Slashdot Mirror
The Rage For MOOCs
An anonymous reader writes "Ever since Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig signed up 160,000 people for their online artificial intelligence course last year, educators and entrepreneurs have been going ga-ga for 'MOOCs' — massive open online courses. A new article in Technology Review, The Crisis in Higher Education, gives a balanced overview of the pluses and minuses of MOOCs as well as some of the technical challenges they face in areas like machine learning and cheating detection. The author, Nicholas Carr, draws an interesting parallel with the 'correspondence course mania' of the 1920s, when people rushed to sign up to take courses by mail. 'Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation's colleges and universities combined.' That craze fizzled when investigations revealed that the quality of the teaching was poor and dropout rates astronomical. 'Is it different this time?' asks Carr. 'Has technology at last advanced to the point where the revolutionary promise of distance learning can be fulfilled?'"
The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.
Palm trees and 8
It's a faulty assumption that lack of technology caused high dropout rates in during the correspondence craze of the 20's. The real issue is that a low entry cost coupled with a lack of requiring people to attend a physical room or building means that walking away doesn't involve any walking. You simply don't watch anymore. It's as easy as changing the channel on the TV. Essentially you're commoditizing education. Without a requiring a large investment of cash, all but the most serious students students feel no remorse about walking away.
Interesting that this pops up in my RSS feed just as I'm browsing MIT OCW for a new course to take. I've taken several already, and really enjoy augmenting my knowledge with the course materials. I've also taken most of the Stanford and Udacity courses, so I'm well aware of what they have to offer.
I'd say the value of these courses is personal growth. I do not see any possibility of using these online courses for any type of credentials, and I certainly wouldn't put my online course experience in front of my actual degree on any sort of resume or job application, but I would say "I have some experience dealing with X." In fact, I doubt I'd have the skills or base knowledge to understand most of the courses I've taken in advanced physics, mechanics, and computer science without my bachelor's degree.
Maybe they could teach how to run a Massive Open Online Business?
I hear MOOBs are really popular nowadays...
1. Time
2. Money
Spending an hour or two studying at home in the evening is a lot more accessible to most regular working people than driving to their local community college and blowing their whole evening there. Money is also an issue, as taking the course in-person guarantees that you A) have to pay for it, and B) need to drive there which comes with its own costs.
Free MOOCs take care of 1) and 2) simultaneously, so all things considered, is it really that shocking that they're becoming more popular and in-demand?
Also,
'Has technology at last advanced to the point where the revolutionary promise of distance learning can be fulfilled?'"
Really? Is this an article from the 1980's? Distance learning technology has been sufficiently advanced and accessible for at least 10 years. Just because you don't have anatomically-correct personal telepresence devices in each classroom taking the place of human bodies doesn't mean distance learning technology isn't "advanced" enough. Web-based educational technology is pretty well-developed by now, and in most cases gives you the exact same amount of human interaction as you'd get today with most on-site college classes. By that I mean, if you have a question after you've listened to the professor drone on for an hour with no classroom interaction, you need to send him an email and wait for a response. At that point, the people in the classroom might as well have just stayed home and watched a video lecture in their underpants.
Seriously. MOOC? Seriously?
If you just wanna learn, all you need is a good textbook, and some patience.
Or you could watch a video or read some shit on the internet, or whatever.
Learning isn't really that hard to come by.
If, on the other hand, you want to have evidence showing that you do, in fact, know the material, then it gets much trickier.
It's particularly tricky to automate, since it's intrinsically an arms race between students and testers.
The usual approach for automating decision problems is heuristic + blacklist + whitelist.
We can't really whitelist anyone, since generating a whitelist is, itself, the whole point. Your college diploma is the whitelist entry.
We can blacklist people, but only if they get caught, and it doesn't work all that well if they can just retake the course at no extra cost.
We can't use heuristics because with so much at stake, the students are highly motivated to cheat, and will exploit any weakness they can find.
The heuristic will quickly be broken and the whole thing goes to shit.
So basically, we go nothing that works here.
The traditional solution is tests taken in a controlled environment, under supervision of paid humans, with harsh punishments for cheating.
So far, I've yet to see any alternative to that, regardless of computers or the internet.
There is no breakthrough in sight.
I think if nothing else the popularity of MOOC's demonstrates just how desperate people are for education.
The vast majority of humanity has no access to the training they want. Either it just isn't available or it is beyond their means.
Perhaps it is time we gave everyone that wants it free access to whatever education they desire throughout their entire lives.
It is the lack of skill-agility within the workforce that is really putting the brakes on economic growth and technological progress.
Trust The Computer, The Computer is your friend.
Here are some reasons, in random order:
1. The courses are "immersive" with frequent short quizzes, explanation of answers, etc. (in case of udacity, it is almost like once every couple of minutes). This is a big plus compared to correspondence courses.
