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?"

Comments

Because MOOCs aren't experiments

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Quid Pro Quo

[james.paul.white]

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?

Re:that's lot of lazy teachers

[Immerman]

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. On the other hand it's drastically better than the "no education" you could alternately get for the same price. And if you have an axe to grind against 50,000:1 ratios, are you volunteering to teach at more reasonable ratio in southern Africa or India at local wages?

As far as the lecture itself goes, frankly I would be surprised if 50,000:1 were notably worse than the 500:1 you sometimes see in intro courses, or even a 50:1 ratio. Once the class is too large for the professor to meaningfully engage with students individually then what does it matter how many extra eyes are watching?. It might even be better given the quantized feedback and sample size, and the fact that you can actually read the "blackboard" comfortably. Not to mention immediately back up and repeat any bits that confuse you.

Re:Sounds . . .

[Mr. Slippery]

Sounds like somebody has an axe to grind

Good. Grind it to a fine edge and cut these fraudulent mofos down. MOOCs in general are 90% scam, nothing more than taking the old idea of a correspondence course and adding the phrase "...on the inernet!", and this one specifically is clearly engaging in unethical behavior:

For example, in Week 4, the assignment was to complete this research study [link to a SurveyGizmo questionnaire about your gaming habits], which was not linked with any learning objectives in that week (at least in any way indicated to students). If you didn't complete the research study, you earned a zero for the assignment. There was no apparent way around it.

In my experience on one of the human subjects review boards at my university, I can tell you emphatically that this would not be considered an ethical course design choice in a real college classroom.

Couldn't disagree more!

[eatvegetables]

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.