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What Professors Can Learn From "Hard Core" MOOC Students
jyosim writes "Hundreds of people are spending 20 or 30 hours a week just taking free Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. They're not looking for credit, just the challenge of learning. This Chronicle of Higher Ed story looks at whether these MOOC addicts think they're learning as much as they would in a traditional college course. From the article: 'Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer.
"This stuff is actually addictive," she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. "The Dutch have the proverb 'If you never shoot, you already missed,'" she says.'"
How does this help me teach people to be engineers?
"'If you want to become an expert in the field,' he says, 'I think you need the book.'" My first assignment in my current PhD program was to come up with a list of errata from the textbook to submit back to the collegue of the instructor to fix for the next edition. It was one of the most informative assignments of my entire academic career.
I'm a software engineer, with some training in electrical engineering. I'm currently taking one on civil engineering. Trust me, its still a challenge- it requires mastery of physics concepts I haven't touched since high school, and some I was never really taught that I have to learn concurrently.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
While I'm not quite a hardcore MOOC user, I usually have three on the go as well as book learning. All of the courses I have taken have been entirely or mostly new to my existing knowledge. Given the time commitment and the nice-but-limited outcome of most MOOCs (an 'attaboy' certificate), it's a waste of time and effort to gravitate towards the comfortable.
About half of my courses complement my IT career (programming, networks, tech history), half don't (ancient history, philosophy, rhetoric, music/songwriting). Anecdotally, those peers I have interacted with have come 'cold' to many subjects, too.
It's been a most productive period of unemployment!
I'm an engineer doing history ones. I guess my comfort zone are the things I'm very interested in, but I still fail to see your point. Trust me - the intricacies of the history of the Duchy of Burgundy in the 1400s or the Holy Roman Empire during the Reformation aren't a walk in the park.
How many art students take classes in nuclear physics or string theory just for the "chalnge of learning"??
Chaos theory. Mandelbrot set. Fractals. The Golden Mean. Get a math degree and become a better artist.
So out of 3 million people signed up with Coursera, only 900 have completed 10 or more courses, comparable to roughly a year of full-time schooling. Only 100 have completed 20 or more. That's a 99.97% dropout rate after one year.
This isn't going to replace other forms of education with stats like that.
What about stuff that is a poor fit in to an traditional college setting.
Stuff that is a better fit for hands on?
Stuff that is better in a trade school / tech school setting.
traditional college needs to change as well.
Actually, I'm a software dev (so unusual here), and I take plenty of actually challenging MOOC classes, usually in things that I didn't have access to as an undergrad since I wasn't a major in say Neurobiology or Genetics. My background is CS (surprise!), so there's obviously a little math overlap (stats mostly), but I have no background in molecular biology at all, so I thought, well, jump right in and look it up until I know what's going on. (My undergrad U actually offers a number of classes on Coursera, several of which I couldn't take as an undergrad because they were closed to non-majors or had tons of pre-reqs.)
It's been fun, but I keep getting caught in this trap of signing up for too many interesting classes which then all decide to start at the same time.
At a certain point I'm concerned that it becomes substitutive, that is, it takes the place of things I'd be doing on my own anyway.
This Chronicle of Higher Ed story looks at whether these MOOC addicts think they're learning as much as they would in a traditional college course.
It's been psychologically demonstrated that people who volunteer their time up-front to some activity for which they're not receiving other rewards (e.g. payment) are biased towards finding the activity fulfilling, even if it wasn't really, simply so they don't feel foolish for having wasted their time.
I have no doubt many of these people are learning things and they would probably drop out if they weren't, but self-reporting is no way to measure the efficacy of MOOCs as learning tools.
When people take courses at their own free will (as opposed to fulfilling a degree requirement), they tend to gravitate towards courses they feel comfortable with; not necessarily know the subject being taught (otherwise, what's the pont?), but something within their comfort zone.
I am currently doing a course that I would never attempt if I were enrolled in the actual school.
Why>
Because there's no skin off my ass if I fail.
