A Top Ten master’s degree in computer science at a very affordable cost.
Access to world-class educational resources for anyone with a broadband connection.
Tapping technology to jump-start training of engineers and other technical talent for the 21st Century.
All of this is now possible through Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, that hold the potential to radically revamp access to and costs of higher education.
That’s why AT&T is joining Georgia Institute of Technology and MOOC education provider Udacity to support the first professional Online Master of Science degree in computer science that can be earned completely through the “massively open online” format.
During the last five years, we have transformed our industry by making broadband connectivity nearly ubiquitous. During the next five years, we will see transformation everywhere – how we make purchases, manage our health and secure our homes.
Education, where costs are putting pressure on quality, is ripe for this transformation. And this new model has the potential to revolutionize education.
That leaders from corporate America have joined academia and a MOOC to offer this advanced degree on a massive and affordable scale signals that we as business leaders place a high value on the skills and knowledge students can attain through MOOCs offered in cooperation with top-tier institutions.
As part of our commitment, AT&T will tap into the pilot program to further develop our own employees as well as recruit graduates. In addition, we will provide technical support, connectivity and, where appropriate, guest instructors, curriculum content and internships.
By making graduate degrees and certifications available online at affordable rates, Georgia Tech, Udacity and AT&T are eliminating barriers for many students unable to afford or access an advanced degree, and increasing the pipeline for the next generation of technology leaders.
Removing these barriers is critical.
Workers with skills in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) are increasingly important to our business – and to nearly every business – because STEM drives innovation and innovation drives our economy.
During the next six years, 2.8 million STEM openings are predicted. But, today, many STEM jobs are going unfilled as candidates lack the necessary skills, training or degrees.
Through this new program, Georgia Tech will be able to offer employers like AT&T a larger and more diverse pool of highly qualified, STEM-trained workers and help the U.S. retain its global competitive edge.
And these students will never have to set foot in a classroom to earn degrees on par with those received in traditional on-campus settings – degrees that will be equally valued by their future employers.
Today’s learning experiences transcend the brick-and-mortar classroom. As technology improves, the availability and affordability of a quality education and our definitions of the learning environment are radically shifting.
By engaging all stakeholders and seizing the promise of technology that we use every day, we can drive real transformation in education.
By harnessing the power of MOOCs, we can embark on a new era for higher education and for the development of a highly skilled workforce.
If you’re an academic librarian, you’re probably already awash, at least peripherally, in news about MOOCs—massive open online courses have been touted as the next big thing in higher ed since they burst on the scene about a year ago. If you’re a public librarian, on the other hand, you may not even have heard of them. Yet MOOCs are bringing unprecedented challenges and opportunities to both kinds of libraries already, and they’re only going to grow.
What is a MOOC?
“I’m sorry to be dumb, but what’s a MOOC?” one of the librarians interviewed for this story asked. There’s nothing dumb about that question. Beyond the acronym above, ‘What is a MOOC’ is still very much a matter of debate. The first MOOCs, which established the archetype, were free online classes, for no credit, offered by a few eminent experts in their own fields (mostly science, technology, engineering, math [STEM]) and taken—or at least started—by hundreds of thousands of students at a time, though the dropout rates are similarly massive. (Most MOOCs have completion rates of less than ten percent, according to Katy Jordan, a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University who is studying MOOCs. But that ten percent still represents more students than most professors would teach in person in a lifetime.)
The major MOOC providers, so far, are Coursera, EdX, and Udacity. Courses are taught by faculty from established colleges and universities—usually fairly high-ranking and select ones. Coursera, a for-profit entity, is by far the most prolific, with 341 classes. Udacity offers 22, mostly in STEM disciplines, while EdX, a not-for-profit, is currently accepting sign-ups for 32. In addition, individual colleges offer MOOCs of their own.
MOOC Once Removed
There are also phenomena that are clearly related to the MOOC movement but don’t conform in all respects to the image of a standard college class, uploaded. Still, the attention given to online training, single courses rather than degree programs, and alternative forms of credentialing such as badging and certificates will likely make these of increasing importance to the public library mission to provide lifelong learning in the future.
Khan Academy is a nonprofit that offers 4,000-plus videos on various subjects, but for the K-12 set (or adults who need remedial help), rather than college-level coursework.
Gale Cengage’s Ed2Go, soon to be rebranded to differentiate the public library product from the company’s community college offering, is not free, though the cost is usually absorbed by the library or institution rather than the individual. Gale describes the product as “online continuing education courses…through a network of more than 2,100 top colleges, universities, and other organizations.” The more than 300 offerings to date tend to focus on the practical rather than the high levels of academia, with classes such as assisting aging parents, résumé-writing, and “Navigating Divorce,” as well as a lot of courses for college readiness, test prep, specific career and technical skills, and ESL.
Ed2Go is in “a few hundred libraries so far,” Gale told LJ, but the one with the deepest experience is Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System (AFPLS), which tested Ed2Go via a pilot program and is still using it. Interim director Anne Haimes told LJ that the dropout rate for Ed2Go may be lower than for more academic MOOCs. “We did experience a relatively steep lack of completion at first, but 2013 has shown improvement,” said Haimes. One patron’s comment was particularly telling: “The library’s online courses are a risk-free way for someone who has not been in a classroom for decades to prepare and practice for a professional course of study. For those of us who need to upgrade our skills to land full-time employment but cannot afford to take classes without incurring substantial debt, the AFPLS program is a
much-needed lifeline.”Lynda.com, which offers about 1,700 instructional videos, also focuses on practical online training, much of it technical. The site recently partnered with New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) to provide free access to its content and is pursuing partnerships with other libraries.
So, too, is Treehouse, which recently completed a beta test
with the Orange County Library System in Orlando, FL, on providing its step-by-step technology video courses and training exercises to patrons.As the concept matures, expands, and is tinkered with, the issue of where “traditional” online education ends and the MOOC begins becomes murkier. Michael Stephens, an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University (SJSU), CA, for example, is offering a MOOC pilot that is limited to 500 students—about the size of a large lecture hall. Does that count as massive?
Is a class truly “open” if it’s not free? The idea that education from formerly elite institutions would now be open to all—or at least all who speak English, the language in which most classes are offered, and have access to a computer and broadband—is part of what helped MOOCs capture the popular imagination. Yet the for-profit providers must find a way to monetize the concept, and even not-for-profit EdX and the participating colleges and universities must justify the resources they consume. Udacity is experimenting with charging $150 for courses that come with college credit from SJSU, while Coursera’s “Signature Track,” whose prices vary by course, does not provide credit but uses a combination of ID, webcam, and biometrics to provide a verified certificate of completion. (The American Council on Education, which advises college presidents on policy, recently endorsed five MOOCs from Coursera for credit.)
Why would they need the library?
There are multiple potential roles for libraries in the MOOC development, support, assessment, and preservation process, some of which have been more fully explored than others in the few months since Coursera and EdX began rolling out offerings.
CLEARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT One major, and comparatively mature, role for libraries is in helping faculty ensure the materials they use to create their MOOC presentations and to assign as readings are not going to get them or their institutions into trouble. Faculty members are increasingly used to turning to the library for help with copyright, so in early discussions around making MOOCs work, the library should be front and center.
While professors are used to relying quite heavily on the fair use exemption for in-person teaching, that does not apply to MOOCs, according to a panel of copyright experts including Brandon Butler, director of public policy for the Association of Research Libraries; Kevin Smith, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, NC; Kenneth Crews, director of the Copyright Advisory Office at New York’s Columbia University; and Kyle K. Courtney, manager of faculty research and scholarship at Harvard Law School, MA, at an OCLC symposium, “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?“, held this past March at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Furthermore, while the universities are not-for-profit institutions themselves, Coursera and Udacity are for-profit companies, which could conceivably weaken a fair use defense, as could the massive size of the audience and that some students access the content from jurisdictions where fair use and fair dealing protections are weaker than in the United States or absent entirely.
As a result, the panelists said, instructors should first strive to find open access materials that will serve the pedagogical purpose as well or better than the copyrighted options that were being considered. Failing that, they should request a free license. Only if both attempts fail should instructors turn either to paying for a license—particularly problematic when the number of potential viewers is so large and said viewers are unwilling or unable themselves to pay for texts—or using the absolute minimum amount necessary to make the pedagogical point—only the relevant 20 seconds of a video, for instance.
Faculty can also embed or link to content to make it available to students without raising copyright concerns. (Course reserves, electronic or physical, are obviously not an option, as MOOC students are not matriculated and hence have no access to the library of the providing institution or its proxy server.)
One advantage of MOOCs, according to the panel, is that they are helping with open access advocacy, as professors see the need to make their own writings accessible to their students and ask their colleagues to do likewise.
Supporting production Faculty members need audiovisual equipment to record their MOOCs. They need software and computers to edit the raw footage. They need training on how to do both, as well as how to adapt to a new format their teaching style, which must be strong, clear, and succinct enough to stand largely on its own without benefit of office hours, librarians, a question-and-answer period, or the ability to adjust on the fly when the professor sees puzzled expressions. These tools and training don’t have to be centralized in the academic library, but it makes sense for them to be there. Unlike with IT, the library is often already providing instructional support and access to the same technology for students and for faculty who are experimenting with “flipping” their in-person classrooms, using video presentations to take the lecture out of class time, which can then be devoted to discussion. This, also, is a role that has already been explored by librarians at a number of early adopting campuses, though how thoroughly the library has been involved in the process varies drastically from a seat at the task force table from the very beginning to ad hoc troubleshooting near the end.
Supporting students This is the biggest question mark so far: Can, and should, libraries attempt to support MOOC students the way they support traditional—e.g., paying—students? Mitigating against this idea is not only the scale of the endeavor—a single MOOC often has ten times more participants than an entire university’s student body—but that MOOC students are not necessarily looking for a traditional academic experience. If these students won’t be writing papers, won’t be reading anything that isn’t provided by the professor for free via hyperlink, and won’t be going on to do independent research, do they really need the help of a librarian?
The answer, of course, is “it depends.” MOOCs are increasingly expanding beyond their computer science starting point into areas of the humanities, in which the ability to find supplemental library materials might indeed be useful, if not mandatory (and might pose more of a challenge than it would to students with a well-stocked academic library at their disposal: a MOOC student halfway across the country from the provider institution is arguably more in need, not less, of information about how to find and use materials via interlibrary loan, JSTOR Register and Read, and open access digital collections).
Even for students who never progress beyond assigned readings, especially those who are new to higher ed, librarians help to clarify things they don’t understand in assigned materials. Though the data is preliminary and far from representative, some EdX findings suggest that the early promise of MOOCs to democratize education may be overstated, because the people who do best in MOOCs (and other online courses) are those already familiar with how to succeed in college courses. A long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that while all students performed better in in-person classes than in online environments, weaker students lost more ground. Russell Poulin, deputy director for research and analysis at the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, said of the study’s findings, “For the underprepared students that the study worries about most, student support services (advising, tutoring, library resource materials, study skills assistance, technical assistance) could be the differentiator.”
Whether on campus or around the corner, libraries seem like a likely candidate to provide such support. Still, questions of scale apply to them as well. Jeffrey Pomerantz of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, who is offering a class via Coursera, told LJ, “Since these aren’t Carolina students, I would be hesitant to ask the librarians on campus to support them. I’m sure that most librarians would serve the world if they could, but there’s a limited number of hours in the day. I haven’t heard anything about any of these platforms integrating libraries or librarians into them. It might make sense, but if you’re talking about embedded librarians, you’d need thousands of them.”
Right now, the main source of instructional support for students taking MOOCs is other students taking MOOCs. Several speakers at the OCLC event commented with surprise on the speed, depth, and accuracy with which students answered one another’s queries, and a brand new entrant, Stanford’s Nova Ed, plans to focus even more on peer interaction. In the meantime, student forums would provide a potential entry point to leverage library assistance only when it’s needed; users who didn’t get a satisfactory answer could potentially escalate the query to a librarian.
At a minimum, Forrest Wright in D-Lib Magazine recommends reaching out to faculty members teaching the MOOCs and providing links to the tutorials and research guides sections of their affiliated library’s website, as well as peer-reviewed research tutorials.
DRAWING THEM IN This calculus MOOC taught by the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert Ghrist features hand-drawn illustrations
Measuring a MOOC One major unanswered question that arose at the OCLC seminar was how to decide whether a MOOC has succeeded: What are the right metrics? What does success mean for a MOOC student? People who are taking MOOCs for enrichment may feel their own criteria have been met even if they never bother to complete the homework or take the final, akin to auditing in the traditional campus environment. People who are taking MOOCs to test-drive a particular institution or subject before applying may get everything they need by the midpoint of the course and drop out altogether. Those who want to learn to execute a particular skill—coding in Java, for example—may stop when they reach the desired level of proficiency. As such, the relatively low completion rate of MOOCs may not be an indication of failure that it would be for the same course at the offering university.
But the lack of consensus about the right metric doesn’t mean one isn’t needed. (Phil Hill, on e-Literate, outlined four archetypes of MOOC students whose patterns should be considered when designing an assessment.) It is still necessary to capture granular data about how MOOCs work and who they’re working for if the offering institutions are to improve them, segment their strategies for different audiences, or decide whether to continue the experiment at all. There is an emerging role for libraries as “big data” repositories and analysts in many fields; with MOOCs, where in many cases no one except Coursera and EdX is yet keeping this data, much less slicing and dicing it, academic libraries have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and present a compelling case study.
Preservation As is often the case when something new and potentially faddish takes off quickly, no one yet is really paying much attention to preserving MOOC content. The focus is much more on getting it up and out there. But a shakeout in MOOC platforms is likely once the category matures, leaving any content that is housed only on the shuttered servers suddenly stranded, if not lost. As MOOCs are tweaked by professors learning from experience, what happens to the earlier versions? Will future scholars be able to study the evolution of the form, or will the earlier, superseded versions be overwritten? With most institutions offering only a handful of courses so far, academic libraries at MOOC-providing institutions have a great opportunity to design a preservation structure for MOOC content before there is a huge backlog to handle.
This is also a way to make sure that academics don’t wake up one day to find that they are in the same boat with MOOC providers that they once were with journals—their own work siloed off from them by third parties that profit from its distribution. If MOOC institutions are keeping their own content in institutional repositories and make sure to write that into their contracts, they can avoid the need for a reprise of the open access movement. OCLC’s panel of copyright experts strongly recommended writing or editing the contracts with course providers to guarantee that long-term preservation is permitted even if you can’t get reuse.
Yet another potential role is for libraries to curate and preserve the user-generated content—student work—that is created during a MOOC.
The Library as Content Creator
FUTURELEARN, a UK-based MOOC provider that is still in the process of launching, has already signed up the British Library as a creator of MOOC content in its own right. In the United States, institutions from the Library of Congress to the HathiTrust to the Digital Public Library of America might offer similar scope. There was also considerable discussion at the OCLC symposium about the possibility of libraries offering MOOCs on research skills, such as how to navigate databases and recognize seminal articles.
MOOCs and the public library
One major question is whether it is the academic library of the host institution or the public library of which the patron is a member that will end up supporting these students’ efforts—or whether MOOCs will require a deeper level of cooperation between public and academic librarians.
Unless the MOOCs provide very clear links on how to reach out to the academic library directly through the course provider software (and maybe even if they do), the public library and librarian whom they already know and feel entitled to use are likely to be the go-to entry point for many. As such, public reference librarians might suddenly find themselves dealing with a raft of specialized academic questions on top of their usual workload, without access to the collection resources or subject specialists that academic librarians rely on to answer them.
In addition, public libraries will find themselves providing a far more basic service: access to equipment to take the courses at all. Public libraries remain a key player in redressing the digital divide [PDF] in America. For would-be MOOC students who don’t have broadband and the fairly new computers necessary to use the courseware at home, the public library is where they’ll go to take the class—and that means they’ll need headphones or speakers in privacy, as the classes are presented as videos with sound, as well as the ability to reserve the computers for longer at a stretch than some libraries currently allow. Of course, they’ll need help operating that technology as well. “A MOOC student will probably go to the library that serves them,” SJSU’s Stephens told LJ. “I would hope they could go into a library and say, ‘I’m taking a course online, and I need to make a video, can you help me?’ It will probably be some technology support. I know some people bristle at that, but I think it is an absolutely viable question to be asked inside the library.”
