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San Jose State Suspends Collaboration With Udacity
New submitter ulatekh writes "San Jose State University is suspending a highly touted collaboration with online provider Udacity to offer low-cost, for-credit online courses after finding that more than half of the students failed to pass the classes. 'Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44% in remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses. In a somewhat more promising outcome, 83% of students completed the classes.'"
In a somewhat more promising outcome, 83% of students completed the classes.
And 100% of students successfully signed up for the program.
I went back and finished my associates, graduating this past December. If there's one thing I observed, it's that a lot of people passed classes who really shouldn't have. Thanks to treating professors' pass rates as a measure of success, following a syllabus is all you really have to do to pass these days. If online students weren't even putting in that kind of effort, there's nothing an instructor can do for them.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Well duh, but seeing as how in many areas an 83% completion rate for a high school grade would be considered excellent, I can see why they consider it a positive sign.
The 20-44% pass rates though, are pretty bad. For any cost-benefit analysis I'd want to know:
1. How much the courses cost per course per student
2. Where the students started knowledge wise, and where they ended, on average. Were they barely falling short?
3. How much time the students had to invest in the course(another expense).
Still I like the article, it mentions that their trial, while not particularly successful, did give them many areas to investigate for improvement.
I don't read AC A human right
It means the classes were actually properly graded and mean something. If you are passing 80% of folks you are likely teaching no one anything.
In any online effort, you are going to get a ton of people who sign up, some that follow along the first few weeks, and then a significant dropoff as people move on to other things.
You cannot apply in-person success rates to online efforts.
Perhaps what they need to do is organize the classes around micro-classes no longer than two weeks. That way they wouldn't get people just dropping off the grid and actually finishing classes... you could string together a series of such classes to make a whole course. It would also let people jump in at the level they felt comfortable at and not bored.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Woah, your user numbers have all the same numbers.
From TFS
remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses
No. It's not on topic; these are all math courses.
MS-specific courses wouldn't even be barely on topic for an IT education.
Also; if anybody with an open-source-inspired name starts first-posting with links to MS sites; check their posting history and see if they've ever posted anything non-MS-related, often you'll find they won't. Lately every first post on slashdot seems to somehow relate whatever TFA is about to some random MS link.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Who modded this post offtopic? It's perfectly on topic, the discussion is about online learning courses.
Because there's no "-1, Shill" mod option?
I completed a course through Coursera from the University of Toronto. It was a good course, and I enjoyed it. Learned a lot from the course. In the final week of the course (it wasn't a free-for-all - I had to register for the course and complete it, with tests every week, during and eight week period set but the U of Toronoto), there was an exam that would make up 50 percent of my total grade. Coursera completely fell over that final week, and I wasn't able to gain access to the test until two days after the course deadline. So there went an otherwise good grade. They wouldn't allow any tests to be taken after the deadline, regardless of technical issues.
I had spent a total of around 40-45 hours with the course, 20 of those hours were video lectures that needed to be watched, the rest was study time. Even though all I would get from the course was a certificate of completion, I felt cheated and like I'd wasted a lot of my time for what was otherwise a good course.
Would I take another course? Maybe, but I know that if I were studying for transferable college credit, I would have been seriously pissed.
I wonder how much of the non-pass rate was due to issues other than actual class material in Udacity's case.
Reading between the lines, my guess is that many students thought an online course "inferior" to regular classes, and therefore okay to slack off when doing. Time, however, or time management, may be more the enemy than actual course matter.
I know a high school student who takes online school courses, and one of the ongoing problems for the parents is getting the student to understand that there are X modules to do and only Y days to do them in. Dividing X by Y means that every two or three days something must be completed and sent in for marking. If this requirement is difficult for a high school student to follow without parental hectoring, then it is entirely understandable that kids only a couple years older, who no longer have their parents to help keep them on track, are going to run into problems.
Online courses are the collegiate equivalent of independent study programs. Independent study programs are definitely not for everyone.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The main reason SJSU (and other schools) are looking at Udacity and its like, is to be able to spend less time and resources on remedial courses for incoming students (the California State Univ system is basically the entry-level university for the state). If Udacity could ensure that a majority of these students pass those courses, then SJSU can focus its efforts on "real" university material.
They seem to have fallen down on that deliverable, so SJSU really has no option but to toss them, and go back to teaching those remedial courses in person.
