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How MOOC Faculty Exploit People's Desire To Learn
RichDiesal writes "Just as businesses try to make something off of massively online open courses (MOOCs), so do the faculty running them. But instead of seeking money, MOOC faculty seek something far more valuable: a cheap source of data for social science research. Unfortunately, the rights of research participants are sometimes ignored in MOOCs, and successful completion of courses are sometimes held hostage in exchange for mandatory participation in research, as in this case study of a Coursera MOOC. Such behavior is not tolerated in "real" college courses, so why is it tolerated in MOOCs taught by the same faculty?"
Sounds like somebody has an axe to grind
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
If it was a real experiment, they'd have to have an ethics review and all the details of the research would have to be disclosed to the participants. Since this is not happening, any data derived from the MOOC "research" is not ethically sound, probably completely invalid from a social science perspective, and should probably get Coursera in trouble with certain academic circles.
I recall that in Psych 101 at my university in order to pass one had to do a certain number of hours of "research study participation". This entailed going to an office in the psych building and being a psych subject in some grad student's experiment. I don't remember anyone complaining too much about this.
It's tolerated for the same reason "free" services such as those provided by Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and most any other important social media company display ads and do data mining on visitor and subscriber behavior. The research being conducted with the data collected in MOOCs is one of the most socially valuable results possible since it leads directly to better education for the world. As Andrew Ng has stated plainly, his primary concern in participating in Coursera is delivering the best education possible to the world's poorest people. Coursera A/B tests most every aspect of the student learning experience and makes decisions based on what results in the best student learning outcome. Exactly what better system are you proposing?
> To facilitate a 50,000:1 teacher-student ratio, they rely on an instructional model requiring minimal instructor involvement, potentially to the detriment of learners
There are lots of services that one gets from the government which come with all sorts of catchs. Obviously you never read your student bullitin and talked to people who were expelled. What right did Brown University have in expelling Amy Carter?
Actually researchers are required by state laws and university guidelines to follow research consent laws regardless of whether they are done via the university or not. In this case however, the issue is blurred because it depends what the researcher is doing. The line between research using aggregated data and using platform BI tools to benchmark effectiveness are related things but different. It may not be easy to draw the lines as easily as before because data is used for everything now.
It's also the same as a face to face course. When I teach a course I use student responses and feedback to improve the course the next time I teach it. While some of the feedback is voluntary, end of course questionnaires some of it is me looking at student responses to e.g. assignments and rewording questions to avoid common misinterpretations or looking at exam answers and adding or changing assignment questions to make students focus on concepts a large number had problems with.
This is how teaching has worked since it first began Each year's students are benefiting from the data provided by the previous years. The only difference with a MOOC is that this is more quantified which is has to be given the size of the enrolment. So long as the data is used to improve the teaching of the course then I don't see an issue because this is what teachers do innately (although you do need special, voluntary permission as well as ethics oversight if you wish to make any results public).
However if the data is going to be used for non-teaching purposes e.g. to make more effective ads, then this needs to be made crystal clear to students before they sign up for the course so they know what is going on and what the price for a "free" course is. While this sort of thing would not be tolerated in a course that you pay for in a "free" course, so long as consent is informed and up front, what's the problem?
Fuck with their data. Give them false answers and rub it in.
I almost never answer online marketing surveys truthfully, particularly when they are required for something they shouldn't be required for. It should be no different when academia does it.
Sounds like somebody has an axe to grind
He writes and sells books - http://www.amazon.com/Step-Step-Introduction-Statistics-Business/dp/1446208214
MOOC's bypass the need for the books he sells.
Most MOOCs I've taken had a suggested reading list and many of the books are ones like his.
In other words, MOOCs are an AWESOME way for promoting your book.
I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that a MOOC is going to be an inferior experience to a physical lecture and TA-led study sessions.
The TAs I had were mostly grad students from Third World countries (with barely understandable English) who were exhausted from overwork and had a huge chip on their shoulder. I got the impression they thought of me as some rich entitled American who didn't know what hard work was.
Going to a brick and mortar univerrsity will cost you tens of thousands of dollars. How much do MOOCs cost you? Most likely the cost is zero.
As someone who needed to spend years crawling out of my university debt, you would need to use an electron microscope to see the size of the violin I'm playing right now.
Nothing in this world comes for free, nor should it. If you don't like it, then do without, you bloody self-entitled cheepskates.
If they "force" you to participate in a study, simply give them garbage results. Choose options at random without reading the question. Deliberately choose false/wrong statements. Do whatever you can to ruin their data-set.
From the article: Instead of paying new employees during an onboarding and training period, business can now require employees to take a “free course” before paying them a dime.