Also, a few groundbreaking public libraries are experimenting with using MOOCs provided by others as the basis of programming. For example, Margaret Donellan Todd, county librarian, County of Los Angeles Public Library, said the library is incorporating MOOCs into the Center for Learning initiative of its new strategic plan, which also includes homework and literacy support, online tutoring, GED prep, and courses from Gale Cengage’s Ed2Go platform.
“When we added…Tutor.com about eight years ago, the response was amazing. It was clear that the public wanted to be able to be tutored online. We also saw strong response to the addition of résumé builders and other products. The idea of MOOCs seemed like the logical next step,” Todd told LJ. “We are also looking at collaborating with other organizations to share MOOC content, such as literacy classes or GED.”
“In the future, we see the library as becoming a local meeting place for people enrolled in specific MOOCs,” Todd added. “We also believe we may offer group MOOC viewing—perhaps for literacy-based classes.”
Such wraparound programming has the potential to beef up the library’s adult lifelong learning offerings at little expense and without limiting them to the pool of qualified local volunteers. From the MOOC perspective, it exposes the courses to a whole new audience, potentially drawing in students who wouldn’t have signed up to do a MOOC in isolation, as well as providing support to those who might otherwise have dropped out of one. Todd even said the library is considering collaborating with a local college to produce MOOCs in future. “Public libraries know how people learn and where they get stuck,” she explained.
MOOCs for librarianship
Another major opportunity for MOOCs in the library involves staff, rather than patrons, as students. MOOCs directly in the field of librarianship are just beginning, in a trickle: UNC’s Pomerantz is offering a metadata course through Coursera, but he told LJ, “I’m not going for library focused. I suspect there will be librarians and library students in there, but I’m sort of hoping that isn’t the bulk of the students.”
SJSU’s Stephens, however, is offering a course focused on librarianship, called the Hyperlinked Library, and planning to do more if this one is a success. While it won’t count toward an MLS, his course could help working librarians up their game and help potential librarians, particularly paraprofessionals already working in libraries, decide whether they want to pursue library school further. Stephens told LJ that he hopes the MOOC experiment will help produce “a professional development model for librarians that is open and free and becomes a community of learners coming from library schools and jobs. That ongoing professional development that we want librarians to be doing? This formalizes it and gives it a place.”
Stephens also predicts that aspects of MOOCs are likely to feed back into more traditional library education. “I think what we’ll see is maybe some of the affordances of the MOOC finding their way into some of the offerings of library schools. I think it’s entirely acceptable to have an incoming class in a much larger class to start, that is kind of a sampler and in a choose-your-own-adventure style. A lot of people come to library school not really sure where they want to end up.”
Since Stephens’s employer, SJSU, already has a large online library school, its fledgling MOOC credit partnership with Udacity, if expanded to include library coursework, has the potential to be disruptive to library education—potentially reducing the diversity of online offerings in a rush to the lowest price but also making library school affordable without student debt for many who might previously have considered it out of reach.
In the meantime, there is a rich vein of resources already on offer that, while not library-specific, would be useful to librarians looking to brush up on their skills to get hired, promoted, or just do their jobs better. Technology is an increasing part of librarianship, and the rapidly changing state of the art means that updated training is needed every few years. MOOCs have the potential to make that convenient and cost effective for even the tightest budgets. Beyond technology, there is information on offer for aspects of library life ranging from public speaking to pedagogy: for example, the American College of Education is offering a free MOOC on digital tools for the K–12 classroom. (For more on MOOCs for librarians, see the Google Group MOOCs and Librarianship.)
This article was featured in Library Journal's Academic Newswire enewsletter. Subscribe today to have more articles like this delivered to your inbox for free.
I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions lately. In trying to trace a narrative line through the sturm und drang around MOOCs and all that they make visible, I’ve been digging into institutional histories, trying to understand what the hell happened in the last thirty years. Who switched the terms of the game of higher education?
I’m looking at you, market forces.
For those of us raised in the world that Stanford researchers in the 70s called ‘the New Institutionalism’ – a world where education’s entire organizational structure was understood to place it firmly “beyond the grip of market forces” (Meyer & Rowan, 2006, p. 3) – it’s all gotten rather bewildering. Many managed not to notice the stealth incursion of for-profit institutions and Pearson into the world of academia (related: the student populations these corporate entities have served, via ESL textbook empires and “the MBA you can probably get into” ads, have not been the white middle-class that still codes “default university student” in North America. Ahem. Just sayin’.). But MOOCs, with their posh ties to Harvard and Stanford and their grandiose claims of revolution, sorta blew that stealth game out of the water.
MOOCs as Enclosure
This past week alone, Coursera moved into professional development for teachers and announced a partnership with Chegg, an online textbook-rental company, to connect MOOC learners with select, limited-time access to texts from large publishers. As Audrey Watters notes, these shifts are beginning to look like the enclosure of education against the very openness that MOOCs began from: “What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM’d. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web.”This enclosure is about profit models, not learning. And it profits few, in the end, because – as I got het up about in Inside Higher Ed last week – the societal mythology of education as value really only functions if institutionalized credentials in some way tie to social mobility and lucrative work.
That’s not the game we’re in, anymore.
But here’s the thing: MOOCs are a symptom of change in higher ed, not the source of it. We need to find ways of talking about this enclosure of openness by profit models, without conflating these forces with online ed in general or even entirely with MOOCs.
Because we will not resist the corporatization of education by standing solely for conventional institutionalized models. That horse has left the barn. But in online practices there may still be ways to protect and preserve some of the broad societal concept of the “we” that institutions were intended to enshrine.
MOOCs as Symptom: Networks + Neoliberalism
Basically, this is where we are: traditional institutional education is being encroached upon from all sides. And the big MOOCs conflate the two primary forces for change: networks and neoliberalism.This is an ugly slide – I kinda like to call the clip art “retro” – but it’s the best illustration I have at the current moment for what I see actually happening to higher ed as we’ve known it. From one side, what George Siemens terms “the Internet happening to education,” or the networked opening of what was conventionally the closed domain of knowledge. From the other, the market incursion into the sphere of education, with its attendant ideological leanings towards the measurable and the profitable.
Last week, Dave & I went to two conferences together. We do the majority of our conference travel independently, so even getting to be at the same events was kind of exotic for us: being invited together was a treat. But blending our two separate strains of thought into a single keynote for the second conference was something we haven’t done in a couple of years, since all the MOOC stuff blew up.
We bickered about process: that’s par for the course, for us. We’ve worked together as long as we’ve known each other, and while our ideas and even perspectives tend to complement the other’s, our ways of getting there are pretty much opposite. (Sidenote: our writing on the MOOCbook has been pretty much two solitudes, enabling us to continue our lawyer-free relationship.)
But in the process of pulling together, between the two of us, three hour-long presentations to be delivered over the course of three days, on separate but intertwined topics, something converged and snapped into focus.
I’ve been looking at networks from an identities perspective for a few years now, trying to understand who we are when we’re online and what it is about this whole experience that actually matters, from an education perspective. Dave’s been wending his way through an exploration of rhizomatic learning as a way of navigating uncertainty within an era of knowledge abundance. Both of us have been thinking a lot about MOOCs and what they mean for change within higher ed. Hell, most of our household income comes from academic institutions, so the current budget crunch hits home.
But it became clear this week that our work needs to be about finding ways to use networks to push back against the neoliberal vision of the future of education. About making clear that the two do not share the same set of interests.
The conflation of the two is everywhere. Salon has an interview with Jaron Lanier today that makes the case that the Internet killed the middle class. Lanier’s arguments conflate networks with neoliberalism, making the latter invisible as a force unto itself. Sure, there are places where networked practices rely on neoliberal approaches to the world, in the sense of Foucault’s “entrepreneur of the self.” And neoliberalism often co-opts networked practices and naturalizes the perception that the two are one and the same.
But I don’t think they are. At least…I don’t think they inherently are.
Whether they become so is up to us. Particularly those of us who share the values espoused by public education. We need to build our learning and teaching networks, share our ideas and our questions and our practices and what works and doesn’t, and refuse to be enclosed.
Institutional concepts of educational practices enclose easily: that is their nature. The transition from institutional models of the classroom to a massive for-profit textbook magnate’s version of the classroom isn’t really much of a transition, except in what gets lost in terms of public values.
Networks don’t actually enclose easily. Hence the idea of “participate or perish” that Dave & I came up with the night before our keynote at #WILU2013 in Fredericton: a new academic imperative for our times.
Don’t just publish, because the institutional models are encroached upon and becoming enclosed. Participate. Make things different. Don’t wait for it to be your “job:” that’s institutional thinking. Institutional jobs won’t be there if we let the profit models gut education entirely.
Here are our slides from WILU2013, which trace some of these ideas through our own research lenses.
And here are the slides from my Spotlight Speaker session at CONNECT2013, where I focused in more detail on the participation and networking side of things: on how to go beyond institutional identities. Help yourself.
(Postscript: the “Education is Broken” Narrative as Sniff Test)
I want to return to this one in more depth…but a quick thought. The phrase “education is broken” gets thrown around a lot in the current educational climate. It is, in a sense, one of the key reasons neoliberalism and networks get conflated: it’s the area in which they agree.But from one perspective, the idea that education is broken is a learning claim. From the other, it’s a credentialing and business model claim.
If you’re in the process of learning to tell the difference, don’t necessarily run from anything that claims education is broken. Rather, ask what aspect of ed it frames as broken. Is it the learning? You might be looking at a network. Is it the profit model and the structure and the means of offering credential? Probably neoliberalism and enclosure at work.
You’re welcome. ;)
There’s a refrain we keep hearing in the current debate over MOOCs: people don’t complete. Only a small fraction finish. The dropout rate is enormous.
It’s all true. As illustrated in Katy Jordan’s excellent data visualization, released this spring, less than ten percent of registered students actually complete all their MOOC course requirements.
To which we tend to respond, Oh dear! MOOCs have a big problem. They aren’t serving their students sufficiently.
MOOCs may well not be serving their students sufficiently, and their non-completion rates may be highly informative in that regard. But the fact that our default approach is to assume that their purpose IS to serve students seems to me to be a symptom of a bigger problem.
We insist on thinking about educational ventures in institutional terms, even when those ventures are framed as direct assaults - erm, I mean “disruptions” - to institutionalized education as we know it.
This, people, is why higher education can’t have nice things.
Completion as Credentialing: the 'Hand Up'
Non-completion is only a problem if we accept MOOCs as alternative revenue-generating credentialing system.
As a cultural institution, education has long served two relatively separate purposes. One of these is learning. The other is credentialing. Only one of these is reliant on course completion in order to have value.
Learning’s value is understood to be both individual and inherent. The credential, on the other hand, is a social signal: it is standardized, transferable, and earned by successful completion of a societally-agreed upon course of study. Unlike learning, it is meant to function as a currency which can be cashed in for specific societal opportunity.
Students implicitly understand this separation of credential and learning. When my college roommate and I took different sections of the same course, we often found ourselves with different textbooks and differing assignments, depending on our professors’ focus. What we each actually learned and retained from our respective endeavours was likely even more distinct. But we each earned the same credit, the same prerequisite needed to move on to higher levels within the discipline, and ultimately, the same degree.
This was an institutional education system for an institutionally-structured society. It relied on public acceptance of the ceremonial legitimation of individualized learning into the currency of credentials. More broadly, it depended on the mythology of education as a means to individual betterment within the societal hierarchy: on the premise that if an individual learned enough to earn credentials, they would serve as a ‘hand up,’ a marker for entry into the professionalized institutional world.
This is the very premise of public education: learning transubstantiated to credential equals opportunity.
Thirty years of rising neoliberalism and globalization, however, have changed the reality of this social contract. We live in a time when educational institutions are beset from all sides, and expectations of their capacity to deliver success far outstrip society’s ability to offer meaningful opportunities even to those who meet the requirements. Decreased public funding of educational institutions, rising student debt, and labour precarity all combine to make the mythos of credentialing as a means to betterment a shaky one.
And make no mistake, MOOCs as credentials will topple it from within.
Completion as Myth
MOOCs started, in a sense, as a recognition that the credentialing equation was hollow. The early MOOCs were actually extra-institutional: they aimed to enable learning outside the system, focusing on generating and networking knowledge. They were learning for learning’s sake.
But credentialing is where the money lies. The mainstream thrust to position MOOCs as a disruptive replacement for conventional academia allows market forces to capitalize on the old mythology of institutionalized education and its ties to social mobility.
That myth hinges on completion. Institutions take the two separate acts of learning and credentialing, and marry them through the formalized process of completion. When a student completes a course, s/he is graded, accredited, and - when and where the mythology functions - accorded a level of public recognition in return. Stay in school, we tell our young. It’ll pay. And in spite of generationally-diminishing returns, it broadly has.
But the era of protected, bureaucratic jobs for the educated is over. At the individual level, there may still be opportunities, and some form of credential may still be better than no credential. The societal equation by which completion becomes credential becomes social mobility, though, increasingly fails to add up. Market forces have changed the game.
And if market forces open up cheap credentials to everybody in a society where even expensive credentials struggle to translate to opportunities, the whole currency will collapse.
Completion as False Promise
We need to understand this when we talk about MOOCs. MOOCs may be touted as a revolution in education, but they actually organize learning opportunities. The fact that they’re elbowing in on the ceremonial business of credentialing and therefore taking on both roles of a conventional education institution does not mean they can or will serve the societal function of educational institutions. Educational institutions have writing centres and Student Unions and myriad supports focused around helping students gain achieve the kinds of learning that count as currency and opportunity. Institutions explicitly serve the citizenry, not the market.
MOOCs offer organized, affordable learning opportunities at a mass scale, and that has a great deal of value. But MOOCs are not a system. They are not education for the masses.
We are accustomed, in our society, to understanding education in institutional terms, and to thinking of learning opportunities as tied to the mythos of betterment and mobility. We’ve been acculturated to this from childhood. But MOOCs are not the inheritors of our public education myth. They are, at least in some models, the inheritors of the forces that have gutted that myth.
Whether people complete their MOOCs or not, Coursera credentials will not bring back institutionalized, protected careers for the educated. So we need to be wary of bringing in MOOCs to prop up overstretched institutional systems, as California is doing. We particularly need to be wary of invoking MOOCs to deliver on the mythology of education as access to betterment; as a proverbial hand up.
If we don’t, we may find that MOOCs’ so-called free education costs a great deal to those in our society who depend most on that social contract of mobility, after all.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D. student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. In higher ed since 1997, Bonnie has lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada and in Eastern Europe and Asia. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. Published at Salon.com and winner of the 2011 PEI Literary Award for creative non-fiction, Bonnie blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart.
The recent announcement from the California State University System regarding its embrace of edX massive open online courses (MOOCs) is interesting and depressing at the same time. As with many aspects of the MOOC phenomenon, it comes packaged with good and bad aspects bundled up together. Instructors will offer a "special 'flipped' version of an electrical engineering course ... where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home." So the good is the flipped part because it's more interactive and dynamic and there's less lecture-based didacticism in the classroom due to watching videos at home? Really? The 1970s just called: they want their Open University courses back.
This model perhaps moves the Cal State system forward as it offers more accessibility to content for working adults in a hybrid format. I wish they would just step away from the MOOC terminology, which is, let’s be honest, copying and lending out a videotape in another name. MOOCs have been so beaten up and stolen for self-serving means that the original premise has been lost. As Stephen Downes, one of the forefathers of original MOOCs, stated in a recent blog, "These arguments miss the point of the MOOC, and that point is, precisely, to make education available to people who cannot afford to pay the cost to travel to and attend these small in-person events. Having one instructor for 20-50 people is expensive, and most of the world cannot afford that cost."
The MOOC spirit has been eroded by institutions and individuals who see an easy way to sound (or just seem) tech-online savvy. MOOCs are being used by many institutions to avoid actually having to discuss issues like ownership of curriculum, scalability and strategic online growth. In a (MOOC) swoosh, difficult governance issues regarding intellectual property, scalability and ownership are gone. Corrupted MOOCs circumvent the need for anything other than talking (lecture-style) to a camera with the hope that the "nice young guys and gals at CoursEdXra" drop me into a backdrop of the Parthenon and/or animate the background with pen cast versions of napkin sketches. There’s no building of an online community, facilitation of discussion threads, not even grading of papers, just, "I’m done — here’s my MOOC!"