The funny thing is, because there's no pressure to keep the GPA up, I'm mostly enjoying the class. There are times, when I'm just lost and I have to go to the forums for hints - no one give you the answer - and I get to hear from others who are also having problems. We "stupid" people finally get our project done and it's an incredible confidence builder. Yeah, there are grades, but it's more of a feedback mechanism than anything.
A traditional school, on the other hand, IS NOT about learning. It is about busting your balls until you play the game and get your piece of paper. Lot's of busy work because many profs think you need to do a lot of work for the sake of doing a lot of work - I actually had a prof see me in the gym and comment that if I have the time to exercise, then he's not giving enough work.
I am enjoying learning and taking a class AND being challenged for the first time in my life.
School sucks. MOOC rocks!
I don't think I can agree with you on that. People gravitate toward their interests, not just to what they feel comfortable with. That often results in picking up ever more rarified knowledge, or higher skills. In my experience that can provide plenty of challenge. There are also plenty of people that will strike out in a totally new direction just to learn something about a topic or to acquire a new skill.
People often joke about basket weaving classes, but it is a useful skill with a significant knowledge base and many skills to learn. If you care to master all aspects of the craft there is much to learn about different materials and preparation techniques, suitable construction methods with different materials, etc.
Consider the humble pencil in this classic: I, Pencil
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You are missing the point. Why would you want someone who hasn't mastered the calculus to study string theory? I have been taking Physics II through edX.org and it is wonderful. I have my degree in Physics and several years of grad school but I have been working as a restaurant manager for 25 years.What good would a course that is over my head be for me? I am thinking like a physicist for the first time in decades and I find it makes me a better all around person. I have no illusions of standing on the podium in Stockholm any time soon.
to teach a niche or particular subject they find incredibly interesting and the university may not sign off on it. For example I took and Algorithms course, and a cryptography course. Both applicable to the CompSci field and degree programs but not really incorporated in the bulk of programs offered.
I think what she meant was "You can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket".
There's more to education than listening to lectures and taking the final exam (though the Chinese and many European schools don't seem to understand this). College education involves lectures, Q&A, homework, feedback from the teacher, projects, interaction with classmates...all in some personal manner. I am not suggesting that everyone needs one-on-one training as provided by a tutor, but interactivity is important. In mega-classrooms this is impossible. Sure, you'll get graders and TAs, but they often are unable to answer more than the most basic questions. It's not only about receiving information from the professor, it's also about responding back in turn - to improve the professor's understanding of the field, his or her teaching methodology, and to build a repor which lasts beyond the classroom.
For some years now, Wall-street and wannabee wall-street types having being trying to rebuild higher education along the lines of a business, with assembly lines and workers as interchangeable parts. It doesn't work. The quality of education is suffering. There's a race to the bottom as students are taught only how to pass the multiple-choice, computer graded exam. While understanding of certain facts is key, and rote memorization and replay have their value, it is not sufficient as part of a quality education. Small classrooms and interpersonal relations are required. This is best done in the traditional university environment.
Disclaimer; no, I am not any part of this teaching machine, either of the mass-production or hand-crafted ones.
An educator does not deal with driven, curious, and happily intelligent people all day. Her job is instead to take the lazy, complacent, and dull-minded and instill knowledge and analytical ability.
"Hundreds of people are spending 20 or 30 hours a week just taking free Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. They're not looking for credit, just the challenge of learning."
Hundreds, huh? Out of MILLIONS? They are the outliers within the outliers!
MOOC addicts are not the norm.
iPad owners with 4G connections are not the norm.
Slashdotters are not the norm.
AP students are not the norm.
Increasing access to those who already have access will give only marginal gains. If you want to start a revolution in education, focus on the students that regularly receive Cs, Ds, and Fs as course grades. Change THEM and you change the world.
Stuff that is a better fit for hands on?
The Internet is the greatest thing for Do-It-Yourselfers since power tools were invented.
