Presentation Scales In Massive Online Courses; Does Interaction?

lpress writes "Coursera has demonstrated that they can scale presentations in massive, open, online courses — they have reached over 1.3 million students in 195 countries since they were funded in April. But can they scale student interaction? As of this morning, 7,839 Coursera students had formed 1,119 communities on Meetup.com in 1,014 cities — many outside the U.S." On the whole, isn't that a positive outcome?

Comments

Isn't that good...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the whole, isn't that a positive outcome?

I dunno; are they forums where the blind lead the deaf or are they staffed with people who are able to answer questions correctly and quickly enough that students don't learn the wrong lessons?

Re:Isn't that good...

[White Flame]

They're staffed by the instructors and their assistants, and in my experience give quick and quality spoiler-free guidance and answers. The nice thing about a forum is that you're not getting off-the-cuff responses from one random assistant; they've got a chance to run it around the room and up the chain to give a better formed response than if you were to sit down with them one-on-one.

And yes, it does scale. Any question that I desired to ask was already asked in the forums, with great answers and discussion around it, even sometimes ending up in new errata added to the video. By keeping this "interaction" persistent, it coalesces a ton of human redundancy out of the learning pipeline, effectively broadcasting the most effective parts of the interactions in a similar fashion as the videos, from a very conversational and relatable perspective.

Re:Isn't that good...

[AchilleTalon]

Having followed about a dozen courses at Coursera and one at MITx. I believe there is still much room to improvement on Coursera's forum. The quality isn't equal. Some teaching assistants and Professors are outstanding. Others are so, so. The main point is that professors aren't paid to put their courses on-line. So, in some cases, the time commitment is just not there. Same thing apply to teaching assistants.

The forum could be easier and more user-friendly searching isn't always easy. There is no performant search engine and classification with tags is depends on the students. Provided the number of students from many different locations and culture, it is easy to imagine not everyone is taking care about the tags.

Beside that, you can usually find good help on the forum if you are up-to-date with the course material and not lagging to much behind, otherwise, you are reduced often to dig into the already existing threads to find your answers. There is not always a great willing to help those lagging behind. And, as I said, since there is no search engine, you may endup reading more pages on the forum than the actual course material to find the help and information you are seeking for. This can really be a time consuming task. At my sense, it should be a top priority in the list of the improvements to implement on the forum.

For disabled students, the material isn't always available on time and isn't always accurate. That can be a concern for those needing it since they may at the end have much less time than others to complete the lessons, assignments, homeworks before the deadlines. This is a problem Coursera can easily fix by better planning the lauch of each course making sure a professor do not start a course without having already a given number of videos already adapted for disabled students. This is really just a planning issue. And, it is sad to say that disabled students may be penalized in a course by this lack of planning.

For many teachers, this is the first experience at this scale, they need some guidance from Coursera which should be the primary ressource and should ensure the quality of the material by supervising the preparation and lauching of the new courses.

I strongly believe in MOOC and despite my comments I believe Coursera did a great job. On the side of the on-line help on the forum, my experience with MITx is the forum environment at MITx was a little bit superior to Coursera's environment. Now, let see what edX will offer. Starting a new course today with them.

What's special about study groups?

[AK Marc]

Is it real interaction? Class interaction is talking to the professor for authoritative answers to questions, or in the case of the massively large science classes I took (CHEM 101 and PHYS 201-ish), they had a paid TA in the lab. Unless there is a paid TA in each of the 1000+ groups, they are nothing more than study groups, and aren't class interaction. There is no "official" answer to a question. There is no "interaction" with a class authority. That's not class interaction any more than friending a classmate on Facebook makes that classroom interaction (even if they meet in person, the difference is the lack of official representation in the group).

Not exactly scaling well

[artor3]

So 8k students out of 1.3M have formed study groups? While that's good for those students, I'd hardly call it scaling well. That's a rate of 0.6%. Far, far lower than what you get in traditional universities.

Do students really need to resort to a third party site to meet each other? If so, that's probably part of the problem right there. It seems like integrating social networking features right into Coursera would help to tremendously increase the rate at which students interact.

Define "interaction"...

[bgat]

On the whole, "interacting" via message boards is about as productive for education as typing with mittens on is for coding. Online courseware can provide students with reference materials and enlightening prose, the enhancement that comes with direct, rapid-fire human interaction is missing.

This is why medical, law, and engineering schools heavily promote study groups where you appear IN PERSON to interact with your classmates. The nuance of the spoken word, and the nonlinearity of conversation, adds a powerful dimension to the student's internalization of the material in ways you just cannot duplicate with words on a screen or paper.

Re:Define "interaction"...

[ShanghaiBill]

On the whole, "interacting" via message boards is about as productive for education as typing with mittens on is for coding.

It depends on the message board. I have learned way more from Stack Overflow than I ever learned from a book. The content is well categorized, and both the questions and answers are rated in a way similar to Slashdot moderation. It seems to work very well.

Re:having someone tell you the 'right answer'

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry, I profoundly disagree.

Let's separate topics into "objective" and "subjective".

The "Objective" ones are "easy" - math-engineering-parts of science. There is supposed to be "1.0001" right answers. (The "Right One" and the one in a million shot that the official answer is in fact incorrect.) So no amount of students thrashing around with no closure will help if at the end of the day the instructor-team doesn't produce the right answer. Then there's more thrashing about why 70% didn't get it right, and there is where you learn.

On the subjective stuff, yeah, it heads more into what the Prof wants to hear, but a good Prof might actually have a clue. Look at the Legal Disputes we have going on here. We desperately need an IAAL whose paid specialty (from the EFF?) is to lead the discussions because however much we joke about the topic, law is hard, and 85% of our comments are flawed. The IAAL might make an error, but it's gonna be a much narrower error than most of our 200 comments.