MOOCs were originally intended to educate the Masses (M): hundreds of thousands who “cannot afford to enroll or travel to classes.” They were all Open (O): Open Content provided or supported by Saylor.org, Creative Commons and others. Now Open no longer means open resources — it has been unofficially changed to mean "open to anyone." Don’t get me wrong. Being more available to more people isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it does move the focus away from the original intent, which was to provide free, quality educational materials. The second O stands for Online — unless it’s a hybrid offered in a flipped classroom in which students have watched a video before coming to class (sigh). C = Course. Well, I guess one out of four is not bad if 10 percent retention is acceptable.
Original MOOCs (oMOOCs) were free, or at least extremely affordable, fully online, well-crafted and contained a lot of interesting pedagogy and instructional design. The target demographic was the underserved, both nationally and internationally. Per Downes, they were "not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities...." but rather "designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete."
Hijacked MOOCs are flagship (institution)-led, starting to cost (increasingly), often hybrid, faculty headshot to camera, tech sophistication layered on, little-to-zero impact on faculty member revisiting / learning? pedagogy (in any format) and not very massive. They're mostly taken by education technologists, already-qualified individuals and Tom Friedman.
It’s the strategic analysis and "nuanced discussion" that I want us all back to. Proper MOOCs may work for some, others may just choose to use open online materials and some may even have a mission to support affordable education for underserved communities (my favorite). But let’s not kid ourselves. Co-opting a MOOC label does not make an offering edgy. Get strategy and rationale nailed first, worry about the acronym later.
Fascinating graphic,a sit shows that nearly 42% of the target audience for MOOCs are not the developed world. It also raises an interesting question. Who is it for?’ are four words that tease out a MOOC strategy or lack of strategy. For most it is a marketing exercise in terms of the brand, a way of reducing internal costs on high volume courses, a way of recruiting potential students (directly or through their parents). Yet others see it as a way of flushing out funding from Alumni or presenting an ‘accessible’ face to Government.
For MOOCs, several target audiences have emerged:1. Internal students on course – cost savings on volume courses2. Internal students not on course – expanding student experience
3. Potential students national –major source of income4. Potential students international – major source of income5. Potential students High school – reputation and preparation
6. Parents – significant in student choice7. Alumni – potential income and influencers
8. Lifelong learners – late and lifelong adult learners9. Professionals – related to professions and work10. Government – part of access strategyThis is the big one, as it produces the big numbers. There seems to be a genuine thirst for courses on a wide range of subjects for people who just want to learn more. This is heartening. Rather than locking in learning within expensive institutions, we may be on the edge of a cliff from which new forms of learning can soar. What’s surprised people is the diverse nature of this group, as they come from lots of different countries.The set of people who are external is huge and diverse in terms of age, national v international, nationality, ethnicity and first language. You really have to focus down with some profiling (define a typical user) or risk negative reactions from some groups. Most Coursera course are aimed at an external audience but who is this audience? If your course is for people with busy lives, is it wise to offer such strictly synchronous courses?Do you want your existing students, either slated for the existing course or others, to do your MOOC? If MOOCs are to fulfil their promise of changing the way we teach and learn and reduce internal costs, this may be necessary.Sebastian Thrun’s famous MOOC did take existing students, none of whom were in the top performing 400 students. NovoED aim to produce group MOOCs aimed at both internal and external students. It has happened, will happen, and if MOOCs are to change the face of HE, it must happen.The University of Alberta’s Dino 101 Dinosaur Paleobiology MOOC hopes to attract huge numbers and I’m sure it will. Due for release in September 2013 it’s billed as being “led by Phil Currie, the world’s premier dinosaur hunter”. This is much smarter than the blatant AUE approach, as it is aimed at three audiences:· Free to anyone (marketing)· University of Alberta students can do it and get a credit (core business0· Students from around the world for course accreditation for a modest feeThis is more strategic as it takes the one asset and targets three audiences. They’ve also cleverly sneaked in another marketing objective – tourism, “It will also help highlight the best of Alberta’s rich dinosaur assets”. Smart thinking.Many MOOCs are more marketing than learning. There one species of MOOC, the outreach MOOC or more accurately the marketing MOOC, that is sprouting up everywhere. These MOOCs are aimed at marketing your brand to new students, parents of potential students and alumni, all potential sources of income, hence the use of the word ‘marketing’. I know academe hate the word ‘marketing’ unless it’s a course in their revenue-rich business school but this is a marketing MOOC.A good example is the Australian National University, who is building an edX MOOC aimed at high school students, alumni, adult learners and parents, the first two topics are 6 week courses on Astrophysics and Engaging India (English & Hindi). She admitted her University had no real strategy for MOOCs but thought this was a way of testing the water. At least she was honest, as I see precious little strategic thinking around MOOCs but lots of groupthink and bandwagon behaviour.A lot of IT courses are clearly aimed at the skills market and professionals who want to get a job or promotion. Udemy is full of such courses. There’s nothing new here, other perhaps, in them being free, though many do have a cost. This type of course has been long available on the web. An interesting example is the Google MOOC, aimed at a specific skill, improving your search skills. We can expect many more of these, MOOCs that tackle a specific issue.Many MOOCs want to hit a number of these audiences but this is not easy as they have different needs in terms of approach, commitment, start times, accreditation needs, technical issues and support. Knowing your target audience from the start matters, as it influences the choice of platform, as well as design and nature of the content. Initial data suggests that large numbers of people from around the world, who do not have easy access to Higher Education, have taken MOOCs (41%). The language level for those with English as a second language may therefore have to be considered, as well as level of difficulty, relevant examples, appropriate peer activity, group needs, synchronous or asynchronous, and so on. You may also want to be clear in the registration process about the data you want to identify and gather for later analysis.The problem is that the decision makers often don’t have the marketing skills to differentiate between different addressable audiences. External adult learners may not want a long-winded, over-engineered, six to ten week course on anything. Life’s too short. Yet academics are used to producing courses of this semester length. What many may want are mini MOOCs. They may want them to be asynchronous starting and ending when convenient for them. This, of course, is exactly what’s happening. All in all, however, the good news is that MOOCs are forcing HE institutions to change. MOOCs may very well be the force that makes them more open, transparent and relevant. There will, of course, be a backlash, but the digital genie is out of the bottle - MOOCs are here to stay.
Plenty has been written about MOOCs already, but most of what I've read has related to the wider debate about them (are they a good thing or a bad thing? etc). I wanted to write a quick post thinking about the copyright and licensing issues around the creation of MOOCs with particular focus on the UK.The key word in the acronym 'MOOC' is 'open'. Open in theory means that the course is freely available to all worldwide via the Internet. This already means that universities need to think beyond what is done in the lecture theatre / seminar room space, and not just from a technological point of view. Within the UK, UK copyright laws take effect, but what if a student is doing the MOOC from their home in India? When developing content for a MOOC, educators must ensure that the resources they create are their own and that any third party content (such as images retrieved from the Internet, video clips, journal articles, and so on) is appropriately licensed for such a wide use online.
However - it's not always easy or possible to get copyright permission to use third party material for a public online course. This is where the difference between face-to-face teaching and delivery of teaching online really shows itself in copyright law. Not only is the whole approach to teaching different, but the approach to using resources must be different too. What may be permissible in a classroom environment (such as showing clips from a film for instructional purposes) is not permissible in the online environment. Educators must therefore think hard about what they want to use, whether they really need to use it and whether they could seek alternatives should they not be allowed to use it.
Educators should treat their course materials for MOOCs in the same way as they would treat the writing of a journal article; permissions to use third party content must be acquired before the publisher will publish the work. Universities and other institutions embarking on the MOOCs route must ensure that their compliance / legal departments are involved in the process so as not to run the risk of having an entire course taken offline because of copyright infringement in one small element of it.
So where can educators go for help? Well, there are loads of resources out there which can be freely used without the need to seek permission. Much of the content in Wikimedia is in the public domain, which means that copyright has expired and it can be freely used (always check to see as it will be explicitly stated). Or find content which has been licensed with Creative Commons licences; the widest licence is CC-BY, and most CC licensed works can be used in open content. Linking to content held elsewhere is the next best thing, although you need to make sure that you are not linking to items held behind a paywall or behind one of your own institutional subscriptions. Open access works and Open Educational Resources can be found across the Internet and may be incorporated into a MOOC. And finally librarians are a valuable source of information, particularly those who deal with subscription-based resources as they usually have good negotiation skills.
Technology is a wonderful thing, and education is becoming more and more innovative. But when it's public-facing and accessible to the world, the institution must appreciate that there are risks involved with using content that is not its own and therefore must take appropriate steps to ensure that content is truly 'open'.
Some excellent further resources:
Embracing OER and MOOCs to transform education
It's 166 slides long but it's well worth flicking through as there are some great resources highlighted as places to find open content: http://www.slideshare.net/zaid/embracing-oer-moocs-to-transform-educationMOOCs and Libraries: Copyright, Licensing, Open Access
It's 59:39 minutes long so watch it over your lunch break or in stages! But a fantastic panel discussion about how some of the US universities have approached MOOCs, how they have persuaded faculty to get on board with the concept and helpful tips and tricks that they've implemented. Some excellent questions asked at the end too, particularly about contractual limitations (e.g. when you have an image from a museum that you are not permitted to make available online): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvR4K3eddUMOOC Yourself: set up your own MOOC
Sadly this is restricted to Kindle only (something I don't have) but it looks like a great resource and is an interesting way of monetising a CC-licensed product. It's very cheap as well so might be a worthwhile investement! http://www.amazon.com/MOOC-YourSelf-Non-Profits-Communities-ebook/dp/B00CDVZ2AW/ref=la_B00CE8VHVC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366230473&sr=1-1
I was hoping for replacement When the sun burst through the sky. - Neil Young.
Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) is the most hyped educational buzzword of the last year. Alan Cann reflects on what still needs to be done after the hysteria dies down. You can read more about his adventures in the land of MOOC at: http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/MOOC
Who put the mooc in the mooc, mooc, mooc, mooc, mooc?
MOOCs have had a reasonably long history, although the term itself is newer than the idea. In 2001 and 2002 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the USA funded the Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative and the MIT Open Courseware project which made course materials from these institutions freely available online under Creative Commons licences. The term MOOC was invented by David Cormier and Bryan Alexander at the University of Manitoba in Canada in 2008. In 2011 MIT OCW morphed into MITx and in 2012, MIT and Harvard joined together to form edX. Not wishing to be left out, a group of UK universities headed by the Open University announced Futurelearn late in 2012.
Show me the money
The course that really grabbed widespread attention was the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence course by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun in the autumn of 2011 which attracted 160,000 registered students. 20,000 from 190 countries completed the course and received a “statement of accomplishment” from Stanford University. On the back of this, Thrun spun out the private company Udacity in 2012 and has subsequently raised over US$15 million in venture capital for the venture. Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller established Coursera shortly after, and have now attracted over US$22m venture capital. This is not a cottage industry. Rather, it reflects the market driven system of higher education in the USA, and increasingly, in the UK.
The Great Schism
The term MOOC reflects the educational philosophy of the early pioneers. Although free (as in free beer) is not part of the etymology, this is implicit, reflecting the origins of the movement in open source software and online distribution. While the offerings of private companies such as Udacity and Coursera remain freely available at the point of use, these are free as in free speech (which has to be paid for). As is the way with Internet companies, business models during the early rounds of capitalization consist of plentiful smoke, mirrors and optimism. Realistic business models are slowly beginning to emerge. Udacity led the way by offering to match “graduates” of its computer science courses with selected employers, including Google, and more recently, by developing employer-sponsored courses with partners such as Microsoft, NVIDIA and Wolfram. Coursera is developing similar employer-matching services and recently announced that it will begin charging students $30 to $100 for “verified certificates”.
More importantly, the privateers have departed from the original conception of MOOCs as “open”, meaning that there is unrestricted access to course materials under Creative Commons licences. The development of early MOOCs was strongly influenced by connectivism, based on concepts of networked knowledge and social learning. They were deliberately platform agnostic in contrast to the closed platforms developed and trumpeted by commercial players. To underline this distinction, Stephen Downes is credited with proposing the terms “cMOOC” and “xMOOC” to distinguish the two strands evolving from the early origins.
Is this a bubble I see before me?
Clearly it is, as defined by such large speculative cash inflows into non-profit making ventures. Although there have not yet been any public MOOC provider flotations following the ill-fated Facebook IPO, those of us who have been around this particular block before are haunted by the expensive and embarrassing failure of UKeU at a cost to the public purse of over £50m. This time around governments on both sides of the Atlantic are happy for private companies to bear the risk, and presumably to reap any future gains. Massive online courses imply global audiences, probably to the detriment of overseas student recruitment by public universities. Amazon and Starbucks illustrate how well successive UK governments have been able to recoup taxation on UK economic activity carried out by multinationals.
Never mind the quality, feel the width
No UK university and few schools now operate without an online virtual learning environment and no-one in their right mind doubts the value of online delivery in leveraging the efforts of academic staff and minimising costs. In spite of years of experience, the thorny issue of measuring quality in online education (and in higher education in general), remains substantially unresolved. Although there is much to be gleaned from the smorgasbord of free courses that online providers offer, irate blog posts from many users show there is still much to be learned in this field in terms of both pedagogy and “customer” service.
Udacity has developed an in house platform consisting of live mini-lectures via screen capture videos with integrated MCQs. By focussing on a limited range of courses spanning maths and computer science and by developing in house, Udacity has managed to present a fairly uniform interface to users (or students, if you will). Coursera faces a much bigger problem because it spans a wide range of content including humanities and arts courses. In response, it has developed an online peer grading model, although this has received criticism due to game playing and inappropriate behaviour by some course participants. The bigger problem Coursera faces is that its courses are poorly-adapted versions of content originally developed elsewhere by its partner institutions, lured in by fears of missing the boat and by Coursera’s promised revenue sharing model.
MOOCs as cargo cults
Far from the hype that MOOCs will replace traditional universities, anyone who studies the evidence soon sees that MOOCs are augmentation rather than replacement of formal educational models. It is fitting that universities should contribute to improving public knowledge by offering free online courses. But connectivism in particular is a step too far for most learners – particularly less experienced learners – who fail without the scaffolding provided by traditional degree structures and support. Across the board completion rates are low, typically less than 10%. While this may be a consequence of free (as in disposable), does it matter why people fail, only that they do? Doug Holton has notably skewered the MOOC hype as a cargo cult which fails to understand how education works. MOOCs are yet another example of the Innovator’s Dilemma – that new technologies displace rather than replace earlier technologies. Think newspapers – radio – television – Internet. Think private tutors – public universities – Internet. MOOCs are here to stay. But we all need to calm down and carry on. And a more thoughtful approach to pedagogical effectiveness wouldn’t hurt either.
Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
Alan Cann is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester. His interests are science education and exploiting emerging social technologies to enhance student and researcher development. He is the author of two textbooks, has served on the editorial boards of several scientific and educational journals, and is serial blogger. He has worked as a consultant for numerous educational and scientific institutions, and has published extensively in the area of educational research and social technologies. See: http://bit.ly/AJCann
April 19, 2013
After much cajoling and numerous requests . . . well OK, one from Martin
Encouraging @sheilmcn to start a mooc agony aunt column/blog. Please help me make her do it
— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) April 19, 2013I've decided to start a new, possibly weekly, feature for all of you out there who [...]
March 25, 2013
Oops, I did it again. I've now managed to complete another MOOC. Bringing my completion rate of to a grand total of 3 (the non completion number is quite a bit higher but more on that later). And I now have 6 badges from #oldsmooc and a certificate (or "statement of accomplishment") from [...]
January 20, 2013
Heard about MOOCs but far too busy doing more interesting things to sign up to one? Not sure if they're for you? Feeling pressure to be part of the "mooc crowd"? Keep signing up for MOOCs but keep getting that cba (can't be a****) feeling after the first week? Fear not, here's a handy list [...]
August 17, 2012
It's coming to the end of the week long #moocmooc course and today's activity is to design our own MOOC. Once again the course team have encouraged collaboration have used a google doc as collaborative space to share ideas and form ad hoc teams this Google Doc.
I've had a fascinating morning exploring [...]
Instructors and students discuss their experiences of the University of Edinburgh’s debut courses on Coursera
Source: Science Photo Library
Remotely operated: the focus of the University of Edinburgh’s debut Moocs ranged from artificial intelligence to equine nutrition
In January, the University of Edinburgh became the first UK university to offer massive open online courses on one of the big US Mooc platforms, Coursera.
Its six courses - covering artificial intelligence, astrobiology, critical thinking, e-learning and digital cultures, philosophy, and equine nutrition - attracted 308,000 students, with Introduction to Philosophy the most popular, drawing almost 100,000 participants.