Last year I decided to go back to school 8 years after graduating High School, even though I had made it as a Software Developer in a fairly large company. I wanted to get a CS degree, mainly for added job security. I worked myself up from lowly tech support to the companies R&D group (where I still work,) and there was no way I was going to do that again. Trouble is that the degree program started with Calc I, no pre-calc unless I wanted to take it without it counting toward the degree credit wide, and I had only gotten up to mid level algebra before then. To top it off, my arithmetic was rusty when it came to unused subjects like negative and fractional exponents, I had no idea what they meant.
Enter Khan Academy and Coursera, I fully completed all of the Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trig and Pre-Calc sections they had in about 2 months and started college. It was really addictive to have a progress bar showing how close you are to completion. I've since taken and passed Calc I and II, and passed both with a 96 and a 91. Next Semester is Calc III and Discrete Math. The point I am trying to make is that they really are effective tools, and I wouldnt have made it this far without them.
be nice if you can get a credit or an badge that means something with not having to go collgle for 2-4+ years with big bill and lot's of theory.
Who you callin' a MOOC?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Traditional college doesn't need to change. Most of the things people complain about are the result of the changes and reforms put into place over the last hundred years.
Things which are generally better at trade/tech schools are usually taught there for a reason. One of the big problems is that people don't seem to understand the difference between vocational certification and a college degree. The former is supposed to set you up for a specific job and the latter is supposed to set you up to think in an area of inquiry. They're both valuable, but if you go to the wrong one and don't know it, you're likely to be greatly disappointing.
I love MOOCs (I hate the word mooc when pronounced Mook though) I have little doubt that many courses go into way less depth than a traditional collage course. But my motivations for learning are entirely different than your typical collage student (not all just the typical). I am picking and choosing my courses based upon what I want to know so that I can put it to use tomorrow. Passing the tests in the MOOC are motivated by the fact that if I can't pass them then I haven't really been paying attention. Your typical collage student is learning many subjects where they follow a "flip-card" learning strategy so that they can pound the knowledge into their head long enough to regurgitate it onto a test. Some material will be built upon and potentially kept for life such as the core subjects for the person's degree. So an Engineer will potentially keep much of the math that they then proceed to use over the next few years but few will remember much from their mandatory arts course. The same even within specialties. Accountants who go on to become advanced bookkeepers will most likely forget their stats course material within months of learning it. I have taken and passed 3 courses from Coursera and loved all three. In every case I have proceeded to put what I learned into action. So my guess is that in 1 year I will have taken what they have given me and run much farther than your typical student taking the same university level courses unless that student chooses a path that will put that material in to regular use. But this is the advantage of my being able to cherry-pick the courses I want and need.
But comparing MOOCs to their University classroom counterparts are like comparing Radio to TV. They are different beasties. A MOOC takes a different form of discipline to take it. They have certain disadvantages in that I doubt anyone took any of the courses I took within a 100 miles of my location making physical grouping almost impossible at this point. University courses are taught by whatever professor is at hand, be they good or bad. Eventually some of the best professors are going to do MOOCs (I wish Feynman could have cooked up one as his lectures were pretty awesome) resulting in a faster more efficient learning experience. MOOCs are bringing world class courses to my desk from institutions I couldn't have gotten into. Also the prices for many MOOCs are perfect for people in parts of the world where they have no access to higher education.
But what it really boils down to for me is that a world with MOOCs is going to be a better world for so many people. I suspect that there will be a few casualties but that overall the number of winners will be incomprehensible. Also keep in mind that this is really the beginning for MOOCs so who knows how much better they will get?
An IMDB like database scoring online course quality is currently missing from the equation.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
-Wayne Gretzky
-Michael Scott
-The Dutch
be nice if you can get a credit or an badge that means something with not having to go collgle for 2-4+ years with big bill and lot's of theory.
Issuing credit/"badges" for technical fields makes no sense, if you lack the common vocabulary to be able to communicate with your peers about complex topics, or lack the theory necessary to be able to generalize a solution and apply it to an entirely new problem.
