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?'"

Comments

Not about technology

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:Not about technology

[supercrisp]

I have to offer a mixed response to this claim that teaching must be developed into a science, so I'll comment, even though I came to this discussion to dispose of mod points. Some teaching of pedagogy is influenced by real, hard science. There are courses and teachers who are teaching pedagogy with cognitive psychology, outcomes evidence based on sufficiently large numbers of sample to be relevant, and that sort of thing. However, the _impression_ I get is that a lot of people in education departments are not basing their work on any real science. For example, there are still lots of education people talking about multiple intelligences, when there is no real evidence for it. Basically, it seems that ideology drives education pedagogy. There's a lot of marxist-lite thinking that is in actuality a sort of watered-down Romanticism. One good example of this is the belief that encouraging expressive fluency in writing will produce students who can write analytical arguments. The thinking still seems to be based on ideas like universal grammar, that we have a "language instinct" that will flourish if we nurture it and blossom into a set of skills that are actually conventional rather than innate. And, of course, there are more right-wing tinged methodologies too. My favorite example of ideologies determining pedagogical practice is the war between whole language (left) and phonics (right). Both camps are wrong because neither will accept that there's something in the other side's method, as well as because neither side is paying much attention to any actual science on the topic (the discourse seems to be more driven by marketing than anything else). That said, there was a day when a lot of science was behind universal grammar-type educational practices.... It's easy to cook your results, without even knowing it. And certainly a lot of education research is barely research, relying as it does on very small sample sizes. And, frankly, there's generally not that much funding for the good research because so much of the funding comes with the expected outcome more or less built in.

The article

[Puls4r]

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.

Re:The article

[Gription]

Exactly!

Who cares if you have a huge dropout rate? You'll still have a completion rate that is way more then any conventional class and even the dropouts will have learned something.

The education system has built a big blind process that isn't about learning. It is about the process. If you happen to learn at the rate that the info is fed to you and if the process intersects with your learning style then you are great. If you learn faster or slower or in a different fashion then the accepted process you are screwed.

Browsing MIT OCW

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Is it really not that obvious?

[Revotron]

Ask someone what stops them from going back to school to further their education and you'll get at least one of two responses:

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.

Re:Is it really not that obvious?

[Missing.Matter]

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?

But they don't actually solve the goal of advancing your education (education in the credential sense at least). The problem with a class with 100,000 students is you have to grade 100,000 assignments, midterms, exams, etc. in an efficient manner. This completely eliminates all the most valuable assignment types like hands on projects, essays, papers, proofs, group projects, etc. and basically boils down tests and homework to multiple choice. And when your homeworks and tests are multiple choice and available to 100,000 people, you are bound to have some sort of cheating ring. How exactly do you, as an MOOC provider, certify that someone who has completed a course has done so on his own merits? This is a serious problem with the model that has not been solved.

And even without solving it, in the meantime we still don't know that these multiple-choice courses are actually teaching anybody anything. I didn't have any multiple choice tests or assignments after my freshman year in college, and I can't say I remember anything from any class in which I've done multiple choice work. If MOOCs can't figure out a better homework/test model than multiple choice, I'm not really sure MOOCs will ever match more traditional forms of education.

Yes. This time, it's different

[sisukapalli1]

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.