The next step is when companies start suggesting the problems they would like to have solved for course credit. The course is "free" to the participant,but somebody is paying the bills, and that somebody expects to get something of value.
From the original post: "Such behavior is not tolerated in "real" college courses, so why is it tolerated in MOOCs taught by the same faculty?"
TFA answers the question quite nicely: "Despite a couple of years of discussion, the question of monetization remains largely unresolved. MOOCs are about as popular as they were, they still drain resources from the companies hosting them, and they still don’t provide much to those hosts in return." Good or bad, it's an attempt to try to get something useful in return for the effort it takes to create a MOOC course. It's as simple as that, and there's no reason to read anything more sinister into it.
And let's not hyperbolically describe this as "holding the users hostage," okay? Users are free to leave the course whenever they want -- hostage situations don't usually work that way.
Didn't someone point out that if you're getting something for free, you probably are the product? In the same way that Facebook happily sells your personal information to advertisers, these professors use your information for their own benefit. If you get something for (nothing | less than full price) it's probably in exchange for something else.
Quid pro quo Clarice!!!
"...successful completion of courses are sometimes held hostage in exchange for mandatory participation in research, as in this case study of a Coursera MOOC. Such behavior is not tolerated in 'real' college courses..."
Signing up for one or more experiments was a requirement of every undergrad psych class I took.
the cheap ones say no data cap and some do slowdown after X data use.
free course is better then a high cost theory based degree with big skill gaps.
No it isn't. Skills become obsolete in a year. Theory never does.
but that Theory can also be part of skills based plan that does 4 years of pure class room. Why not have an apprenticeship system?
Why not have an apprenticeship system?
It's called co-op.
And it is quite common.
I just finished my 10th MOOC through Coursera https://class.coursera.org/. They have all been great. I'm just completing a course: Søren Kierkegaard - Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. The lectures are done at different locations, even traveling to Germany. Experts on the subject are interviewed. Discussions boards are in several languages and are moderated by grad students. Mostly high level discourse.
I have an economics course coming up in Feb. The university sponsoring it is Yale and the professor was just awarded the Nobel prize!
I live in a university town and I have free access to audit classes, but I don't think I will. Yes. This is a disruptive technology.
Shit don't fly on ethics boards.
Really? My impression was that it's extremely common to require patients/subjects to give up privacy in exchange for cutting edge medical treatments. Typically, the cutting edge treatment is part of some research study and in order to participate you have to agree to let the investigator publish the results of the experiment.
For example, if you've got a rare genetic disorder, the costs of sequencing your genome are now in the ballpark of a few thousand dollars (an even thousand for only exome sequencing but up above five thousand for full genome). But, for anything beyond a simple known disease variant that gets identified in the basic analysis pipeline, you're going to need a PhD to spend some serious time looking at your data. And the price of that is privacy - letting the PhD publish your results.
Thing is, IRBs are totally fine with this practice. Which raises the question of whether IRBs are realy about protecting the patient or whether they're about covering institutional behinds from lawsuits and embarrassment - which isn't quite the same thing (e.g. if you force the patients/subjects to sign away their rights then that protects against lawsuits).
Horrible story text.
I'm wasn't aware that universities had an existing policy in effect protecting non-tuititive students from forced enrolment of their metadata in minor research programs.
Doesn't he have somewhere else to troll?
Privacy isn't the issue, it is the consensual waiver of privacy that is the important part.
TINSTAAFL
Privacy isn't the issue, it is the consensual waiver of privacy that is the important part.
But is it really consensual? With respect to rare genetic disorders, there are certain specific disorders where eating the right thing (or not eating the wrong thing) makes the difference between dying in infancy and living out a normal life. So, oversimplifying a bit, the choice is along the lines of "Give up your privacy or watch your baby die." As far as the IRB is concerned, though, as long as the privacy was given up in advance with iron-clad legalese then it's all fine and ethical.
Y'know, I was wondering which was going to win out- /.'s general disdain for Formal Education vs. /.'s worship of technology. Looks like MOOCs have been around long enough for /.ers to start thinking about them like the rest of Formal Education.
/. will break in it's next article on MOOCs (my money's on "back to mindless adoration").
If anyone's interested, we could probably find some open source software to run a betting pool on how
I took that first Thrun/Norvig pre-Udacity AI course. I have been taking one or two Udacity or Coursera courses per season since they started up. Before any of this, I was watching Stanford courses on iTunesU. Sometimes I complete the course. Sometimes I don't. But I almost always get something out of the courses. I am a mid-senior software engineer, but I still have plenty to learn.