If you are talking instead about society valuing blue collar labor less than white collar labor, then the educational system or trade school system is not the place to fix what society does or does not value, or for something it values, how highly. It's like looking under a streetlight for your contact lens that you lost in the alley "because the light's better".
I personally do not value blue collar labor, such as road construction, since I believe the infrastructure problem can be solved once by laying down utility tunnels. There's no reason that AT&T needs to come by, rip up my street, and do a half-assed repaving job, then PG&E comes by and rips up the same street for gas lines, and then does a half-assed repaving job, and then the water district come along and rips up the same street for the water, and does a half-assed repaving job, and then the sewer people come along and rip up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job, and then Sprint comes in to lay a fiber optic line, and rips up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job.
And the people doing the repaving each time are the same people the city contracts with to do paving in the first place. These are the same people, who, when it was rumored that there might be budget cuts, guaranteed that they wouldn't be the ones cut by *starting and not finishing* all the scheduled projects on the books for the next two years so that the city would have to keep them on and not cut them so that they could repair all the damage they did from starting the jobs and not finishing them. Note that this was all on *rumored* cutbacks, not the real deal.
You want me to value them, then get them to act professionally; and yes, that includes turning out the lights when they are the last person to leave an office that's being shut down due to budget cutbacks. Anyone here who's ever worked for a failed startup, or a failed established company, can tell you whether or not they acted professionally. Most have.
Anyone use The Great Courses DVDs from the Teaching Company? I find that stuff pretty addictive. And it's good quality too, they have qualified tutors from real colleges including Ivy League schools.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Then doctors are communist then.
This brings up a question I've been pondering... What's wrong with lazy, complacent and dull-minded people to just be let to their own devices a bit? In a MOOC framework, they'd have easy, painless access to all require course material, including exercises and a discussion forum when they need help. If they can't be bothered to do it, then sucks to be them.
I'm being serious here: we're wasting valuable resources trying to keep mediocre people from entirely failing, only for them to get mediocre grades that barely give them their diploma so that they can go on to be mediocre employees with brains so numbed and dull that they're basically automata. If we let them fail (yes, letting people fail, the horror!) early on, it could act as a wake up call. I've rarely seen people without any interest in life; usually if they find school boring it's in large part because they're not at the right place. Instead of putting them on life support, letting them fail could make them realize they need to change career paths, and it'd still be early enough for them to do so without significant damage.
The trend right now is that students, especially young ones, shouldn't be allowed to fail. That sets a dangerous precedent, for once you're out of the school system (I consider graduate degrees to be "outside the school system") you're very much allowed to fail and discarded without second thought if you do. It's setting out an entire generation to unrealistic and frankly absurd standards that you can do jack shit and still make it. That sometimes happens, but it's not the norm.
but we are putting to much into the college degree and field like tech / IT more trades / hands on are needed. Maybe some kind of mix of the 2 ideas is needed but not 4 years pure class room.
College misses the mark in a few ways. Some people think that CS is one size fit's all, Some degrees have to much theory, With some stuff by the time you are out of collgle when you learned is out of date. Some college professors have been in academics to much and they have little to no real IT knowledge or its very out of date.
Higher levels of degrees are geared to academics.
IT / Tech needs an apprenticeship system mixed with maybe some kind of reworking of the certifications systems in place now. (maybe add more common stuff with less vendor based certifications and regroup vendors stuff)
maybe doctors can just get into med school with out needing a full 4 year bs / ba. Why not an 2-3 year aa / as and then? (mix years 2-4 into med school) Also MED school does have a residency part that is basically an apprenticeship.
standard educational requirements in places like IT need have some kind of hands on tech / trades part to them maybe 2 years MAX up front class room. And then have apprenticeship part with on going classes that are not tied down to the college time table.
As one of the persons mentioned in this article, I can't help saying that I felt uneasy being identified by my family status (as opposed to everyone else, who were described by their professional affiliation), after all I work in SW dev longer than that journalist has been writing his articles. Didn't expect the Chronicles of High Ed be that gender biased.