The programmes, which ran over five weeks, had an estimated average completion rate of about 12 per cent, while early figures suggest that each Mooc cost about £30,000 from development to delivery.
But what did instructors and students think?
Siân Bayne, a senior lecturer, and Jeremy Knox, a PhD student, both in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Education, were instructors on the university’s E-learning and Digital Cultures Mooc.
From August 2012 until the course went live in January, Knox estimates he was spending about eight hours a week on Mooc-related activity. During the five weeks of the course itself, this figure doubled, he says.
“Populating the platform itself was quite time-consuming, but we thought that once it was up and running, it would kind of run itself. That’s the impression we got from Coursera - just wind it up and watch it go. However, we found that we were spending a lot of time monitoring the course while it was going.”
In contrast to the set-up of many programmes offered via Coursera, the developers of Edinburgh’s e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers.
The decision proved unpopular with some students, Knox says, as they had been expecting to see professors imparting knowledge as they would in a lecture theatre.
“Lots of people describe ‘face to face’ as a gold standard, but we have tried to disregard that idea. People come with expectations…If I was approaching the Mooc again, I would try to be very clear up front about what the course is and what it isn’t.”
Bayne says that a lack of “talking heads” might have made some participants feel that there was “no ‘professor’ present in the course” - a problem exacerbated by the vast number of students per instructor.
“As a team, we were putting a lot of work into forums, the Twitter stream and so on. But when the teacher-to-student ratio is 1:8,000, any interventions you make are going to be tiny, tiny contributions to the whole, however hard you work. I think we might need to come up with some alternative strategies for making our presence felt next time.”
Community spirit develops
However, despite some criticisms, groups of engaged students did start to emerge, making use of the course’s interactive forums and other social media channels to form virtual study communities.
“There was a very engaged group that began forming a community before the course even started,” Knox explains. “They were using social media to meet each other, and were very happy with the idea of self-directing their study. They got it.”
Bayne says she was “astounded” by the number of people discussing the Mooc online. Its Facebook group attracted more than 4,500 members, with a further 2,000 on Google+.
On Twitter, about 700 tweets used the course’s #edcmooc hashtag every day, with numbers rising to 1,500 on occasion. In addition, nearly 1,000 blogs were started by participating students. “The sheer volume and energy of it was really exciting,” she says.
In total, some 42,000 students enrolled on the five-week course, with about 17,000 logging in at least once in that period. The number of students engaging dropped each week, and Knox estimates that some 2,000 students completed the final assignment.
However, he is not disheartened by the figures. “In traditional education there’s a perception that you have to see it through to assessment. [But with a Mooc] you don’t necessarily have to begin and end at the same time as everyone else. There are other ways to get value from courses,” he says.
Bayne agrees. “With this kind of scale there is absolutely no way you can please everyone, so I think you just have to offer a Mooc that you are happy with in terms of content and design, have a clear sense of what you’re trying to achieve with it, and stick to your guns,” she says. “We did that, and enough people completed it and enjoyed it to have made it an absolutely worthwhile adventure.”
No talking heads: students expected lectures to camera, says Siân Bayne
Results may vary
Sheila MacNeill, Jo Stroud, Shazia Arif and Imogen Bertin were among the 42,000 students who signed up to the course.
All of them are involved in higher education to some extent, which is unsurprising because the course was aimed at learning technologists and those with an interest in digital education.
Of the four, only MacNeill saw the course through to its conclusion, although that does not mean that the others took nothing from the experience.
Stroud, a learning technologist at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Learning Technology, was typical of many.
“I participated up to week four [of five], but didn’t interact much with other course participants beyond week two,” she notes, citing competing deadlines at work as one reason why her participation tailed off.
“Like many others have pointed out, the numbers of people engaged with the course’s discussion boards made the experience rather overwhelming,” she says, adding that she would have liked students to have been split into groups of about 100 before the course started.
However, she says she found the themes for each teaching week “engaging”, and the accompanying resources “thought-provoking and stimulating”.
Arif, subject liaison librarian for engineering and design at Brunel University Library, also found mixed blessings in the size of the student cohort.
Although she enjoyed “the feeling of being part of a huge movement - like a club, attending a concert or a demo - a sense of belonging”, she observes that it was difficult to engage with this group when things were not progressing as expected.
“The worst thing was getting behind and being unable to catch up. There was no forum on which to discuss this, and I was not comfortable sharing with strangers,” she says.
Completion isn’t everything
Less impressed overall was Bertin, who used to lecture in social media skills and digital marketing at University College Cork and now works for a technology company.
She wrote several critical blogs about her Mooc experience.
Speaking to Times Higher Education, she says the course did at least prevent her from enrolling on the course at a cost.
“Great project, all kudos to Edinburgh for trying it, but the overall effect for me was knowing that I don’t want to do an e-learning course they run that I had previously been interested in taking.”
For MacNeill, assistant director of the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards at higher education IT consortium Jisc, the course had ups and downs, but it reinforced her belief that Moocs should not be judged on completion rates alone.
“A big part of it is realising you don’t have to do everything - you can engage at your own pace,” MacNeill says.
“But for a lot of learners who come from a traditional educational background and who work in education, I think that they put themselves under great pressure to do everything and do it really well. But dropping out isn’t a huge issue - we really need different metrics to measure success.”
Print headline:
Article originally published as: Wisdom and crowds (18 April 2013)
Making Sense of MOOCs:
Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility
by Sir John DanielMOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is the educational buzzword of 2012. Through a thoughtful analysis, Sir John Daniel discusses the myths, paradoxes and possibilities for MOOCs in the wider context of the evolution of educational technology and open/distance learning.
This playlist includes videos of the sessions from the "MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?" event that took place 18-19 March 2013 in which OCLC Research and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries presented thoughtful and provocative presentations about how libraries are already getting involved with MOOCs.
On my open course H817Open I use a mixture of technology, and thought it might be useful to describe these here, and also to indicate what I'd like to do beyond this.
The technologies are:
OpenLearn - This is where the bulk of the content is hosted and also forums. It is provided by the OU for OU content only, so not an open content system. It made sense to use this, but some recent changes have made the page rendering slow, and the design is suitable for a one-off visit to find an OER in that it prompts you to find other resources, it uses up too much screen real estate on this for a MOOC.
WordPress - this is the blog aggregator, based on the DS106 model. Students blog on their own spaces, but they register their blog with us. We then syndicate all the feeds using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I wanted them to use any blog they liked, so I tried using a Google Form that has a Martin Hawksey script to autodiscover the feed. This hasn't really worked as feeds are hidden all over the place and I've ended up adding most in by hand. We ask students to tag posts with #h817open and only posts with this tag are accepted (there is a setting in FeedWordPress for this), so if they blog about going shopping, that doesn't get pulled in. This has worked quite well. For next year I think I would ask learners to restrict their platforms to blogger, wordpress or tumblr as we can then write a bit of code that will automatically discover feeds in the known locations for these platforms.
Mailchimp - I send a weekly email outlining what is coming up and addressing any issues. This has been surprisingly important, and probably the key component. Mailchimp allows you to send emails to upto 2000 subscribers for free. I get a csv file from the openlearn platform and upload this, then create the weekly email. A lot of the identity and tone of the course arises from this email so it's worth investing some time in getting it right (I don't know that I have).
GMail - I set up a generic email account for the course to handle queries
Cloudworks and badges - we experimented with badges and the Cloudworks system has a very neat tool for creating a badge. However it's a bit fiddly in that you have to create a cloudworks id and then a mozilla one.
Blackboard Collaborate - I deliberately haven't scheduled many synchronous events as I wanted a more open course in terms of timings, but I did get George Siemens to give a talk and we have a discussion and review session planned. The OU has signed a contract with Blackboard so we went with this for easiness, but I think I would explore Google Hangouts next year.
Twitter - I ask people to use the #h817open hashtag, but I have to say Twitter has proven to be less significant, or less active, than I expected. I would probably make a specific activity around this next year to encourage use early on.
Google Plus - I didn't create a specific Google Plus community, but learners created one immediately and it has proven to be lively, interesting and supportive. It has beaten twitter as the forum of choice.
Blogs - as I mentioned above, most student activity is undertaken on their own blogs. They can use any platform they like (although note my reservations about this for next year). I've been trying to promote a 'collaboration-lite' model whereby you can work largely independently, but through the aggregator (or Google Plus) you can connect and share as much as you like. I think this has worked for some learners but not others.
So that is my collection of tools - a mixture of in-house and out-there technologies. I met Philipp Schmidt last week and at the same time had a twitter conversation with Martin Hawksey which has set me thinking. What I would like is an open course DIY toolkit. You come along, select which functions you want and it recommends a bunch of open technologies (although not necessarily open source) with examples of where they've been used, and hey presto, you roll your own MOOC. I may work on this soon, but if anyone wants to have a crack, let me know.
- Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY- Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO- Font Size
In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford’s website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.
Meanwhile, two of Thrun’s Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.
Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”
In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”
In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.”
Of course, we will always be pre-something. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt foresees a technology that will be “totally immersive in all our senses”—something like the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined would render the “talkies” obsolete. The MIT Media Lab has already developed a vest that gives you a hug when a friend “likes” something you have posted on Facebook. It may not be long before we can log onto a Shakespeare course taught by, say, Stephen Greenblatt and feel the spray of his saliva as he recites “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Such technologies will likely find their biggest market through the pornography industry, but there’s no reason to doubt that academia will adopt and adapt them.
The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind. No one knows whether the MOOCs will achieve any of these things, but many academic leaders are certain that, as Stanford President John Hennessy predicts, higher education is about to be hit by a “tsunami.”
What’s driving all this risk-taking and excitement? Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities. For decades, the price of tuition has outstripped the pace of inflation. Over the past ten years, the average sticker price at private colleges has increased by almost 30 percent (though net tuition has risen less because financial aid has grown even faster). At state universities, the problem has been exacerbated by public disinvestment. For example, less than 6 percent of the annual budget of the University of Virginia is covered by state funds. Last fall, I heard the chief financial officer of an urban public university put the matter succinctly: The difficulty, he said, is not so much the cost of college, but the shift of the financial burden from the state to the student.
There are many reasons why college costs continue to soar: the expense of outfitting high-tech science labs, the premium placed on research that lures faculty out of the classroom (and, in turn, requires hiring more faculty to teach classes), the proliferation of staff for everything from handling government regulation to counseling increasingly stressed students. At some institutions, there are also less defensible reasons, such as wasteful duplication, lavish amenities, and excessive pay and perks for top administrators and faculty.
But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.” “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”
This is a true statement—but it unwittingly undercuts its own point: Most people, I suspect, would agree that there are some activities—teaching and prostitution among them—in which improved productivity and economies of scale are not desirable, at least not from the point of view of the consumer.
True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease. Their own financial viability is by no means certain. The for-profits must make money for their investors, and the non- profits must return revenue to the universities that give them start-up funds.
Coursera has begun to try out a number of different strategies. It provides a matchmaking service for employers looking to hire people with certain demonstrable skills—a logical extension of a role that colleges already play. When a company expresses interest in a top-performing student, Coursera e-mails the student, offering an introduction, and receives a finder’s fee from the prospective employer. The college that developed the course also receives a cut. As for Udacity, Thrun says only that it charges companies looking for talent “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn.”
A few months ago, Coursera also announced a licensing arrangement with Antioch University, which agreed to pay a fee in return for incorporating selected Coursera offerings into its curriculum. The idea is for students to supplement their online experience by working with on-campus faculty—a practice known as “hybrid” or “blended” learning. The college can expand its course offerings without hiring new faculty, and Coursera can earn income that will be shared by the institutions and professors who develop the courses. So far, however, student interest has been low.
Other possible sources of revenue include selling expertise to universities that want to set up their own MOOCs or partnering with textbook publishers willing to share revenue in exchange for selling to online students. Some MOOCs are also beginning to charge fees for proctored exams (in person or by webcam) for students seeking a certificate marking their successful completion of a course.
If new technologies can cure, or even slow down, the cost disease before it kills the patient, that would be a great public service. The dark side of this bright dream is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble. Consumers, the argument goes, are already waking up to the fact that they’re paying too much for too little. If they are priced out of, or flee from, the market, they will find new ways to learn outside the brick-and-mortar institutions that, until now, have held a monopoly on providing credentials that certify what graduates have supposedly learned. If that happens, it would be a classic case of “disruptive innovation”—a term popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that, “in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise.”
We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question. As underfunded public colleges struggled to meet the needs of such students, private for-profit “universities” such as Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry, and Strayer emerged. They offer mainly online courses that serve—some would say exploit—an expanding population of consumers (a word increasingly used as a synonym for students). The first time I heard someone commend for-profit universities was five or six years ago, when a savvy investor said to me, “Look at California—the public system can’t meet the demand, so we will step in.” He was making the safe, and sad, assumption that public reinvestment is unlikely to restore what was once an unrivaled system of public higher education. Last August, nearly half a million students found themselves on waiting lists for oversubscribed courses at California’s community colleges.
Many online students meet the low-income eligibility threshold for federal Pell grants—a ripe market for the for-profit universities. These institutions offer cheaper courses than traditional private colleges, usually in practical or technical subjects such as cosmetology or computer programming. Their business model depends heavily on faculty who receive low compensation and on students with high loan obligations. It’s a system that works well for investors. (In 2009, the CEO of Strayer University collected a cool $42 million, mainly in stock options.) How well it works for students is another question. Last summer, a U.S. Senate committee noted that for-profit universities spend more on advertising and recruiting than on instruction and that, without significant reform, they “will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree.”
So far, the for-profit sector has been regarded with disdain or indifference by established universities. This fits the Christensen theory of “disruptive innovation”: The leap by low-end products into higher- end markets is sudden and surprising because the higher-ups have been lulled into thinking their place in the pecking order is unassailable. What has happened to newspapers and publishing are obvious examples. Suddenly everything changes, and the old is swept away by the new.
Because of the durable value of prestige, it will be a long time before Harvard has to fear for its existence. But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life. On traditional campuses, many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail. To the millions who have used sites such as the Khan Academy, the idea of hour-long lectures spread out over 15-week semesters is already anachronistic. “Disruptive innovation” is a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous declaration that capitalism works by “creative destruction.” What will be innovated and created in our colleges and universities, and what will be disrupted and destroyed?
One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value. And as humanities departments shrink, some institutions are collaborating to shrink them faster (or close them altogether) in order to avoid duplicative hiring in subjects with low student demand. For example, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell have announced a collaboration whereby certain languages—such as Romanian, Tamil, or Yoruba—will be taught via teleconferencing. This is good for students, since the subjects will still be available. But it’s bad for aspiring faculty—as the number of positions dwindles, research and scholarship in these fields will dry up.
MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars. Michael Sandel, for example, who teaches a famous course on justice at Harvard, has become a global figure with millions of followers, notably in Asia, since his lectures became available online through Harvard’s website and at a site called Academic Earth. A few months ago, Harvard announced that Sandel had signed up with edX. Sandel is an exceptional educator, but as master-teachers go global, lesser-known colleagues fear being relegated to a supporting role as glorified teaching assistants.
In some respects, this is the latest chapter in an old story of faculty entrepreneurship. By the mid-twentieth century, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, was already describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Today, as star professors increasingly work for themselves, more faculty members at less prestigious institutions face low wages, meager benefits, and—since many lack tenure—minimal job security. But if the new technology threatens some professors with obscurity, others face obsolescence. Language instructors may someday be replaced by multilingual versions of Siri on your iPhone. One of my colleagues speaks of the imminent “evisceration” of graduate study, once young people who might have pursued an academic career are deterred as it becomes harder and harder to find a dignified job after years of training.
These prospects raise many pressing questions—not just speculative ones about the future, but actionable ones about the present. What, if anything, can universities do to formulate new rules governing conflicts of interest? As faculty stars relocate to cyberspace, how can institutions sustain the community of teachers and students that has been the essence of the university for a thousand years? (The pacesetting Thrun, who is a vice president of Google, resigned from his tenured teaching post at Stanford, though he remains a “research professor.”) In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?
There are also unanswered questions about how much students actually learn from MOOCs. Coursera recently withdrew one course at Georgia Tech because of student discontent and another, at the University of California, Irvine, because the professor disputed how much students were really learning.
