. I've signed up for a bunch, but only ever started taking (i.e. watching the daily lectures, doing homework, quizes, and projects) 3; two programming courses (never programmed before, thought it would be fun to see if I could do it...apparently I can't) and an intro to astronomy course (always had an interest in astronomy). I ended up bailing on all three at one point or another. That point being where I was confused about/couldn't wrap my head around a concept and the avenues for help were not cutting it. I would end up not being able to finish a homework or pass a quiz, then get behind, then get discouraged, then depressed, and it would snowball.
I guess I'm one of those people that needs to have a Professor or TA that I can go in and bug when I don't get something. I'll stick to just listening to stuff from The Great Courses and curse Japan for not having a robust culture of community colleges/continuing education.
posted by snwod at 5:38 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
I guess I'm one of those people that needs to have a Professor or TA that I can go in and bug when I don't get something. I'll stick to just listening to stuff from The Great Courses and curse Japan for not having a robust culture of community colleges/continuing education.
posted by snwod at 5:38 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]
Ralston McTodd, according to the Department of Labor, being a student at an accredited university is not any kind of requirement under the FLSA for internship programs. It might well be that it's a matter of getting free labor, but it's supposed to be in exchange for training, not necessarily college credit. And yet most internship programs that I've seen, in many fields, are only offered to students of accredited colleges or universities. I really think it boils down to that they want students, and that nobody considers someone who goes through a bunch of essentially-self-study through MOOCs to be equivalent to a college student. Not even if those people are just as free.
posted by Sequence at 5:51 PM on November 27, 2013
posted by Sequence at 5:51 PM on November 27, 2013
I'm halfway through the final of my first MOOC as we speak. It's an accounting course, so by all rights it should have gone as poorly as the computer programming class I took online a few years ago (for which I paid actual money and still failed miserably due to lack of support and terrible scaffolding). Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the professor of the accounting MOOC has won real-life teaching awards: the amount of time and effort put into creating the class was clearly substantial and fully as much work as a regular class prep.
Given that the course is being taught through Coursera (so it's free to take a class, but Coursera hopes to make a profit charging students for certificates that are at present mostly worthless) by a Wharton professor (read: he probably receives one of the highest salaries in academe), there's a lot of money being thrown at this class. Though the class size is quite large, the investment of time and equipment plus what I assume is a low rate of conversion from regular students to certificate students probably makes it all a wash. If I wasn't pressed for time, I'd go see what I could dig up on the financials of Coursera and EdX (Udacity, I can already guess).
On the other hand, from the personal side of things the MOOC has gone really well. I took the course because it's MBA level, and I am thinking of pursuing an MBA at some point, so I wanted to test out the classes without applying for admission and paying for tuition. The class is also very relevant to my day job and I have already used things from the class in direct application (but it's not so direct that I have to worry about keeping the details of say, how to calculate a NOL in my head). I also wanted to judge whether I could handle taking classes while working full time, again before plonking down a check, so I took the class as seriously as I would have a class I paid real dollars for. Also, I wanted to check out Wharton as a b-school since my professional career revolves around them. The bad news for Coursera is that with all these competing motivations I still didn't pay them a dime, so no doubt they're looking past me toward the student who will pay them for a certificate.
I suppose I should disclaim that the institution I work for has signed a contract with Coursera. It's not much of a disclaimer, given that I personally receive no benefit from the contract and I don't think the institution has done much yet besides sign the dotted line, but ethically speaking there you are.
Back to my final--I need to go find the method to calculate depreciation expense for tax purposes.
posted by librarylis at 6:16 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
Given that the course is being taught through Coursera (so it's free to take a class, but Coursera hopes to make a profit charging students for certificates that are at present mostly worthless) by a Wharton professor (read: he probably receives one of the highest salaries in academe), there's a lot of money being thrown at this class. Though the class size is quite large, the investment of time and equipment plus what I assume is a low rate of conversion from regular students to certificate students probably makes it all a wash. If I wasn't pressed for time, I'd go see what I could dig up on the financials of Coursera and EdX (Udacity, I can already guess).
On the other hand, from the personal side of things the MOOC has gone really well. I took the course because it's MBA level, and I am thinking of pursuing an MBA at some point, so I wanted to test out the classes without applying for admission and paying for tuition. The class is also very relevant to my day job and I have already used things from the class in direct application (but it's not so direct that I have to worry about keeping the details of say, how to calculate a NOL in my head). I also wanted to judge whether I could handle taking classes while working full time, again before plonking down a check, so I took the class as seriously as I would have a class I paid real dollars for. Also, I wanted to check out Wharton as a b-school since my professional career revolves around them. The bad news for Coursera is that with all these competing motivations I still didn't pay them a dime, so no doubt they're looking past me toward the student who will pay them for a certificate.
I suppose I should disclaim that the institution I work for has signed a contract with Coursera. It's not much of a disclaimer, given that I personally receive no benefit from the contract and I don't think the institution has done much yet besides sign the dotted line, but ethically speaking there you are.