In any case, for me main drives for getting involved with Coursera (and a couple of other MOOCs) were professional interests (for the stuff that was related to my work, eg computer science) and curiosity ( for the stuff that was not), combined with some free time I had available. (the bit about addiction was supposed to be a joke, but apparently that's the stuff journalists tend to pick. Lesson learned :) )
I still wonder for how long the whole MOOC frenzy will continue in its current form. One of the concerns (which is often shared by the MOOC students themselves) is that the courses might become "watered down" so that more people will be able to pass them, but there will be less value in taking them. (If everyone wins in a lottery what's the point?). Another worry is monetization and which form it will eventually take (if things come to that point at all).
In any case, there are now some courses well worth taking, even though they can't be seen as the equivalents of the "real" education, it's too experimental for that. What they can do (at least the good ones) is to provide a structured introduction to the field, which is quite valuable if you want to learn something new.
On the other side, there might be some indirect (and hopefully, positive) effect of MOOCs which isn't measured by the percentage of those who successfully finished the course, but we might not be able to see it yet. From the fact that many of the people I know follow these courses now, I would assume that there is at least a demand, and it seems to grow. OTOH, it might be just a fashion which will pass after a while. So the best strategy seems to be using it while it lasts :)
Perhaps IT shouldn't be at college, it should be a vocational program the way that being an electrician or a plumber is a vocational matter rather than one that's taught at college.
But, it's not the level of the degree that determines that, it's whether it's focused on vocational training or on understanding things in a more broad way. Every time the topic comes up there's a bunch of luddites that comes to bash college because it's not laser focused on the job. Well, guess what, that's what college is. If a person wants the focus, then they should go with a technical certification. For those that want the context and some increased ability to move into other areas if need be, that's what college is for.
I'm signed up for almost every coursera MOOC.
I've only officially completed 1, and watched every video for about 30 others, and have downloaded videos 'to watch' for most of the others.
A few things I've found are that
1) Professors seem to like to assign waste of time busy work.
There are lots of classes that require essays or projects where it is essentially a giant waste of the students time. This includes doing videos and presentations for almost any course (a really well taught audio production course wanted every stuent to do a video essentially repeating a subset of the same material he just did. Others have wanted various large scale projects.) Since there would only be 'peer' evaluation of the material, this was all essentially busy work. There are areas where peer evaluation can be useful (some writing with rubrics and such), but mostly it was stuff that wouldn't matter at all from improving learning. Or the amount of learning improved versus the time invested was drastically out of proportion.
The math, science, programming and finance classes tend to 'get it right', only assigning an amount and type of assignment required to understand the material well, not wasting students time.
2) Science, Programming, Finance, Engineering, and Math courses are real courses, courses from Bschool and other sections are often ridiculously simple.
Of course testing and evaluating understanding of computer and science courses is quite easy, but still the quality and type of questions asked in reviews and homework and the type of assignments made sense for the Science/Tech classes; whereas I was sometimes wondering why the other courses had even bother to do a quiz the questions were so ridiculously simple minded.
I have two problems with the present "model" of Engineering "registration" in the USofA (see Feynman):
1) it is a STATE not NATIONAL level registration for a work area based on laws of physics and chemistry which do NOT vary based on the governmental jurisdiction, and NOT "man-made" statutes and rules based totally upon the opinions of a transient majority (I found the NCEES record to be totally useless when I was 'required' to become registered by another state because that model is based on corporate "supervised" NOT individual contract sole provider practice, dropped the NCEES record because it does NOT bypass having to complete the entire reference package anyway);
2) ABET is based on a model of totally government controlled education, which must end [period - end of statement].
Many moons ago Mr. Newt gave a speech in which he identified that technology based economic structures will by necessity rely upon skill certification not education certification, an interesting conceptual change.
For further discussion - look up Scientific American - Software's Chronic Crisis, W. Wayt Gibbs and then ask any working Engineer, not a ladder jumped middle level manager no longer capable of performing the 'grunt work' themselves just WHO and HOW the Arc-Flash and coordination analyses are being design-basis documented and performed in real time. NOT 'professional' by any stretch of the imagination in my not-so-humble opinion.