So far, most testimonials to the value of online learning come from motivated students, often adults, who seek to build on what they have already learned in traditional educational settings. These are people with clear goals and confidence in their abilities. Stanford has even established an online high school “for gifted students” from around the world (a residential program brings them together in the summers). Its medical school has introduced “lecture halls without lectures,” whereby students use short videos to master the material on their own, then converge in class for discussion of clinical applications of what they’ve learned.
And yet it’s one thing to expect brilliant teens or medical students to be self-starters. It’s another to teach students who are in need of close guidance. A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia finds that underprepared students taking online courses are, according to one of the authors, “falling farther behind than if they were taking face-to-face courses.” Michael Crow, one of the architects of Fathom and now president of Arizona State University and certainly no traditionalist, warns against a future in which “rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computer.”
Back in the mid-twentieth century, the Ford Foundation report on “telecourses” asked the key question about technology and education: “How effective is this instruction?” When I came upon that sentence, it put me in mind of something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a long time ago. “Truly speaking,” he said, “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”I first understood this distinction during my own student days, while struggling with the theologian Jonathan Edwards’s predestinarian view of life. Toward the end of the course, my teacher, the scholar of American religion Alan Heimert, looked me in the eye and asked: “What is it that bothers you about Edwards? Is it that he’s so hard on self- deception?” This was more than instruction; it was a true provocation. It came from a teacher who listened closely to his students and tried to grasp who they were and who they were trying to become. He knew the difference between knowledge and information. He understood education in the Socratic sense, as a quest for self-knowledge.
Nearly 40 years later, in my own course on American literature, one of my gifted teaching assistants received an e-mail from a student after a discussion on Emerson:
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. ... [T]he way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. ...I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week's class just so I can dive even further into this. So I just wanted to send you a quick message thanking you, letting you know that this fifty minutes of class has undeniably affected the rest of my life. ... [S]ome fire was lit within me tonight, and I guess I'm blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.
No matter how anxious today’s students may be about gaining this or that competence in a ferociously competitive world, many still crave the enlargement of heart as well as mind that is the gift of true education. It’s hard for me to believe that this kind of experience can happen without face-to-face teaching and the physical presence of other students.
Yet I’m convinced that those leading us into the digital future truly want to dispense the gift of learning more widely than ever before. Currently, the six-year graduation rate at America’s public four-year colleges is approximately 58 percent. It would be a great benefit to society if online education can improve on that record—although it should be noted that, so far, the completion rate by students who sign up for MOOCs is even worse—barely 10 percent.
In one experiment, Udacity is providing remedial courses to students at San Jose State for a much lower price than in-person courses. A bill is now under discussion in the California legislature that would require public colleges to offer online courses to students whom they can’t accommodate in their classrooms. If the new technology can bring great teaching to students who would otherwise never encounter it, that could lessen inequities between the haves and have-nots, just as digital technologies now give students and scholars worldwide access to previously locked-up books and documents. But so far, there is scant evidence on which to base these hopes.
Quite apart from the MOOCs, there’s an impressive array of new efforts to serve low-income students—including the online public Western Governors University, which charges around $6,000 in tuition and awards reputable degrees in such fields as information technology and business. Southern New Hampshire University—also a nonprofit—has moved aggressively into online learning, which it combines with on-campus programs; and Carnegie Mellon University has launched an “open learning initiative” that offers non-credit free courses, with substantial interactive capabilities, and seems to be working well in science, math, and introductory languages.
The best of the new education pioneers have a truly Emersonian passion for remaking the world, for rejecting the stale conviction that change always means degradation. I sense in them a fervent concurrence with Emerson’s refusal to believe “that the world was finished a long time ago” and with his insistence that, “as the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.”
In the face of such exuberance, it feels foolish and futile to demur. In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”
Andrew Delbanco’s most recent book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, will be published in paperback later this month.
Now that I have participated in a mooc, I am naturally qualified to dispense expert advice about them. Lol!
Seriously though, one aspect of moocs that I think requires urgent attention is the sense that many participants feel of being overwhelmed. This was certainly the case for some in the EDCMOOC, and I fear I was too dismissive of the issue in my previous blog post.
Upon further reflection, I appreciate that what gave me an edge in this mooc was my experience in studying at postgraduate level. By that I don’t mean so much the knowledge acquired from the instructors, but (on the contrary) the skills developed in learning how to learn for myself.
You see, in postgrad you are left very much to your own devices. You are given a tonne of readings, and the most instruction you can hope to extract from the professors is “read this”. The theory is that the students will collaborate with one another, share their diverse experiences, and contribute to robust conversations. Too bad most of them are straight out of undergrad, inexperienced, and don’t have a collaborative bone in their body.
So if you actually want to learn something rather than skate through each subject, it’s up to you to do your prescribed readings, seek more from blogs and journals to enhance your understanding, reach out to your network to ask questions and gather feedback, and generally drive your own education.
The successful postgraduate student is highly motivated, autodidactic, connected, and participatory. I suggest the successful mooc participant shares these same qualities.
So what I’m really trying to say is: I’ve been there, done that. If you trust me, you may find the following tips useful as you embark on your own mooc voyage…
- Before doing anything, ask yourself three fundamental questions.
Firstly: “Why a mooc?” It may very well be the right mode of study for you, but of course there are many others to consider. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of this mode in light of your personal circumstances.
Secondly: “Why this mooc?” There are plenty of them around, pitched at different levels and targeting different audiences. Analyse the pre-information of your chosen mooc to ensure it will give you what you need.
Thirdly: “What do I want to get out of it?” Be very clear in your own mind about the WIIFM, then doggedly pursue that during the mooc.
Having said that, remain open to new ideas that foster other lines of inquiry. Your goals may change. That’s fine; it’s called learning.
- Follow the sequence of the curriculum as arranged by the mooc coordinators. It may be tempting to jump ahead or even lag behind, but it’s wiser to pace yourself week by week.
- Read the mooc’s instructions! I’ve added the exclamation point in case you think words on screen are merely decorative. Sometimes they’re informative, so take notice.
- Prioritise the core videos and readings. At the very least, all these should be watched and read. The other stuff is a bonus if you get around to it.
- Participate actively in the discussion forum. This is your opportunity to share your understanding of the key concepts with your peers and receive valuable feedback from them.
Don’t just talk at your peers, but rather engage with them. Reply to their posts, build upon their ideas and suggest alternative thoughts. Challenge them (politely) to clarify their position if they appear to be waffling.
- Blog. More specifically, use your blog to articulate your learnings from the mooc. Focus on the practical applications that you have drawn from the academic concepts.
I found it helpful to use the discussion forum to post preliminary drafts of my ideas, refine them, then blog them.
- Concentrate your discussion activity on only one or two threads each week. You’ll go mad trying to keep up with all of them, so narrow your field of vision to what really matters to you.
At the end of the week, abandon those threads. Again, this is about pacing yourself. While the conversation may be rich and rewarding, you can’t afford to go down any rabbit warrens.
If you’re super keen, you can always continue the conversation with your new-found friends after the mooc has ended.
- Pick a social media platform to support your progress. I made the mistake of bouncing between Twitter, Google+ and Facebook in case I missed out on anything, but all that did was waste my time. Next time I’ll pick my favourite platform and stick with it.
- Do something daily. Whether it’s watching a video, reading an article, discussing an idea, writing a blog, liking something on Facebook, or mulling over a thought in your mind, it’s important to keep the momentum going.
- Think of moocing as informal learning. If you remember your WIIFM, it will ease the pressure that you put on yourself. You don’t have to finish the course. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. Assume control of your own actions, and become the master of your destiny.
In other words, be the tiny ship of order in the vast sea of chaos.
Explore posts in the same categories: active learning, MOOCsThis entry was posted on 1 April 2013 at 7:55 and is filed under active learning, MOOCs. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: #edcmooc, active learning, anxiety, challenges, discussion, distance education, distance learning, e-learning, E-learning and Digital Cultures, elearning, informal learning, learning, MOOC, online, online learning, online training, overwhelmed, participatory learning, postgraduate, study, success, tips, WIIFM
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
Back in August 2012 having surveyed the technology behind a number of connectivist orientated MOOCs (cMOOCs) and I came to the conclusion that:
It’s apparent from the survey of [c]MOOC technology that course teams are taking a loosely joined set of tools that they are comfortable with to facilitate a shared experience with the learner.
I also asked:
Even with the bespoke nature of [c]MOOCs there are still opportunities to start collectively raiding the parts bin. … Given the wide use of WordPress … are there opportunities for [c]MOOC specific themes or plugins?
At the time I highlighted the prevalence of the FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress, which is used to aggregate content from other sites via RSS feeds. Six months on and reading posts mainly from Alan Levine the WordPress parts bins has well and truly been raided. Alan is at an advantage having been involved with the open online course in Digital Storytelling (DS106) and it’s been incredibly useful to see how his recipe has evolved. At the same time others have been turning to WordPress to support their courses. Of note are E-learning and Digital Cultures on Coursera (#edcmooc) , which challenges the division of connectivist (cMOOC) and instructivist (xMOOC) by using the FeedWordPress recipe; and the Open University/OpenLearn/Martin Weller course in Open education (H817).
This last example is particularly interesting because as you’ll discover by reading this post by Martin Weller you’ll see he’s embraced the DIY approach, confronting the challenges of being your own IT support head on. In the post Martin concludes:
One last plea – I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I’m serious though – it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don’t have Alan and Jim’s tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they’ll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don’t think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.
Personally, and at the danger of frustrating Martin further, I think it needs more than just a guide. In my original post I highlighted how aggregation of data was key. This still holds but with all data the next challenge is turning it into something actionable. What pathways might be useful for users to make sense of what is going on.
Looking at H817, EDCMOOC, DS106, ETMOOC and others you have a lovely, gorgeous, wonderful flow of creativity, ideas and reflections, but often this is hard to navigate. Even when you use post excerpts a page of the last 10 posts is at best over 3,000 pixels long. Add in the issue that you might be pulling in content from 100s of sources and those 10 posts could quickly disappear.
Taking a step back a considering what FeedWordPress is doing, its a feed aggregator so are there any cues we can take from feed readers to make it easier to users to browse the content. That was the question I found asking myself when I was recently asked to contribute to ALT’s Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL) [starts 4th April – still time to sign up].
Take Google Reader for example (don’t even get me started on Google’s ridiculous decision to close this in July). Reader is able to allow you to easily browse 10 posts in 300 pixels and if there are over 10 posts as I scroll down more content is automatically added. If there is anything I look the like of I can click the title to get the content. I can also see the things I’ve read and options to ‘star’ and share (although sharing has been compromised with the introduction of Google+). Feeds can also be organised into folders making it easy to filter content.
With these ideas in mind I scoured the WordPress plugins database to see how much of this functionality I could recreate. And here’s what I’ve come up with:
I’ve got more tidying up to do with the code before official release but you have have a play here (if you want to test read/favouriting then register here) and here is the current code (very poorly documented).
Thoughts and reflections
A group RSS reader
When I started making this custom child theme Google Reader was going to live to a merry old age. Given it’s death in July and having already started my search for a replacement I’m wording if reusing this recipe and my existing feed subscriptions might be the way forward – particularly as the base theme is responsive and works well on mobile. Taking this idea one step further there are potentially some interesting collaborative opportunities beyond an open course context. In particular I was thinking of enabling the WordPress commenting system which would allow discussion of posts, the scenario being your team want to monitor and comment on a set of feeds (I’ve disabled commenting for now as I want people to discuss content on the source post, the issue though is the comment activity is not captured and displayed … one to add to my TODO).
WordPress as an open course platform
Pro – flexibility allows you to find and install themes/plugins to get your desired functionality
Con – flexibility means you’ll spend hours looking for the right plugin then discover it doesn’t quite do what you want and which point you either (if you can) tweak, live with or spend hours more searching for an alternative
Pro – wordpress has numerous well documented internal functions and an architecture to easily add custom functionality (functions.php) and creating themes based on existing templates (child themes)
Con - custom functionality takes time and can easily break if dependencies like plugins or parent themes change (for example my current child theme is broken by the very latest version of the responsive theme)
Box of bits and no instructions
One of the things at the forefront on my mind is this is potentially an open course platform in a box, but the box contains a random selection of pieces and no instructions. The guidance can be written, its finding the balance between ‘flat pack’ and bespoke.
As always you thoughts and ideas greatly appreciated
BTW I final got a nice blog registration integrated into FeedWordPress. More about that next time (code is in the repo)
Last updated by Martin Hawksey at March 27, 2013.
Philadelphia — A lot of the discussion about massive open online courses has revolved around students and professors. What role can academic librarians play in the phenomenon, and what extra responsibilities do MOOCs create for them?
At a conference held here at the University of Pennsylvania last week, librarians talked about the chances and challenges that open online courses throw their way. The conference, “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?,” was organized by OCLC, a library cooperative that runs the WorldCat online catalog and provides other services and library-related research.
Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services at Duke University, said the “rapid uptake” of MOOCs had taken many people by surprise. As she put it, “These courses don’t seem to fit anything of the model that we have for how to do online education well.” She’s been hearing from instructors that “the process of preparing courses for this environment made them rethink” how they teach their on-campus courses. “Faculty have said it’s a huge amount of work but that it’s also a wonderful opportunity,” she said.
Librarians who get involved in MOOCs should be prepared to deal with “lots of interesting questions for an international audience” of students, Ms. O’Brien said. MOOCs attract students with very different skill sets, languages, technological setups, and knowledge. Ms. O’Brien shared some statistics about the global distribution of students who have enrolled in Duke’s online courses: 37 percent come from North America, 31 percent from Europe, 16 percent from Asia, 10 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean, 3 percent from Oceania, and only 2 percent from Africa. Many don’t have reliable Internet connections or can’t access course material that requires Adobe Flash Reader.
Ms. O’Brien had one basic piece of advice for librarians wondering what to make of MOOC mania: Take a MOOC or two to see what they’re really like. “You can’t be a valued adviser if you don’t understand what it takes to do one of these courses,” she told the audience.
Brown University will debut three Coursera MOOCs this coming June. Sarah Bordac, the university’s head of instructional design, advised libraries to think carefully about the specific pedagogical requirements of each MOOC before they rush to get involved. “There is a lot of new time being put into these new projects,” she said.
Ms. Bordac described some of the many jobs librarians can be called on to do in support of MOOCs. Library personnel might need to negotiate with publishers over course materials, help make fair-use decisions, track down public-domain images, provide digital production services, set up teaching spaces and equipment, and/or provide TAs with extra support, especially when the lead professor is also very busy with on-campus courses. At Brown, Ms. Bordac said, she serves as “a connector” among many several different offices and groups, including the university counsel’s office, media services, and the university library.
Several panelists said that working on MOOCs can be a great way to heighten instructors’ awareness about open access and the licensing of course materials. Jennifer Dorner is the head of instruction and user services at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is a real opportunity to educate faculty about the need for owning the rights to their content and making it accessible to other people,” Ms. Dorner said in one session. “This is a really good place for us to educate them about open source and push them in that direction.”
In the summer of 2012, Berkeley joined the nonprofit edX venture founded by Harvard University and MIT. Ms. Dorner said the university had a wide assortment of online-ed offerings beyond edX. That gives students a lot of options. It can also be a headache for librarians asked to provide support for many different kinds of courses. “The lack of coordination and lack of centralization really do pose challenges for the library,” Ms. Dorner said.
To help figure out strategies for dealing with those challenges, librarians from all of the edX partner institutions have formed two working groups, Ms. Dorner said. One group is looking into the issue of access to content; the other is talking about the research skills that MOOCs require and how librarians can help students develop those skills.
Merrilee Proffitt, a senior program officer for OCLC, helped organize the conference. In a phone conversation afterward, she said it’s very early days for MOOCs, too early for libraries to rush to build MOOC support into their core services. Not every online course “is going to require library support,” she said.
But librarians also can’t afford to sit back and let the phenomenon develop without their input. “It’s important for libraries to be engaged in the conversation and present and watching,” Ms. Proffitt said. “This is a great time for experimentation.”
published by menard on Fri, 02/08/2013 - 13:48
***Updated***
With Coursera and edX both announced this week they are doubling the number of universities partners, I decided to update the data. I also added another MOOC: FuturelearnOne more thing that was added to the visualisation is the average University World Ranking by MOOCs.
-----------------
Original Article is bellow the visualisation
MOOC (Massive open online course) systems have been all the rage for the last year. The number of students and high dropout rates have been highlighted and analysed. The firms investing in each system and the capital invested have been scrutinized. Speculations on monetisation of the different systems is ongoing and this week, 5 classes have been approved for credit recommendation by the American Council on Education.
