Slashdot Mirror
Coursera To Offer K-12 Teacher Development Courses
An anonymous reader writes "Coursera on Wednesday announced it has partnered with 12 top professional development programs and schools of education to open up training and development courses to teachers worldwide. The massive open online course (MOOC) provider is expanding beyond university courses by offering 28 teaching courses for free, with more to come. It’s worth noting that this is the first time Coursera is partnering with non-degree-bearing institutions. It’s also Coursera’s first foray into early childhood and K-12-level education. The company clearly sees this as a necessary step if it wants to go beyond just students and address the other side of the expensive education equation."
We're really living in amazing times.
Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.
Recently I saw this gem, which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.
While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.
Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX). And of course there's Kahn academy, which is turning high-school education upside down.
In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.
No more massive student loans just to get a decent education.
Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.
Amazing times indeed.
What you're paying for when you take a paid course is individual attention and verification that you passed the exams that the instructor gave you. Coursera is great if you're personally motivated to learn the material, but it's shit if you want any guarantee that the person did the work themselves or took the tests. Yes, it's possible to cheat in regular classes, but it's harder to do so when there's at most a few hundred people in the class rather than the tens of thousands in a free course.
In this case, the correct answer is for the school to just pay the fees associated with teacher training. And leave free alternatives like this to the 2nd and 3rd world where they might not have funding to provide it at all.
What you're paying for when you take a paid course is individual attention and verification that you passed the exams that the instructor gave you. Coursera is great if you're personally motivated to learn the material, but it's shit if you want any guarantee that the person did the work themselves or took the tests. Yes, it's possible to cheat in regular classes, but it's harder to do so when there's at most a few hundred people in the class rather than the tens of thousands in a free course.
In this case, the correct answer is for the school to just pay the fees associated with teacher training. And leave free alternatives like this to the 2nd and 3rd world where they might not have funding to provide it at all.
Actually, the correct answer is to use courseware like this as the core *teaching* component, freeing up resources to manage testing and application training.
Teaching materials should be as low-cost as they can be; it's the training and testing of learned skills that needs some sort of paid adjudicator.
This is something I never understood; when I was in school, there were some teachers who felt like it was their duty to shove the training material down students' throats, and then they turned around and tested the training material instead of the students. Other teachers provided the material, taught the students how to learn from it, and then administered tests that measured the students' ability to handle the knowledge they were supposed to have learned from the teaching material.
In my opinion, the first group wasn't really teaching anything in the first place, and passing tests was as easy (or difficult) as memorizing (not learning) the source material. Cheating in these "courses" was rampant. The paywall did nothing to stop it.
The second group could just as easily have used coursera for the teaching, freeing the teacher up to *teach* students the bits that they were having difficulty grasping. Then, come testing time, the teacher has time to create and administer a test focused on what they expected the students to know -- the coursera tests being a method for the *students* to gauge how likely they were to pass the graded test and figure out where to get help from the teacher, nothing more.