Back to my final--I need to go find the method to calculate depreciation expense for tax purposes.
posted by librarylis at 6:16 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
The Biggest Dreamer: "There's a very interesting perspective brought forth about Udacity's SJSU experiment though. Basically using a class of students as your company's experiment without express consent and without any protection offered to the students is unethical by any current scientific research standard. "
Um.... what? The pilot was an optional summer course. No students were coerced into taking it. Furthermore, you had to go out of your way to enroll into an SJSU Plus course - if I recall, the Plus courses were separate sections from normal enrolled courses. If the students did not want to join an experimental pilot program, they could've just enrolled into a normal classroom environment.
Personally, I think the idea of the pilot is great - cheaper online courses to supplement normal classroom courses. If I don't want to commute to school to go some filler GE course, I can just take it online. Now, are online courses for everyone? I would say no, but I do think they help lower the barrier to entry for some students, and for that alone they should be given merit.
(I'm not saying online courses should supplant traditional classroom environments; they better serve as supplemental courses for self-driven students, but I believe online learning is an area that deserves further exploration.)
posted by Qberting at 7:57 PM on November 27, 2013
Um.... what? The pilot was an optional summer course. No students were coerced into taking it. Furthermore, you had to go out of your way to enroll into an SJSU Plus course - if I recall, the Plus courses were separate sections from normal enrolled courses. If the students did not want to join an experimental pilot program, they could've just enrolled into a normal classroom environment.
Personally, I think the idea of the pilot is great - cheaper online courses to supplement normal classroom courses. If I don't want to commute to school to go some filler GE course, I can just take it online. Now, are online courses for everyone? I would say no, but I do think they help lower the barrier to entry for some students, and for that alone they should be given merit.
(I'm not saying online courses should supplant traditional classroom environments; they better serve as supplemental courses for self-driven students, but I believe online learning is an area that deserves further exploration.)
posted by Qberting at 7:57 PM on November 27, 2013
snwod, I'm not good at MOOCs either. I literally FORGET a class exists if it is only online. I have flaked out on every Coursera class I've ever taken (er, "taken"). And let's face it: if if's not a degree program with real life consequences if I don't do the work, who cares if I do the work? I pretty much signed up to watch the videos, and I really don't end up having much time to sit around watching the videos, plus my ADD seems to kick in and I get bored as hell watching a video lecture and wish there was a transcript I could get through faster. And the homework? Man, who cares about doing the homework? Especially if some other student is grading it? I'm not a fan of "learn from your peers" anyway and what do "my fellow students" know about this? I thought that was particularly weird in the beginning guitar class I tried taking--if I don't know enough to know if I'm doing it right, how does anyone else?
I guess I'm in favor of them in theory, but in reality most online courses just plain don't work for me. Too easy to blow off or fall behind.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:00 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
I guess I'm in favor of them in theory, but in reality most online courses just plain don't work for me. Too easy to blow off or fall behind.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:00 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
like empath's experience, from a comment on 'Moocs are no magic bullet':
yea, schuman seemed a bit unfair and tendentious: "Thrun blames students..."
from the chafkin article, thrun sez: "I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished..."
but to her larger point: "Successful education needs personal interaction and accountability, period... If the only university students who can benefit from a MOOC are those who can already afford an elite education, and if the only corporate trainees who succeed are those already primed for success, then what is the point?"
while i think she would hail finland as a model (or perhaps the german example?) i think it's worth remembering that our educational system is embedded in society and if that's not working well, it's hard to know what to fix, cf. Conspicuous consumption in the new gilded age: "the top 1 percent are fervent spenders. Compared with the rest of the top 10 percent, they spend twice as much on college tuitions, three times as much on private elementary and high school tuitions and three times as much on tutoring to get their children into elite institutions."
anyway, i'd rather live in a world with MOOCs than without and it's good to know there's a lot of experimentation going on, viz. The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT; Pierre Omidyar is backing Bridge International Academies btw, re: The Omidyar way of giving - "The founder of eBay aims to be a more entrepreneurial philanthropist than his predecessors"
oh and last but not least brad delong observes:
This fall I took 2 MOOCs from Coursera and liked them both. I didn't take quizzes or do anything for some credit. I already have 2 master degrees in different disciplines from top schools; I did these for the fun of learning. But, since it probably appears that I'm a dropout, they would classify me as one of the 90%. Not correct. I'm just a true learner.I find a great deal of the Slate coverage on MOOCs to be slanted and lazy journalism
yea, schuman seemed a bit unfair and tendentious: "Thrun blames students..."
from the chafkin article, thrun sez: "I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished..."
but to her larger point: "Successful education needs personal interaction and accountability, period... If the only university students who can benefit from a MOOC are those who can already afford an elite education, and if the only corporate trainees who succeed are those already primed for success, then what is the point?"