So why do we need another article on the subject? We don’t really… I was just interested in looking at the universities that have partnered with the 3 major MOOC systems: Coursera, edX and Udacity and see if any pattern emerged.
Coursera
· The most in number of partnering universities with 33
· The greatest number of participating countries
· The smallest average in endowments per university
edX
· Limited to United States universities
· The biggest in average endowments per university
· The only system that has a bachelor-focused university
Udacity
· The smallest number of partnering universities with only 5
· The largest average number of students per university
· The smallest average number of postgraduates
Final word
All 3 systems have hand-picked their partnering institutions. Seventy percent of the universities are on the Times Higher Education top 200 World University Rankings 2012-2013. Eighty-two percent (82%) of Coursera's partners are in the Top200 University rankings compared with edX at 38.5% and Udacity at 60%. In the ranking's top 5, only the University of Oxford is not part of any of the 3 MOOC that we are looking at. I cant wait to see who will recruit it.
Dave Chidley for The Chronicle
Paul Gries, of the U. of Toronto, has taught MOOCs on computer science.
By Steve Kolowich
What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom.
The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded.
Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Since then MOOCs, which charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access, have been touted by reformers as a way to transform higher education and expand college access. Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.
Princeton University's Robert Sedgewick is one of them. He had never taught online before he decided to co-lead a massive open online course titled "Algorithms: Part I."
Like many professors at top-ranked institutions, Mr. Sedgewick was very skeptical about online education. But he was intrigued by the notion of bringing his small Princeton course on algorithms, which he had taught for five years, to a global audience. So after Princeton signed a deal with an upstart company called Coursera to offer MOOCs, he volunteered for the front lines.
His online course drew 28,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. He had spent hundreds of hours readying the material, devoting as much as two weeks each to recording and fine-tuning videotaped lectures. The preparation itself, he said, was "a full-time job."
It paid off. By the time his six-week course was over, the Princeton professor had changed his mind about what online education could do. Mr. Sedgewick now classifies himself as "very enthusiastic" about virtual teaching, and believes that soon "every person's education will have a significant online component."
The Chronicle survey considered courses open to anyone, enrolling hundreds or even thousands of users (the median number of students per class was 33,000). About half of the professors who responded were still in the process of teaching their first MOOC, while the rest had led an open online course that had completed at least one full term.
Many of those surveyed felt that these free online courses should be integrated into the traditional system of credit and degrees. Two-thirds believe MOOCs will drive down the cost of earning a degree from their home institutions, and an overwhelming majority believe that the free online courses will make college less expensive in general.
The findings are not scientific, and perhaps the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey. These early adopters of MOOCs have overwhelmingly volunteered to try them—only 15 percent of respondents said they taught a MOOC at the behest of a superior—so the deck was somewhat stacked with true believers. A few professors whose MOOCs have gone publicly awry did not respond to the survey.
But the participants were primarily longtime professors with no prior experience with online instruction. More than two-thirds were tenured, and most had taught college for well over a decade. The respondents were overwhelmingly white and male. In other words, these were not fringe-dwelling technophiles with a stake in upending the status quo.
Therefore the positive response may come as a surprise to some observers. Every year the Babson Survey Research Group asks chief academic administrators to estimate what percentage of their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education"; the average estimate in recent years has stalled at 30 percent, even as online programs have become mainstream.
Professors at top-ranked colleges are seen as having especially entrenched views. For years, "elite" institutions appeared to view online courses as higher education's redheaded stepchild—good enough for for-profit institutions and state universities, maybe, but hardly equivalent to the classes held on their own campuses. Now these high-profile professors, who make up most of the survey participants, are signaling a change of heart that could indicate a bigger shake-up in the higher-education landscape.
Why They MOOC
Professors who responded to The Chronicle survey reported a variety of motivations for diving into MOOCs. The most frequently cited reason was altruism—a desire to increase access to higher education worldwide. But there were often professional motivations at play as well.
John Owens was drawn to MOOCs because of their reach. He also did not want to be left behind.
Mr. Owens, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Davis, liked the idea of teaching parallel computing, a method that allows computers to execute many tasks at once, to a global audience. Putting his course on Coursera's platform would be good for the 15,000 students who registered at no cost, he figured.
But it might also be good for him. It does not take a programming expert to decrypt the writing on the wall: No matter where you teach, online education is coming. "I would rather understand this at the front end," said Mr. Owens, "than be forced into it on the back end."
A number of the professors in the survey said they hoped to use MOOCs to increase their visibility, both among colleagues within their discipline (39 percent) and with the media and the general public (34 percent).
This opportunity was not lost on Mr. Sedgewick, the Princeton professor. "Every single faculty member has the opportunity to extend their reach by one or two or three orders of magnitude," he said.
For heavyweights like Mr. Sedgewick, who co-wrote a popular textbook on algorithms, allowing somebody else to beat him to the punch on that opportunity would be risky. By volunteering for duty, he was, in part, defending his roost. "I wouldn't want anybody else's algorithms course to be out there," said Mr. Sedgewick. He was one of the few professors in the survey who recommended that students buy a textbook—his own.
Nevertheless, most professors did not seem to think that a MOOC-related boost to their professional profile would equate to a payday. Just 6 percent were looking to increase their earning power, and only one hoped that his MOOC work would help him get tenure.
Learning From Online
In May 2012, when the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they would enter the MOOC fray with $60-million to start edX, they were emphatic that their agenda was to improve, not supplant, classroom education.
"Online education is not an enemy of residential education," said Susan Hockfield, president of MIT at the time, from a dais at a hotel in Cambridge, "but an inspiring and liberating ally."
This has become a refrain for traditional universities that have been early adopters of MOOCs, and many of the professors in The Chronicle survey seem to have taken the message to heart. Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed said one motivation was to pick up tips to help improve their classroom teaching.
Among them is M. Ronen Plesser, an associate professor of physics at Duke University, who saw the challenge of captivating a vast, fickle audience as a way to reassess his own teaching techniques. "I found that producing video lectures spurred me to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus," he said.
The result was an online class that he describes as "significantly more rigorous and demanding than the on-campus version."
A key way professors are learning new teaching tricks is by taking cues from their MOOC students. Coursera, edX, and Udacity all track the interactions each student has with the course materials, and with one another, within a given course. Each platform then gives professors the ability to see data that could tell them, for example, which methods and materials help students learn and which ones they find extraneous or boring.
The idea is to glean insights from the online courses that professors can apply in the traditional classroom, where such data are hard to come by.
Michael J. Cima, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, used data from his MOOC to do a side-by-side analysis of learning outcomes for the students in his massive online chemistry course and the ones taking the traditional version on campus.
"I have evidence that the online measurements of outcomes may be better than what we have been doing in class," Mr. Cima said. "This surprised me and caused me to challenge some of my assumptions about how well we do assessment in a residence-based class."
He is thinking about bringing some of the automated assessment tools from his MOOC into his traditional course when it starts up again in the fall. He likes the idea of constantly drilling students with online quizzes that they can take at their own pace. But there would have to be one key difference for his MIT students, he said: The students would have to work on their quizzes in a physical classroom, with a proctor.
Price of Free Teaching
The insights that come with teaching massive online courses, however, come at a price. Many professors in the survey got a lot out of teaching MOOCs, but teaching MOOCs took a lot out of them.
Typically a professor spent over 100 hours on his MOOC before it even started, by recording online lecture videos and doing other preparation. Others laid that groundwork in a few dozen hours.
Once the course was in session, professors typically spent eight to 10 hours per week on upkeep. Most professors managed not to be inundated with messages from their MOOC students—they typically got five e-mails per week—but it was not unusual for a professor to be drawn into the discussion forums. Participation in those forums varied, but most professors posted at least once or twice per week, and some posted at least once per day.
In all, the extra work took a toll. Most respondents said teaching a MOOC distracted them from their normal on-campus duties.
"I had almost no time for anything else," said Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.
"My graduate students suffered as a consequence," he continued. "It's equivalent to volunteering to supply a textbook for free and to provide one chapter of camera-ready copy every week without fail."
Mr. Owens, at Davis, had a similar experience. He spent 150 hours building his MOOC, "Introduction to Parallel Programming," for Udacity. More than 15,000 people registered. Once the course started, he spent about five hours per week on it, posting frequently on the discussion forums.
Although Mr. Owens did not ask for relief from his normal teaching load to make time for his MOOC, he doubts that he would have gotten it if he had asked.
"It's out of 'my own' time, which is quite limited," Mr. Owens reported. "So, yes, other areas of my job suffered."
Most colleges do not yet have a protocol for integrating their instructors' work on MOOCs into normal faculty work flow. But if the survey responses are any indication of how much work goes into a MOOC, institutions may soon have to figure out how to help professors fit them into their professional lives.
"It takes an immense amount of work to produce an adequate MOOC," said Armando Fox, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who has co-taught three MOOCs for Coursera, "and a staggering amount of work to produce a really good one."
Mr. Owens, for one, said he did not plan to teach another MOOC until his bosses reduce his classroom teaching load to give time for it. The continuing participation of top faculty members in massive online courses, he said, will depend on whether their colleges are willing to let MOOCs distract them from their traditional duties.
At that point, Mr. Owens said, campus officials will need to ask themselves whether they want to give that faculty time to online students, "99 percent of whom who are not at their universities."
Cutting College Costs
Most of the professors whose MOOCs had completed at least one term reported the number of students who had "passed" the courses. The average pass rate was 7.5 percent, and the median number of passing students was 2,600.
In lieu of credit toward a degree, most professors offer certificates to students who complete massive online courses. Three-quarters of the professors surveyed said they offered some sort of document certifying that a student had completed a MOOC.
It remains unclear, however, how seriously those certificates are being taken by employers. College degrees are still seen as the coin of the realm.
Perhaps the biggest question surrounding MOOCs is how they might integrate with the current credentialing infrastructure in a way that makes college degrees less expensive.
The American Council on Education, a group that advises college presidents on policy, recently endorsed five MOOCs from Coursera for credit, and it is reviewing three from Udacity.
If colleges yield to the council's judgment, it could mean that students who are clever enough to pass a MOOC could redeem their learning for credit toward a traditional degree. There would be fees in the process, but no tuition.
Most professors who responded to The Chronicle's survey said they believed that MOOCs would drive down the cost of college; 85 percent said the free courses would make traditional degrees at least marginally less expensive, and half of that group said it would lower the cost "significantly."
As far as awarding formal credit is concerned, most professors do not think their MOOCs are ready for prime time. Asked if students who succeed in their MOOCs deserve to get course credit from their home institutions, 72 percent said no.
However, it's worth noting that more than a quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science, and engineering.
Robert W. Ghrist, a professor of mathematics and electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, is among them. His MOOC, "Calculus: Single Variable," is one of the five Coursera courses that ACE has recommended for credit.
Fitting his assessments into the parameters of Coursera's auto-grading system has been somewhat limiting, but no more than the math placement exams that Penn already uses, said Mr. Ghrist, who previously oversaw those tests.
"I would, of course, prefer it if I could read over their work carefully and follow their logic," he said. But that is a technology problem that Coursera will soon solve, he believes.
The Penn professor built his course with the express intention of mimicking, as closely as possible, the version he had taught on campus for eight years.
"Some MOOCs that I've sampled seem to be a bit watered down for the sake of mass appeal," said Mr. Ghrist. "My course is definitely not like that."
In some disciplines, the number of creditworthy MOOCs might depend on the priorities of professors and their institutions more than the limitations of online technology. Some professors might choose to build their courses with formal credit in mind; others might have a different agenda.
Mr. Ghrist, for one, hopes to see the number of creditworthy MOOCs go up as massive online courses proliferate. And he hopes that, as they do, universities like Penn will begin conferring transfer credits on students who enroll with several MOOCs already under their belts—allowing them to finish their degrees more quickly, for less money.
"I have four kids who are going to have to go to college," said Mr. Ghrist. By the time they do, the professor fully expects that MOOCs will be an important component of their applications.
Coursera needs to start acting like a platform
Coursera is now in an enviable position among MOOC providers: they have more students than all the other providers combined (Udacity, edX, FutureLearn, peripheral players like LMS companies). At this stage, Coursera is most like Google in its positioning (edX most like Apple in its attention to detail and quality).
Coursera now needs to start thinking of itself like a platform or an app marketplace. Clearly and publicly define how partners can work with and share data, create an app engine that allows universities to contribute to the value of the marketplace by sharing their content creation and testing tools. At this stage, no other MOOC provider is as well positioned to take advantage of the value add from network partners. The end result would (could) be that we see an explosion in creativity in online learning as the central video/content presentation format of MOOCs needs to be challenged and rethought by a mess of creative folks.
This was written by gsiemens. Posted on Thursday, March 14, 2013, at 7:48 am. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.
The most valuable aspect of MOOCs is that the large number of learners enables the formation of sub-networks based on interested, geography, language, or some other attribute that draws individuals together. With 20 students in a class, limited options exist for forming sub-networks. When you have 5,000 students, new configurations are possible.
The “new pedagogical models” (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old) being discovered by MOOC providers supports what most academics and experienced teachers know about learning: it’s a social, active, and participatory process.
The current MOOC providers have adopted a regressive pedagogy: small scale learning chunks reminiscent of the the heady days of cognitivism and military training. Ah, the 1960′s. What a great time to be a learner.
In order to move past this small chunk model of learning, MOOC providers will need to include problem based learning and group learning in their offerings. That won’t be easy. MOOCs have high dropout rates. Which means that if you’re assigned to a group of 10 learners, by the end of the course, you’ll be the only one left.
The large MOOCs can improve the quality of learning by creating a model for rapid creation/dissolution of groups. If you have teenagers in your house (or if you are a gamer), you’re likely familiar with how groups form in many video games or virtual worlds. There are two extreme opposites: World of Warcraft involves highly cohesive social units where individuals spend long periods of time together in solving problems and engaging in quests. In contrast, Call of Duty has low social cohesion as groups are formed on the spot and once a player logs off, the group dissolve (yes, you can log in and play with friends in a more cohesive unit on CoD as well). The latter model is worth considering for MOOCs.
Let’s say I take a course on Coursera. Due to high dropout rates, pre-planned groups will likely not work well. Instead, if I log in at 10 pm on a Friday in my statistics course, I can be automatically placed into a queue system similar to CoD: I wait until enough people show up to form a basic group, the system then launches us into our group work and we complete the 20-30 minute activity. If we like working together, we can decide to form a more stable group and schedule times to work online together. Otherwise, we disband. For the next group assignment, we are partnered with an entirely different group of learners.
To extend the group work experience, a quest layer can be added onto the assignment. Once a group is formed, each member is assigned a role that is vital to achieving a particular challenge. If members of the group don’t work together and share knowledge and skills, the problem will not be solved. The quest format will likely run longer than 20-30 minutes and may be most successful for groups that have worked together in the past.
My main point here is to emphasize that we need to think differently about group formation in learning when our learners have very weak social ties and when the commitment of learners to varies during the course. Taking a rapid group formation approach, augmented with quests, will help to ensure that some level of social learning occurs throughout the course, even after 90% of the learners have left.
The Web as a classroom is transforming how people learn, is driving the need for new pedagogy; two recently launched courses at Cousera highlight what happens when pedagogical methods fail to adapt.
I wrote recently about the Fundamentals of Online: Education [FOE] the Coursera course that was suspended after its first week and is now in MOOC hibernation mode. Over thirty thousands students signed up for the course hoping to learn how to develop an online course. It was a technical malfunction when students were directed to sign-up for groups through a Google Doc that shuttered the course, along with hundreds of student complaints about lack of clear instructions, and poor lecture quality. The course was suspended on February 2, and there has been no word yet as to when it will resume
.
On the other hand there is the e-Learning and Digital Cultures course also offered on Coursera’s platform that began on the same day as FOE, yet the Digital Cultures course appears to be a smashing success if we use the engagement levels of students on social media platforms as a gauge. I enrolled in both courses, and the experience in Digital Cultures has been outstanding; the course content is challenging, thought-provoking and the instructors involvement appropriately on–the-side. Several colleagues within my network also taking the course appear to feel the same way.