I have never been the kind of student who approached the professor outside of class, so I think that MOOCs are fine (I barely even use the MOOC forums.) Most of the problems that I have found with the MOOCs could have just as easily been a problem with an in-person course.
For example, I recently took a Coursera Social Psychology course. It started off very interesting, but, about halfway through, it seemed clear to me that the lecturer had an agenda and the course veered into promoting the agenda (plus a little "help me refine some psychology software that I have been developing") over education on the topics. Since I was more than halfway through I finished watching all of the lectures, but found myself rolling my eyes more and more frequently. But, I have seen that kind of thing in in-person courses, as has my perpetual grad student brother.
I have applied for the Udacity/GATech Online Master of CS program. If I get in, since I will be paying money, I will take it more seriously than I have the other MOOCs that I have taken.
I have surveyed several coursera courses and completed a couple. Being a Comp Sci, telecoms professional, I derived tremendous value from Coursera material related to these disciplines. Only cost is my time. The video lectures are gold. Most classes that I've seen are project based. Learning is doing. In general, I've found that course difficulty usually floats somewhere between college senior and first year grad student. Some are just insanely hard. One has to accept that one bit of important material is missing, proofs. Just no way to auto-grade them, in general. I haven't seen anything to complain about.
The research being conducted with the data collected in MOOCs is one of the most socially valuable results possible since it leads directly to better education for the world.
This scans like marketing newspeak. Astroturf?
Da Blog
They publish without using the patients actual name. Subject A or parient A etc...
It is unusual for the patients name to be used.
Nothing in life is absolutely 'free' without some cost somewhere. Grow up and get used to it...
Students can fake the results in the research surveys to corrupt the statistical information then publish the fact that a portion of the individuals in the survey's are falsifying the information.
Research becomes invalidated because there is zero confidence in the results.
Presumably, they want to publish a paper based on the data they collect. Presumably, their educational institution has some form of Institutional Review Board, which is required by federal law for anything using human experimentation. This applies even if its something as banal as handing out a survey. Yes, the IRB might have rubber stamped the application, but still, there should be filings, etc.
Has someone asked?
..then you aren't the customer, you're the product. It's the rule of the internet.
This is certainly allowed in college courses and is how I get the bulk of the subjects for my own research.
Below is a response I posted on the original article. It is awaiting moderation, so I thought I'd include it here as well.
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Let me preface my post by saying that I’m a staff member for this course, though my comments and views here are my own and not those of the institution or faculty.
First, I’d like to say that I don’t take issue with most of your points. You claim to be an authority in your field, one directly related to the issues MOOCs are working to solve, and I do not have counter points to your claims about pedagogy. But, I do have problems with your inferences that the course is manipulative, or more specifically (and negatively), “manipulative”.
The faculty faced many issues in producing and running this course, but one significant challenge with this MOOC should not be disregarded: they are making claims against methods of learning that MOOCs themselves traditionally employ, but the platform and learning framework available with Coursera, as well as the course’s massive reach and need for ubiquitous, common technology negated the use of more novel approaches to teaching and learning—approaches more in line with the content being covered. Their response was to do away with traditional quizzes entirely, and let activities and discussion take their place, with live research as a significant component. You and your colleagues comments are representative of this, and show that some students still dislike participating as research participants in an academic course. Thousands of others had no issue, and completed every assignment in the course. For every comment condemning the course, there were several praising and thanking the faculty for providing it.
Some people do not like being used as research participants. That’s perfectly fine, and the course made it apparent from Day 1 that research was a core outcome of the course for the faculty and that continued participation implied the student’s acceptance of this. Please understand that research is a driving force behind much of a modern academic institution’s focus, and serves to support cutting-edge teaching and learning. FWIW, UW is a globally top-ranked research institution (http://www.wisc.edu/research/), and as a former student I know I’ve personally benefited from that research activity.
One final point. This course was provided free (in economic cost terms) to all students, though you can imaging the cost to produce it (economic, opportunity, etc.) was enormous. MOOCs are evolving at a very rapid pace, not only in their design and method of delivery, but also in their value to the institutions (for profit and not) that provide and benefit from them. I tend to believe that they are moving to encourage learning without promoting silos of domain experience, and to encourage learners of all backgrounds to broaden horizons and look for interesting applications of this knowledge across domains. I expect that, as they improve there will be better distinction between courses that have a partial research intent and those that do not, and students can self-select accordingly as they see fit.
I do hope you conduct your own MOOC. Perhaps then you’ll see what a challenge it can be to meet everyone’s desires for something provided free. Or, maybe you’ll produce the “one true way” that we can all learn and benefit from. One can only hope