Really, this is quite an undesirable outcome for all sides (students, the university, and Udacity). Most of the students involved in remedial courses are those who have already failed at learning (enough) in a hands-on setting (school). Udacity's job was cut out for them - to do better than hands-on teaching, with students that are significantly harder to teach. So not too surprising in this context..
The comment ID numbers are transpositions of each other, too. WTF?
They should be happy about 20%+ pass rate, after all the cost of providing the teaching vehicle asymptotically approaches zero.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make them think.... or do the homework.
It's not that simple... the story is that getting students into class, etc... i.e. the more traditional educational approaches, leads to more students doing the work required to learn something.
I often see people bashing about how universities are expensive, and we should all drop out and just follow online courses... i.e. Learn it on our own...
But this clearly shows that showing up for class, discussion with others and having supervisors expecting things from you is very important.
Obviously, it should come as no surprise that educating your self, versus showing up for class, that ladder options is easiest and, thus, most likely to succeed.
Luckily, I'm from a country where education is free... In fact, my living expenses were more or less covered, during the 5 years I just spend taking an MSc in CS.
40 years ago or so, I taught those same remedial classes to freshmen students at a large Midwestern land-grant 4-year university. The only reason my pass rate was higher than 44% was because I felt sorry for the kids. I was then, and am now still considered a good instructor. Most of those students had no business being in college in the first place, and I could tell that few if any would finish regardless of how I graded them. Remember, these are students who were unable to pass the basic requirements coming out of high school. Not representative of the population as a whole. I suspect the "online-edness" of these classes has very little to do with it.
.nosig
I sign up for Coursera courses willy nilly. Then I let my schedule at the time the course starts dictate my participation; that along with the apparent quality of the course. So my completion/pass rate is abysmal. Most of the courses I withdraw from look awesome but through no fault of the course it is bye bye for me. Then there is the annoying situation where two awesome but time consuming courses start at the same time. So again through no fault of the course designers it is bye bye.
Now if I had paid good money and was going to attend a bricks and mortar school course with a very fixed schedule I would make sure to schedule around that.
So my guess is that this school was spooked by numbers that didn't match up with their existing medium of bums in seats. I also wonder if there are "metrics" that would then make this online course look like a complete dud. I could see a university looking at completion and withdrawal numbers to compare one professor to another. I suspect that the crappy professors just stand out statistically when compared to other professors. So this course may have statistically looked like a professor who would pee on the front row and throw feces at the student out of splashing distance all the while screaming that they can all pick up their F's at the end of class.
Why they wouldn't look at this as an experiment and let it ride for a while? Basically try it, tweak it, try it, tweak it.
The other thing that probably killed this course was how much it freaked out the non-researching teaching-only professors.
My experience with university is that many of the courses are glorified highschool courses with glorified highschool teachers. But then hidden here and there are researchers on the prowl for students who have a future at the graduate levels. More online courses will make the distinction that much clearer when the glorified highschool teachers are basically demoted to online TAs while the real researchers are given the recognition that they are something different; mentors and researchers.
I took the remedial math class (not for credit) and thought it was fine. Not a fluff class but not super difficult. I find Udacity classes to be more interactive and engaging than some other MOOCs. There was also plenty of help available in the forums if you need it. There may be some fine tuning of the course content that can be done but it doesn't seem to me that it was shoddy. Maybe they'll find that remedial students are not good candidates for completely online classes? Maybe some of them benefit more than other students from interaction with a teacher? Maybe a self discipline problem? How did all the people who took it voluntarily, free, not for credit do? Was there a difference and why? Compare it with students in the edX hybrid class experiment? Lots of questions to answer and I hope they interview the students, especially the unsuccessful ones, for their thoughts. I have heard depressing stats before about students struggling with remedial math and also low chances of completing a degree even once they get past such a class. Even so, if the Udacity class can't be adjusted to produce better results than traditional methods then it will have to be considered an experiment that didn't work.
I was amused when a medical school professor made a gushing presentation about MOOCs. Then a U of Phoenix professor from the audience, one of those for-profit school, said we've known about issues X,Y,Z for a LONG time. And this is how we solved them. You may have gripes about the business model of for-profit schools. But many of these MOOC startups. But they are arrogantly re-inventing the wheel.
The good news is however, when done correcting online/MOOCs can been useful.