The Tale of the Two
What made e-Learning and Digital Cultures successful and FOE not? There were variables common to each—the platform, the start date and length of course. The topics where somewhat similar, enough so that there was an overlap of enrolled students. However, at the root of the differences was the divergent set of beliefs in how people learn held by the instructors of each course. FOE ascribed to the learning model that most of higher education institutions follow—instructor’s direct the learning, learning is linear and constructed through prescribed course content featuring the instructor. In contrast, Digital Cultures put the learner in control, with choices of how to participate, and access to open resources on the Web for content. The evaluation method for the final assessment also provided learners with options; a peer-assessed, multimedia project created on a Web application of choice, based on a theme of interest covered within the course.How People Learn: Four Viewpoints
In this post I’ll examine four orientations to learning approaches, the processes and pedagogical principles that emerge from each viewpoint. To support the overall theme of this post is a chart that compares the two courses on four factors reflective of the learning orientations: pedagogy, content, and assessment and course interactions. The table gives readers a snapshot view of how the courses created divergent learning experiences, with the aim of highlighting how the Web as a platform for open, online and even massive learning creates a different context for learning—one that requires different pedagogical methods.Orientations of Learning: Four perspective on how people learn with a selection of learning theorists aligned with one of the four based upon the principles of the given theory.
Four orientations to learning; each embodies a belief of how people learn including the processes that bring about learning. Sources: Smith, M.K.(2003), Siemens, (2005) and Roblyer & Doering (2010).
Our current higher education system is grounded in behaviorist and cognitive theories. The behavioral approach suggests that in absence of knowing the internal processes of the learner, the focus is on the external—the behavior of the learner. The behaviorist learning model follows the pattern, A → B → C, where the environment presents the antecedent (A), that prompts a behavior (B), that is followed by a consequence (C). Characteristics of this approach include passivity of the learner, rote learning and methods of reinforcement.
The cognitive orientation goes beyond the external environment, and focuses on the internal where learning is a process managed within the learner’s long and short-term memory. The instructor controls and directs learning through planned instruction, selection of content, and teaches the learner through the building of knowledge [or skills] using a hierarchical approach going from the simple to complex (Roblyer & Doering, 2010).
Constructivism and the idea of social learning, or social constructivism is an approach that gained credibility in late 1990’s at which time numerous research studies suggested students learn more effectively when engaged with their world, build on what they already know, and construct knowledge as active participants. In support of the emerging research on active learning, the National Research Council published a volume by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000) How People Learn that synthesized the evidence. Bransford and colleagues emphasize three conditions for effective learning: engaging prior understandings, integrating factual knowledge with conceptual frameworks, and taking active control over the learning process (Cummins, 2006).
Most Recent Learning Orientation for a Digital World: Connectivism
The three orientations mentioned, have serious shortfalls in context of our current social and digital culture. The focus has shifted to the individual, where the learner is in control. Furthermore, with access to information, social networks and tools that allow learners to consume, share and construct knowledge, the paradigm for learning has changed. In response to these changes, Siemens advanced the theory of Connectivism, which integrates principles from theories of chaos, network, complexity and self-organization all of which drive the need for a new pedagogy (Siemens, 2005).Pedagogies Exposed
It’s the learning orientations, the belief system the instructors ascribe to that determines the pedagogical methods selected for instruction. Numerous higher education institutions and its instructors have incorporated active learning methods in keeping with the social constructivist orientation, yet methods that align with the cognitive and behaviorist model such as the lecture and traditional assessment methods [i.e. multiple choice assessments] are still going strong. In the traditional classroom, these latter methods can still be effective, yet in the context of open and online learning, these pedagogies don’t work, evidenced by the FOE course suspension, and the more recent situation where a professor dropped out of his own Coursera course mid-way through due to disagreements over how to best to teach the course. How people learn in the open, has changed, and institutions would benefit by adapting accordingly when offering courses in an open, online and massive format (xMOOCs).Now that technology has allowed institutions to broadcast their courses to the world through xMOOCs, the world thus has a window into the methods and learning orientations of instructors of various institutions (granted, some views may not reflect the values of the institution represented, but the instructors’). We are able to see through this open platform the deficiencies and shortfalls of the pedagogical methods.
Two Pedagogical Methods Examined
The pedagogical methods, the content choices, the interaction methods of instructors, and the assessment methods of each course are summarized in the chart below.Comparison of Pedagogical Methods of Two Courses on Coursera
Comparisons of pedagogical methods of two xMOOCs based on my experience as student with both courses [2013]. The methods for the Digital Cultures course created conditions for vibrant learning communities with high levels of student engagement.
Conclusion
The two MOOCs at Coursera discussed here are representative of the clashes between the views on how people learn. And people do want to learn, are motivated; are eager to take charge of their learning, make connections, expand their network and construct knowledge. The Web as a classroom creates opportunities for learning and teaching like never before. As the learner’s needs change, so does the role of the instructor, and if he or she implements appropriate pedagogical methods for the learning context, both will have opportunities to expand knowledge consistent with their own learning goals and needs.References
- Roblyer, M.D. & Doering, A.H. (2010). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, Pearson Publishing
- Sharples, M. et al., Innovating Pedagogy 2012, The Open University
- Siemens, G. (2005), Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age, itdl.org
- Smith, M. K. (2003) ‘Learning theory’, the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/b-learn.htm
- A New Pedagogy is Emerging…And Online Learning is a Key Contributing Factor, Ontario Online Learning Portal for Faculty and Instructors
Digital killed the Redbrick Uni
Wednesday 6 March, 2013» Is digital education doomed to fall prey to the worst aspects of the internet? photo: John Tringham
If they say that knowledge is power, it is easy to see how the internet has become one of the most powerful platforms of communication in history. With its speed, transiency and the sheer amount of information, such an abstract world has inevitably raised questions about the transfer of knowledge from reality to online. Is the digitisation of knowledge liberating or dangerous?
Currently one of the biggest debates in higher education is what Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will mean for the material university. MOOCs typify the idealism of the internet community: the notion of an online education that transgresses economic and political boundaries, underscoring a utopian attitude that appears to be for the good of the people.
“Fifty years from now, there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education.” This bold claim by the renowned educator, Sebastian Thrun, makes one wonder about the implications of seeing MOOCs and traditional universities as opposing fountains of knowledge. If Thrun is right in his claims, I would wager two possible situations:
First, I feel that if MOOCs replaced concrete degrees, someone will make sure that they become increasingly commercialised (because students really desire a market, apparently) and cease to be free. However, if people then retort that Harvard and Cambridge “will at least survive”, there is an implication that people will be tempted to make value judgments. The exclusivity of traditional degrees may serve to stigmatise the online degree, adding to generalisations within the discussions about educational worth.
I’d like to stress that whilst this globalised forum appears to mirror the online, encyclopaedic sharing of information that I love, I feel worried about potential for a homogenisation of knowledge.
Some users believe that localised education is more generalised in its biases and that sharing discourses on online forums makes knowledge richer. However, it is not the act of sharing of knowledge that worries me, but the presentation of content.
I feel more cynical about the generalisation and limitation of content. A few weekends ago I attended a talk for Warwick Modern Commons Research Group and there was an interesting discussion on the standardisation of university teaching, something that I think is potentially dangerous on a global scale. There was an interesting notion that commercial vested interest limits research and, if we take this to an online scale, the notion of one lecturer speaking to thousands is potentially revolutionary and potentially dangerous.
How do we make sure that the information is not dictated by a mere few? How do we make sure that deeply sponsored and damaging ideologies aren’t presented as popular and factual data? Will the specialities, the eccentricities of knowledge that made online collaboration so interesting be eradicated for standardised, commercialised and controlled education?
Additionally, I find it quite hard to believe the idealistic intentions of MOOCs when examples such as when the late internet activist Aaron Swartz was potentially going to be imprisoned for 35 years for downloading and redistributing files from digital library JSTOR in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It seems that free knowledge is not always in one’s hands after all.
However, despite this, there is a sense that some on the internet are resisting. Movements like Anonymous, hacktivism and stop SOPA demonstrate a complex resistance to the law, copyright infringements and censorship, a struggle between the public and authority.
The seemingly derogatory label “internet generation” is now a massive advantage in a place that is constantly changing and expanding. For instance, when managerial tw-illiteracy allowed a disgruntled social media member to describe the cull of HMV employees on the company’s Twitter account, it became obvious how subversive and powerful knowledge is and how the accessibility of the internet exacerbates this.
I see MOOCs as a complementary platform to concrete universities, not a binary opposite; as an expansion of knowledge within reach of the students’ fingertips. I just hope that the content is not reduced and manipulated due to funding issues and censorship.
Hopefully, this freedom will destroy the pervading sense of astonishment that maybe, just maybe, the individual who furiously makes Nyan Cat memes might be as influential in the online world as the person who, in the material world, rules because they wield the most money and weapons.
Tweet
Summary
MOOCs have introduced a greater level of transparency in online higher education. They offer students a chance to evaluate and compare institutions to a degree previously unheard of in higher ed. The focus of the evaluations is, primarily, instructional content and related activities. This focus may create new opportunities for less prestigious institutions to compete.
::
Technology’s Unintended Consequences (Strike Again)
Before the concept of the MOOCs was adopted by elite universities and became “a thing” in 2012, it had a decidedly anti-establishment posture. These courses had a DIY quality. They were created and run by people excited by the possibilities of forming ad hoc online communities of learners that could use the Net to learn what and how they wanted. By design, MOOCs operated outside of the constraints of traditional higher education. Today, of course, MOOCs are associated with institutions like Stanford, Harvard, McGill and other institutions which see an opportunity to combine their international brand recognition with open courseware in order to stake out a large slice of the future of digital higher education.
This may not be exactly what the people who started experimenting with MOOCs had in mind, but innovations have a history of leading to unintended, even contradictory consequences. MOOCs are no different. Indeed, the trajectory from DIY to “upmarket” may not be the most interesting unintended consequence; MOOCs may have also inadvertently ushered in a new degree of transparency in higher education.
By providing free and public access to courses and faculty – MOOCs and other “open” initiatives, such as OER – enable learners and other stakeholders to review, evaluate and compare an institution’s core “product” without ever being admitted to the institution. Comments by students are beginning to appear across the Web on the relative merits of different MOOC courses and platforms. And new portals have been created that allow students to select and rate courses from different institutions, much as they would a Hollywood film (see here and here). The change can’t be overstated. A MOOC can be witnessed by 100,000+ people and discussed in the New York Times. On the other hand, faculty have often been hesitant to have a colleague sit in on their lectures. Night and day.
Transparency & Evaluation of Quality
This is new territory for higher education. We’ve not been subject to the transparency and “perfect information” that many sectors of the economy have faced. For example, customers seeking to purchase appliances at the local mega-appliance store now come armed with more information on-hand than the salespeople. Vacation resorts can’t stop tourists from sharing their bad experiences in online forums. By and large, though, students still make decisions about which institution to attend with virtually no direct exposure to the quality of teaching they will face over the next few years.
If the MOOC phenomenon continues to pick up steam, and more institutions see value in making one or more of their courses available through these public platforms, then MOOCs may become a key platform by which the value and differences of institutions of higher education are evaluated and, as a result, the terrain for competition between institutions.
But on what basis are institutions competing? To answer this we need, first, to recognise that MOOCs expose certain parts of the participating universities and not others. MOOCs place certain qualities and features of the universities on display, while other features are hidden. As it has throughout history, technology changes what we pay attention; what “matters” and doesn’t. (For example, the advent of television changed what kinds of people were “electable” in our political systems.)
Greater Focus on Instructional Content
The feature that is privileged in MOOCs is instructional content – the material that is presented to the students in the course.
Instructional content is privileged for a couple of reasons. First, because MOOCs are stripped of many of the other common elements and experiences that usually come packaged with being a university student: loans, registration processes, socialising, and concern about grades. (Because of how students are currently using MOOCs, the vast majority of MOOC students are less concerned with grades than in their college or university courses.). Consequently, instructional content is proportionally a larger part of the overall experience. Second, instructional content is a relatively tangible part of the learning experience. While learning is as much a “process” than artefact, evaluating a process is relatively difficult. Instructional content, on the other hand, is tangible and can be compared with relative ease to content in other courses.
On some level, participating institutions already recognise that these courses are being used to showcase the institution and its faculty. Universities are putting more effort into their MOOCs than is typical of online courses. Duke University recently provided a recap of the process they went through creating and launching a MOOC. They reported a total of 620 hours of labour for the development stage – well above sector norms. That included over 11 hours of video (12 individual videos per week) and more than 1000 files for an eight hour course.
But the effort at Duke will likely pale in comparison to the type we will see in future course developments. Once it becomes obvious to university leadership that these courses are serving as a calling card/front door/flagship for the institution we may see what amounts to another variety of the university “arms race” – this time focussed on instructional content in publicly available courses. I think it’s safe to assume that the President of one Ivy League school won’t be thrilled if the courses offered by their institution look shoddy and home-made in comparison to what’s coming out of another Ivy League school.
The significant impact that MOOCs can have on a university’s reputation was nicely illustrated earlier this month when Georgia Tech decided to pull the plug on its Coursera MOOC after only a few weeks, due to challenges with its design and execution. Those that work daily with online courses in traditional colleges and universities can vouch for the fact that many, many bad courses are designed and offered each semester, many of them incomplete at the start of term – no different from campus-based courses, in this respect. But these courses are not pulled from the shelves mid-stream. The difference, of course, is that the Georgia Tech course was part a high-profile initiative. An institution’s reputation was on the line.
Content: “It’s a Good Thing”
Instructional content has received very little attention in digital higher ed, to date. Some equate concern with the quality of instructional content with passive, one-way learning. They see interaction as the primary basis of learning.
While interaction is fundamental, so is content; the importance of one feature does not mean that the other is irrelevant. No matter what the subject matter, high quality, thoughtfully presented instructional content – whether it is illustrations, videos or well designed activities – is an absolutely powerful component of learning. In fact, I expect the role of content to grow more important as the two currently distinct spheres of content and software merge (e.g. adaptive software, simulations), and as higher education moves beyond the current “cottage model” of content development in which much of the burden for content development falls to lone instructors without the time, incentives or necessary skill sets. I find dismissals of content’s importance quite simplistic, frankly, and when these arguments are put in the form of high quality content, humorous.
The changing status of instructional content can be seen in the trajectory of open educational resources (OER). When individual academics began in the late 90s to make components of their courses available on repositories like Merlot, it was of little significance. Anecdotal evidence suggests that academic leadership were rarely aware of the faculty’s involvement in these initiatives. They reasoned that the intellectual property resided with the faculty member, and if they wanted to dedicate the time to participating in these initiatives, this was the faculty’s concern. Today, decisions about participating in Coursera and other open content/course platforms involves the University Board, investigations by General Counsel, and planning from the VP of Marketing.
The extent to which an institution will seek to use MOOCs as a showcase for their online courses will be influenced by the degree to which the course is affiliated with the institution. Some MOOCs are presented clearly as output of the institution. The most direct path to communicating this direct affiliation is to (a) give the MOOC course the same title as the course within the university, (b) have it taught by an academic of the university, (c ) have the academic identified as a member of the faculty at the university. For illustrative purposes, consider the particular way that Udacity defines the origins of its courses (Figure A).
Compare Udacity’s approach approach to labelling the origins of the courses to Coursera’s, which links the MOOC directly and fully to the institution. Both models rely on the credentials of the instructors (s) behind the course, but Coursera aims to define the course more closely with the partnering institution (Figure B).
The difference stance in relation to universities taken by these two platforms is significant as the closeness of the affiliation to prestigious institutions was the basis of the original excitement about MOOCs in 2012. Private vendors had been doing MOOCs since the 1990s, after all, but to little excitement. Nor would we have read about MOOCs in the New York Times or The Guardian had they come to us via Pocatello Junior College.
The excitement about MOOCs was a by-product and reinforcement of the logic long used to evaluate and rank higher education institutions: the more exclusive, the better. The assumption is that the instructional content made available through these initiatives are of value because they are the product of these prestigious, highly selective institutions. That exclusivity and research productivity doesn’t necessarily correlate with instructional quality is well . . . interesting. And herein lies an opportunity (read on).
A Different Basis for Competition
There is very little stopping less prestigious institutions from producing higher quality courses than the elite institutions. Because the basis of competition has changed, and instructional content is now a key driver of value for learners, other colleges and universities that have made a significant investment in online education could produce high quality courses – as good or better than today’s MOOCs. In fact, as I suggested in a post last spring, the elite institutions may be less well suited to producing high-end instructional media. These institutions established their strong brands through research. Less prestigious institutions have generally focussed more on teaching and dedicated more of their resources to online learning, on average, than the elite institutions that currently dominate the MOOC space.