Easy access, high standards and high completion rate. Pick any two.
Although, I teach at a place with high standards and a high completion rate, but with a very selective admissions policy, I think that another good strategy is to have easy access and high standards, even at the cost of a high completion rate. That's what these sort of courses might provide.
I'm not keen on dropping standards in favour of easy access and a high completion rate. However, there is always a pressure to improve the completion rate so that the money looks well spent. Completion rate is easier to measure than, say, how much the course helps the people taking it to flourish.
Best wishes,
Bob
In order to more thoroughly test students' knowledge, AI software should be used which will sense where the student is weakest through their answers, and then pile on more questions in the weaker areas, or perhaps even provide supplementary learning materials which address the students' weak points.
IT apprenticeship is an oxymoron. At best, what you've leaned is already obsolete in 10 years. Plumbing, electrical, forging, mechanical repair, and landscaping; those you can start an apprenticeship program as the knowledge builds on the shoulders of giants before them. In IT, the ground is too fluid to make anything you've leaned worthwhile to pass down.
Life is not for the lazy.
and college is just as bad with people who have little real knowledge to pass down with costs that are alot higher then an apprenticeship program
BA's. Also many Master's programs and "professionally" oriented degrees.
It is a disgrace, in a way. But real Computer Science is Mathematics, and in the US at least, it was decided a long time ago to pretend it is not in order to not scare away (or fail out) too many students.
Although, I teach at a place with high standards and a high completion rate, but with a very selective admissions policy, I think that another good strategy is to have easy access and high standards, even at the cost of a high completion rate.
Surely having high standards in teaching means making yourself a better teacher, naturally resulting in a high completion rate and pass rate? Low completion rate means there's gaps in your teaching. Yes, there's gaps in everybody's teaching, and it's our job to fill the gaps...
That said, you're correct about the problem of "admissions policy" -- Coursera has no model for course progression, and "open access" doesn't need to mean "access to everything", but rather "access to everything at your level"....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"If you always shoot, you're a freaking ball/puck hog with no concept of team play." - Canadian proverb
I'm being serious here: we're wasting valuable resources trying to keep mediocre people from entirely failing, only for them to get mediocre grades that barely give them their diploma so that they can go on to be mediocre employees with brains so numbed and dull that they're basically automata. If we let them fail (yes, letting people fail, the horror!) early on, it could act as a wake up call.
Except it wouldn't: it would act as a "you're useless" call. The problem we have is not that students are "mediocre", it is that our teaching is massively suboptimal. Poor teaching turns people off learning. The challenge is for the teachers to improve in order to capture the students being failed by the system.
Unfortunately, this is extraordinarily difficult to do, and it also presents us teachers with the uncomfortable reality that we're not as good as we like to think we are. This leads us to protect our egos by dumbing down the exams rather than smartening up the exams. And most of us start out aware of this problem, but slowly convince ourselves we're doing a good job, and it's the students' fault....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
We mechanical engineers called those "Baby Statics" :) They actually taught a subset of sum(F)=sum(m*a) to the civil engineers that got rid of all that useless m and a business. All forces summed to zero, and that's how they liked it!
No judgement on you, though. My EE knowledge goes just about far enough to remember V=I*R, and my greatest software achievements have manifested themselves in MS Excel VBA scripts!
Congrats to you for expanding your knowledge and stepping into the messy world of physics!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
Hi Nemyst,
I love this question and I appreciate your forwardness and honesty in asking it.
The problem with "lazy, complacent, and dull-minded people" just being left to their own devices is that we assume that they are also kind and want for little. But then there's strain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_theory_%28sociology%29).
Strain theory suggest (rather aptly) that people who want (or feel they deserve) more than to what they have legitimate access will find illegitimate means to obtain their wants. When you have a nation full of people who are trained from day one to consume more and more and to seek out luxury, but are not given the necessary requirements to *earn* that luxury through appropriate means, they will (and do) turn to crime.