while i think she would hail finland as a model (or perhaps the german example?) i think it's worth remembering that our educational system is embedded in society and if that's not working well, it's hard to know what to fix, cf. Conspicuous consumption in the new gilded age: "the top 1 percent are fervent spenders. Compared with the rest of the top 10 percent, they spend twice as much on college tuitions, three times as much on private elementary and high school tuitions and three times as much on tutoring to get their children into elite institutions."
anyway, i'd rather live in a world with MOOCs than without and it's good to know there's a lot of experimentation going on, viz. The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT; Pierre Omidyar is backing Bridge International Academies btw, re: The Omidyar way of giving - "The founder of eBay aims to be a more entrepreneurial philanthropist than his predecessors"
oh and last but not least brad delong observes:
To those who have more shall be given. If you are a self-starter who can keep yourself focused on what you want to learn, the interactive and forking-paths and multimedia nature of MOOCs is a godsend that allows you to leverage your mind. But if you are that kind of person, you are the kind of person who could and would learn from a book or over a pizza discussion anyway. And Khan Academy is absolutely wonderful. If not... then you are the kind of person who needs the structure of a class: regular hours, significant time devoted to the subject, required attendance, periodic examinations, public humiliation upon poor performance, et cetera. If online education does manage to succeed in allowing us to deliver more education at a lower cost, it will be because it figures out not how to deliver the content, but rather how to deliver the structure.posted by kliuless at 10:10 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]
In my experience, having taken the Stanford online database class, MOOCS are fine if you completely grasp everything the video lecturer says. Once you encounter a concept you don't understand you are on your own. The real value in an in-person University class is found in the hallways between classes and in the labs (and bars) where you can explore the concepts with the other students.
MOOCS can never duplicate this. The most successful distance learning institution, the Open University, has students attend in-person study weeks during their courses precisely for this kind of cross pollination.
However, there is a great deal to be said for the inside out model of recorded lectures and in-person homework sessions with the teachers.
posted by monotreme at 12:07 AM on November 28, 2013 [2 favorites]
MOOCS can never duplicate this. The most successful distance learning institution, the Open University, has students attend in-person study weeks during their courses precisely for this kind of cross pollination.
However, there is a great deal to be said for the inside out model of recorded lectures and in-person homework sessions with the teachers.
posted by monotreme at 12:07 AM on November 28, 2013 [2 favorites]
In some fields grading and evaluation is near impossible unless the instructor or at least one of his guided teaching assistants looks at large volumes of student work. On the other hand there are media on the internet such as:
Hubert Dreyfus Existentialism in Literature and Film
Richard Bulliet History of the World to 1500 CE
which knock the socks off 66% of the college teachers I ever experienced.
posted by bukvich at 9:22 AM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]
Hubert Dreyfus Existentialism in Literature and Film
Richard Bulliet History of the World to 1500 CE
which knock the socks off 66% of the college teachers I ever experienced.
posted by bukvich at 9:22 AM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]
The state our general public education system is in now after decades of political sabotage, deliberate underfunding and increasing "democratization," I seriously doubt we'll have enough well educated talent to pull off any if the grand techological panacea's all the capitalists are counting on to make these public institutions they loathe so much the profit generators they're hoping for, so I'm not holding my breath this kind of thing will ever fulfill its potential. Especially since our environmental and energy security problems are going to become much more urgent and immediate priorities over the next decade or so.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:55 PM on November 28, 2013
posted by saulgoodman at 2:55 PM on November 28, 2013
For most people, learning is a social process that relies on biological cues online systems will never adequately replace anyway. This is just going to be the usual downgrade in quality in pursuit of profit that's evident in so many other sectors of our society in the end I suspect, despite the best intentions of the foot soldiers advancing the cause.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:00 PM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by saulgoodman at 3:00 PM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]
also btw, speaking of ongoing educational 'experiments', i linked to this before but declara has built a collaborative platform for the australian gov't that all its teachers can use:
that is all; cheers!
posted by kliuless at 11:00 AM on November 29, 2013
Australia is implementing one of the most innovative and rigorous national curricula in the world. All students in Australia must now be able to demonstrate proficiency not only on traditional content, but also a number of inter-disciplinary domains and higher-order thinking skills. How are the country's traditionally-educated teachers to respond to such a high-bar? Rather than pretend to understand what teachers need most or immediately move to evaluate their way to better practice, Australia's educational leaders did a radical thing: trust that through open collaboration, teachers would themselves help one another respond to the problems of practice that emerge in the implementation of such a novel curriculum.i'd be curious to learn the results :P
Declara has become the national platform for teacher collaboration. Every day, tens of thousands of teachers create communities, share resources, link to content, and make connections that help them collaborate on solutions. Declara's intelligent analytics learn what teachers are doing, with whom, how and why. Declara makes visible what was once invisible. The result? Australian teachers feel like 21st century knowledge workers, and most importantly, Australian students benefit immediately from the creative, collaborative problem-solving that is enabling them to become among the world's best educated.
that is all; cheers!
posted by kliuless at 11:00 AM on November 29, 2013
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posted by empath at 11:41 AM on November 27, 2013 [7 favorites]