Technology has the power to change the basis upon which institutions compete. The oil crisis of the 1970s changed what mattered to car buyers; they wanted fuel efficiency. Honda and other then marginal players in the auto industry seized the opportunity and offered fuel efficient cars. Honda and Nissan (then Datsun) likely couldn’t compete head to head with the major US auto manufacturers, but when the way in which cars were evaluated changed, they took full advantage.
Similarly, technology is starting to change how value is defined in higher education. By deciding to take advantage of the technology’s capacity to distribute their courses, elite institutions have provided a previously unheard level of exposure to their core “product” – courses. But in doing this, the participating institutions also provide the means for learners and other stakeholders to determine quality for themselves. In turn, this creates opportunities for ambitious institutions of higher education, just as it has in other sectors, to compete in new ways.
By Keith Hampson, PhD. Analyst and Consultant to the Digital Higher Education Industry
0.000000 0.000000
After spending considerable time and effort on MOOCs in the past the Coursera / University of Edinburgh eLearning and Digital Culture MOOC (#edcmooc) was the first have been able to complete.
How I did this was quite simple … I knew I’d fade out after a week or so so I set a goal of one blog entry per week’s activity, including a pre-MOOC post and post-MOOC ‘submission feedback’ post. Now I had set myself this public goal I needed to follow and live up to it. It worked. This may not be to everyone’s taste or motivational style, but after 3 other failed MOOCs I wanted to finish one, just one.
- MOOCs were also presented at the 2013 Blackboard Users Conference (#durbbu) by Jeremy Knox: MOOC Pedagogy
Which now brings me to the nature of the different MOOCs available. By now just about everyone knows what a MOOC is – if not there are plenty of excellent resources to help you on your favourite search engine. With more and more MOOCs available, and the organisations offering them increasing all the time, just what types of MOOCs are they, and what do they mean for the student?
- xMOOC is based on a model around a more traditional ‘teacher-student’ knowledge transfer and are offered by the large scale organisations like Udacity, Coursera, and edX.
- cMOOC is the ‘connectivist’ MOOC and have been referred to as a “chaotic experience” (Lugton, 2012) or “discursive communities creating knowledge together, inspired by George Siemens.” (Hoyle, 2012).
The difference between these two types of MOOCs is defined as:
“cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication” (Siemens, 2012), or
“in an xMOOC you watch videos, in a cMOOC you make videos.” (Smithers, 2012)
Here’s a question for you … how does the newly created FutureLearn fit into this? I asked this question on Twitter and Pat Parslow summed up what I was already thinking – without seeing what they will deliver it’s hard to say.
I’m going to a meeting soon to discuss MOOCs, possibly FutureLearn too, and what and how the University of Leicester is going to work in this environment, and I hope to
- understand what will be offered and how,
- try and be involved in what Leicester will offer, and
- get a fuller understanding of what it takes to design, implement, and run a MOOC.
Fingers crossed.
References:
Hoyle, M. A. 2012. Coursera, Pedagogy, and the two faces of MOOCs. E1n1vers. October 19, 2012. http://einiverse.eingang.org/2012/10/19/coursera-pedagogy-and-the-two-faces-of-moocs/
Lugton, M. 2012 What is a MOOC? Reflections and Contemplation. August 12, 2012. http://reflectionsandcontemplations.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/what-is-a-mooc-what-are-the-different-types-of-mooc-xmoocs-and-cmoocs/
Siemens, G. 2012. MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace: Learning, Networks, Knowledge, Technology, Community. July 25, 2012 http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/
Smithers, M. 2012. OH: in an xMOOC you watch videos, in a cMOOC you make videos [Twitter]. October 9, 2012. https://twitter.com/marksmithers/status/255562376659730434
Here are some further excellent resources to consider for MOOCs:
Image: Die Bildungsschlange (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Tagged with Blackboard, cMOOC, Coursera, Distance Learning, EDCMOOC, edX, FutureLearn, MOOC, Online Course, Udacity, Video, xMOOC, YouTube.
By David Hopkins – March 6, 2013
I don’t usually like to title a post with negative connotations, but there is no way to put a positive spin on my experience with the MOOC I’m enrolled in through Coursera, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application. The course so far is a disaster, ‘a mess’ as numerous students have called it. Ironically, the learning outcome of the course is to create our own online course. To be fair, there are some good points to the course, but there are significant factors contributing to a frustrating course experience for students, myself included.
Group Chaos
There are three key factors contributing to this course calamity and all link to the group assignment. The first, a ‘technical glitch’ was big enough to cause one of Google’s servers to crash. Another, causing considerable distress to students is the lack of instructions for the assignments and the group activity—there was no clarity provided on the objective or purpose of the groups. I’ll review here what went wrong, highlight students’ reactions to the problems. Though it’s too late to fix the situation now, I’ve also provided a suggestion to the course instructor, what to do for the next course to prevent a repeat of this scenario. And to help instructors or educators be more effective with their own instruction, with group activities in particular, I’ve outlined strategies and tips for the creation and facilitation of group learning activities.The course started Monday, January 28, 2013 and problems began on day one when participants were instructed to ‘join a group’. As of today, Friday, February 1, the purpose of the groups is unclear, many students are still looking for a group, and if they are in one, aren’t sure what they are supposed to be doing.
One comment from student in a threaded discussion titled ‘This is a mess’ which was started by another student. So far, there are over 1,000 discussion threads, many with similar sentiments.
How to Prevent Group Work from Going Haywire
Creating and facilitating group activities in small online classes, (under forty students) can be exceptionally effective in creating meaningful learning experiences, and supportive of the social dimension, which contributes to the building of a positive and effective online learning community. I’ve written several posts about facilitating group work, which are listed at the end of this post. In short, successful group activities in online courses need:1) clear and detailed instructions.
2) a thorough description of the purpose of the assignment, explaining why a group project is required over an individual activity. Highlighting how the student will benefit is a tactic that can contribute to a higher level of motivation.
3) access to technical tools that effectively support group collaboration, i.e. a dedicated discussion venue for each group (numerous LMS platforms support dedicated group space).What happens When Group Work Goes Haywire
1) Technical ‘Glitches’: excerpts from the course instructor’s announcements in Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.
Posted 10:33 am, January 28
Dear Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application Students,
Thank you for taking my class! With so much debate on online courses in general and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) …. I also hope that you will enjoy this class and that you will have fun.This course will be collaborative in nature. So the first thing I would like you to do is to join a group. You will be able to do this when you access the course site. You will be able to click on the Join A Group link in the left navigation bar. This will take you to a Google Spreadsheet.…..” [The Google server could not handle the traffic - it crashed]
Posted 12:18 PM, January 28
Hi Everyone,
It has been an exciting few hours. The course has just started and some of you have managed to delete entire rows and columns in Join A Group Google spreadsheet…some of you removed people from their groups, crashed the Google server. To fix this…. [try logging on again] and If you get a “We’re sorry. Our servers are busy. Please wait a bit and try again” message, please wait and try again. This just means there are too many people trying to access the site…. [This still did not work].Posted 2:24 PM, January 28
I apologize for the technical glitch that did not allow you to view the Week 1 tab. This caused a lot of confusion for a lot of people. Everything is laid out in order in Week 1 tab. Here is a summary of what you need to do for each assignment [Instructions for assignments were 'missing'].Posted 2:48 PM, January 30
I was hoping that the Google Spreadsheet would work after a day but it looks like it will not work at all for our purposes. So I have gone to Plan B. I have created a new Group Sign Up forum. To differentiate this from the groups on the Google Spreadsheet, the group names start with Group A and continues. ……[This method did not work, now they are on Plan 'C'. Students don't appear to know what group they are in, with hundreds of 'threads' for group discussions, it's quite mess].Numerous students appear confused (as the two comments show here). Though in fairness, it is the first week the course; students are trying to assimilate to the environment and determine expectations. This does highlight the need for instructions that are detailed and clear. Some instructors have found using a video or audio clip to explain an assignment helpful for students.
2) Lack of Clear Instructions and Guidelines: Instructions for the group work in this course are vague. It is not clear what the groups are for, or why one needs to join a group. This was not explained anywhere in the course description or instructional video, only instructions of how to join a group. All of this further confuses the technical issue, begging the question ‘why are we dong this’?
My guess is that the instructor is trying to manage the discussion format by providing a more intimate framework to discuss the questions for the given topic of the week. Below is a suggestion for the course instructor of the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application. For the next course, I suggest the following strategy for the group work:
[Recommended] Instructions for this Discussion Assignment: There are three discussion questions for this week. They are 1) … 2) … 3) … To gain a deeper understanding and perspective on the topic, I recommend you participate in a discussion with several of your peers. Given the large group, we suggest students form smaller groups, [suggested maximum is twenty students per group] which will provide a more intimate and meaningful dialogue. You may use a platform of your choice, Google +, Facebook, Skype etc. [From my limited experience as a participant in MOOCs, some students form small groups spontaneously, without prompting].
Alternatively, you may choose not to join a small group in which case you can participate in the class discussion board dedicated to week one questions that is open to all participants. Since the discussion is open to the entire class, it will be impossible to read all of the responses. I suggest you post your response and engage with one or two students during the week by replying to students that respond to your post, and respond to those that engage with your initial post. This method can provide a focused and meaningful way to gain a different perspective on the topics of the week.
Closing Thoughts
Group work can provide meaningful learning, in the right context with the support of a sound instructional strategy. The example here from the class, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application demonstrates why a sound strategy is needed, and what happens when one is lacking. MOOCs require a unique instructional strategy, one that is different from small online courses. What exactly the strategy to follow is under discussion. It is through the courses, such as this one that institutions can learn what works and does not. I give the instructor credit for trying something new, and investing the time and energy she has done which is considerable.I will be sticking with this course, though I’m not submitting assignments, but I’ll be using the examples, tools provided and experience to hone my own instructional design skills.
Note: I’m also enrolled in Coursera’s E-learning and Digital Cultures, with University of Edinburgh, which is so far excellent. What I wrote in this post is exclusive to the course Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application. I also completed Introduction to Sociology, through Coursera last year which was quite good.
Updates:
Sunday, February 3, 2013, 12:23 PM PST: Apparently after the notice yesterday of suspending the course, Coursera has decided to re-open the class:
“Dear FOE students,
We were inspired to see the number of people who expressed an interest in seeing the class resume. There were some choices made in the initial design of the class that didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped. We are working to address these issues, and are reopening the discussion forums so that we can get feedback on how the class can be improved when it relaunches.Thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with a great learning experience in the next version.“Saturday, February 2, 2013, 4:17 PM PST: “We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.”
Further Reading on Group Learning Activities in the Online Environment
Follow-up Post: The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity, Online Learning Insights
“MOOCs are the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. They are the opium of the people. The abolition of MOOCs as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”
(Modification of Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)Replacing "Religion" with MOOC in the quote above should give a pretty clear indication of where this post is heading. There is a confluence of circumstances at play in the United States right now, culminating with the President’s recent State of the Union call to reduce the cost of higher education, that is sending one of our most important and progressive social institutions on a crash course directly back to the Industrial Age, mass-production model that we have struggled to escape for so long. The cost in progress of lowering what society pays for higher education could be a devastating blow that accelerates our fall from atop the global power structure. MOOCs are a symptom of a larger problem, but perfectly exemplify what is wrong with the focus of our discussions on college affordability. We seek to blindly lower costs, placing that burden on the institutions themselves rather than on a society that should be embracing higher education and calling for more expenditure on learning, rather than less.
(Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Artist, unknown. Wikipedia Commons)
Massive is Not Better
Masses, massive, mass-production. All three of these terms stem from the same root, and the latter two seem to indicate that something of larger scale is inherently better. The first, in contrast, has often been used as a pejorative term to describe the 99% as in, "dirty, uneducated masses." Why suddenly then are we so eager to accept Massive Open Online Courses –gigantic classes for the masses- as a good thing? The truth is that the massiveness inherent in the MOOC model is a throwback to darker days of Industrial Age education packaged in a shiny new hi-tech wrapper. And we, the sheep-like masses are swallowing this hollow candy with reckless abandon.Embracing Our Oppression
Certainly the call for everyone in this country to be more educated is a noble aspiration. I agree with this notion wholeheartedly and believe that a more broadly and deeply educated population is the only hope for the future of the United States. In a recent interview John Boyer (AKA The Plaid Avenger), who teaches massive face-to-face classes at Virginia Tech, discussed the primary shortcoming that he sees with MOOCs as their lack of interpersonal interaction. He believes that personal interaction is what makes college special and that students are not receiving the full benefit of higher education if they are not actively discussing issues at a personal level (Marquis, 31 Jan., 2013).MOOCs are, just as Marx indicated, an insubstantial placebo that is pushed onto the masses as an offering to placate their desire for real and meaningful education. This is not to say that things cannot be learned from a MOOC or from other free informal sources on the Internet. Certainly, information can be acquired in a variety of ways, but knowledge is something different from information and it can only be acquired by the active application of learning (Marquis, 11 Aug., 2011). Most MOOCs do not facilitate the kinds of interactions that allow for real learning to happen. By embracing MOOCs we are showing our willingness to accept a cheap substitute for what education could/should be in place of the rich and interactive experiences we deserve.
Watering Down Education
So what should education be if not the acquisition of information? For starters there is a deep intellectualism that is fostered by immersive college experiences, whether face-to-face or online in a more conventional setting, that cannot be achieved on a massive scale. In order for the burgeoning intellect to think deeply about issues, a person needs mentoring and opportunities to explore issues personally, confrontationally, and in an environment where time is taken to work through the issues that arise. This intellectual support cannot happen amidst the masses in a massive, automated course format.In addition to intellectualism, how can students learn to communicate at a personal level in these massive situations? As a high school, college, and graduate student, I was able to work closely with faculty mentors to develop my voice and craft of clear articulation both in speech and writing. Individual teachers took the time to work with me on a personal level to support the development of these two skills that are in danger of extinction if the cheap or free MOOC is fully embraced as a solution for mass education.
Caving in to a Business Model
The rise of MOOCs and our willingness to embrace cost-cutting measures in education is a sign of our eagerness to embrace a business model of learning in which efficiency is valued above effectiveness. People do not seem to understand that education is not a business. It is a social institution, a social service, even an entitlement (though I despise the current use of that word) that all members of society have an undeniable right to. Not for their own good, but rather for the greater good of the society as a whole. We cannot treat education as a business venture. Doing so does a disservice to all of us.Education and our higher education system are an investment in the future of all of us. If you were investing in stocks to provide for your future, you would not arbitrarily choose the cheapest options simply because they save you money today. You must invest your money in institutions that will grow and that have a plan for a long and productive future. Education is the same type of investment. We must invest both wisely and extensively to ensure a robust return on our money. MOOCs are a minimalist investment with a very poor potential return.
Stratifying Education
The MOOC model is also troubling because it potentially does something else that Marx saw as a larger failing of society – stratification. Why are low-cost or free educational options necessary or acceptable for some members of society? Because we as a country are unwilling to support the needs of those who are less fortunate than ourselves. Setting forth free or absurdly cheap education options is, in strictest Marxist interpretation, a way to placate the masses with something that seems like a viable alternative to the far more effective conventional college education.What MOOCs are doing is creating a multi-tiered system in which cheap, inferior options are available for the masses and traditional institutions cater to the elite. This is simply a further symptom of the widening gulf in the United States between the haves and have-nots, that has been expanding dramatically in the last 20 years (NPR, 26 Sept., 2012). MOOCs become, in this view, a powerful vehicle for reinforcing the class structure in the U.S. while duping the masses into thinking that they are receiving an "education." In fact, what they are receiving is a cheap option to keep them quiet and prepare them for their future life of serving the elite.
Demanding Real Happiness and Education
The old axiom that "history repeats itself because no one listened the first time" really is true. Looking at the Occupy Movement and the MOOC Revolution as the next battle grounds in the long history of social unrest in the tradition of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the American Revolution, it is painfully obvious that we have not overcome the basic human tendency to oppress others. Times of social and economic stratification in the past have led to violent revolution and incredible turmoil and unrest. Those in power in the U.S. seem to think that they are beyond the reach of such events – primarily because they have not paid attention to the past.Throwing MOOCs, instead of real education, to the hungry masses is the next incarnation of "let them eat cake." For the benefit of the masses as well as for the ongoing health of the country, it is imperative that we wake up and provide real, robust, personally interactive educational options for everyone. Certainly the cost of education is great. It should be! We must invest in ourselves in order to ensure the brightest possible future for all of us.
Share your opinion on MOOCs and the future of higher education on Google+ and Twitter.
The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other.