2. There is a strong online community, instant access to reference material, forums, discussions, etc., which is a big plus.
3. Most of the material is free (I do not have any experience with non-free material).
4. The teachers are top class -- I mean, really top class, and the material they teach is high class and very unique [*].
5. The classes are massively scalable, archivable, easily made available, etc. (correspondence courses aren't).
6. There is an Indian saying "knowledge is wealth". So far, the top 1% have rarely helped the bottom 99% (and made them think that they should only "occupy wall street"). The MOOCs help in making the knowledge available to the 99% (turns out, it is a simpler problem to solve than the financial one).
The only major point people make is with respect to evaluating the credentials of a student who has taken these courses (and any types of cheating)... It is not a problem of the educator -- my belief is that the job of evaluating a candidate is mostly that of the interviewer. Employers that rely on lazy interviews in hiring people help the society at large -- they take away people that game the system out of the pool! And, slashdot should be the last place where education becomes secondary to grades (mind you, there are still grades for the MOOCs, and one can repeat the courses multiple times -- so one actually learns and deserves a top grade).
[*] To give a perspective, I am old, not from comp.sci background, didn't know python as of January (and have been destined to amount to nothing much!). I completed two courses on Udacity (CS101 -- thinking they'd focus on search, but they taught me python; and Peter Norvig's course). I had a phone interview with a "big deal" company where I gave a one-line answer based on what Peter Norvig taught [which impressed the interviewer -- and I explained him that their guy taught me the stuff]. I also took a course with Tim Roughgarden on Algorithms, and that helped me re-discover the joy of math and formal treatment of problems. I met him [Roughgarden] recently when he was visiting a nearby university, and his point was, if someone spends one hour on his class and learns something, he is more than happy. Without these courses, I'd still be wondering, "where did I screw up". Not any more.
I hate repeating myself, but what's this craze to attribute someone with such a reputation as Peter Norvig merely to his current employer? He's much more than a mere Google employee, IMHO. Can't we credit people with their real achievements instead of their employers?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
No, it's an indication of how many people are interested in what they see as quick and easy education. Hey, that course looks cool! It's free! Okay, I'll sign up!
Then they get into the course (or even before it starts), realize learning takes some work, and either drop out or fail. That's why completion rates for correspondence and other distance learning courses, particularly cheap or free ones, are astronomically low.
I thought the same thing when I read the headline. People see "Get your degree on the internet" and they think "Hey, I learn stuff on the internet all the time. Yesterday, I used YouTube to learn what happens when you light farts. How hard could this be?". And then they discover that, lo and behold, learning valuable skills is hard. In fact, there tends to be a correlation between the value of the skill and how hard it is to learn it. So, they bail and go back to flippin' burgers.
This isn't a commentary about MOOC's or correspondence courses as much as it's about lazy or dumb humans looking for an easy way when there is none. Sure, there's plenty of room for the educational "institutions" to make it sound easier than it is, but that's standard salesmanship (for any product) of downplaying the negatives.
Interested in education. Not desperate for it. There's a difference.
Everyone in the first world ALREADY has access to all the education they want, free. They're called libraries. Learning that way is a bit difficult so there are various ways you can get someone else to do some of the hard work of teaching, frequently by paying some money.
Free online courses are a great idea, but they're not a replacement for schools, they're a supplement to books. I strongly disagree that we should make universities free to anyone who wants to go. That results in resources that are diluted and strained just to try to teach large numbers of people who aren't really interested in putting much effort into learning.
Full agree with that - I'm from a "third world country" (Brazil): less access don't mean no access
This whole point is facetious and I'm sure you cannot be unaware of it.
Since Andrew Carnegie invested a spectacular amount of wealth in creating them a great many of us have access to a library.
This however does not equate to all the education you could ever want or need.
Unless all the education you desire is large print Mills and Boon romances.
As to the nonsense about warlords, how does that negate the point that the vast majority does not have access to free, lifelong education opportunities?
I might go so far as to say that many of these other travails might easily be directly attributed to such a lack of educational opportunity.
Trust The Computer, The Computer is your friend.
Yes yes yes.
It is rather disingenuous of Thrun to complain about the use of filmed lectures in online teaching, while still himself using what is essentially a lecture format, when ignoring the work of one of the world's leading distance institutions who effectively ditched the video lecture years ago in favour of carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical lectures. Thrun has taken a massive step back and is well behind the state of the art in many respects.
Sadly, though, the OU is buying into the online "revolution" and moving more and more of there tutorials online. They even have courses with no synchronous tutorials, instead relying on text forums.
The fact that some people take no active participation in discussion isn't acknowledged as evidence of a problem, but heralded as proof of the superiority of the medium, by invoking the unproven idea of "learning styles". Yes, "lurking" has now been redefined as a learning style in online education land.
It's sad -- the OU risks destroying itself in the name of austerity... :-(
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'