Your standard education curriculum seeks to change both the goals and the means to achieve those goals by teaching that you don't need a life of luxury to be happy (via ethics, philosophy, history, literature, etc.) and to provide the usable life and career skills to not need to turn to crime.
In short, we can't just let the happily uneducated stay uneducated because they will not be able to contribute enough to their own well-being via legitimate means and will thus ruin it further for us all.
To speak to another point you make ("We're wasting valuable resources trying to keep mediocre people from entirely failing..."), I don't think we're allocating *enough* resources. But I'm not talking about raw cash, electronics, or amazing new buildings. The most important and long lasting investment you can make in beneficially affect low-performing students is to have a fantastic person in front of the classroom.
In California, there are thousands and thousands of these fantastic educators dying to get into the classrooms, but the state and districts are either severely underfunded or the money isn't being spent as well as it should. Moreover, the cost of becoming a teacher is insane. Let's just take a look at someone who, in high school, seeks to become a great teacher:
(1) Do well in school.
(2) Apply to 4-year universities. ($45/application. Assume 6 schools.)
(3) Graduate from 4-year university ($120,000)
(4) Take GRE ($185), CBEST ($40), CSET ($140)
(5) Apply to Masters/Credential Programs ($60/application. Assume 4 programs)
(6) Graduate from MS/Cred program ($40,000), Receive Preliminary Credential.
(7) Apply to school districts/schools. Wait. Wait more. Travel expenses for interviews ($?)
(8) Get hired, non-tenure track, work for 3 years on-and-off depending on June-Layoffs
(9) Enroll in Professional Teacher Instruction Program, take more classes over a year. ($50 application fee, variable tuition)
(10) Complete "Clear" Credential from PTIP.
So... if someone wants to become the teacher that low-income, low-hope students need, s/he would have to spend/in-debt over $200,000 for investing in the *right* to make that change. When your average teacher in California gets paid $35,000/year for the first few years and slowly trudge up to $45,000 without job security, without pension security, and with a for-profit industry doing everything it can to reduce the amount of respect that a teacher receives, it's a pretty hard sell.
I know this stuff because I got to step (5), completely willing to accept the rest with a smile on my face. But then the recession hit and I just couldn't drag my partner through the rest of the steps without any realistic expectation of stability. I took an offer to pursue a secondary passion and am making more than a 10-year veteran teacher would be making after only 2 years on the job.
Surely having high standards in teaching means making yourself a better teacher, naturally resulting in a high completion rate and pass rate? Low completion rate means there's gaps in your teaching. Yes, there's gaps in everybody's teaching, and it's our job to fill the gaps...
Many courses have prerequisites and/or require a certain ability or talent. Not everyone will have the require prerequisites, ability and talent. Even good teaching can't overcome a lack of all of these.
Having easy access means that people can have a go, even if it looks, on paper, that they aren't qualified for the particular course. What matters is that they think they can do the work, or, at least, they hope they can do the work. The hope educationally is that some will succeed who wouldn't meet standard admissions criteria, and that more people will take the chance who wouldn't if the costs in time (including fitting it in with other responsibilities) and money were much higher.
My view is that we want to lower the risks to the students and the folks offering the courses while retaining very high standards.
Best wishes,
Bob
I am addicted to MOOC's. I took the first Stanford ones, am still doing edX and Coursera.I come from a developing country and cannot afford a US education which I have always aspired.For someone like me the exposure to such high class learning at no cost is a gift. Yes I don't do homework or exams for all due to time constraints. I pick and choose based on the quality of teaching and hours needed.
MOOC students are even less tolerant than classroom guys on bad teaching and coverage as they have the luxury of dropping out and slamming the course with no loss.And the dedication and discipline is self-driven and harder because you have nothing to lose.The interest is real here not for a college-degree or a career.
Well here's a suggestion, then. Have students tick to self-certify "prerequisites", then have two pass rates, one for those who meet the prerequisites, one for those who don't.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'