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Are High MOOC Failure Rates a Bug Or a Feature?
theodp writes "In 'The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course,' NPR's Eric Westervelt reports that 2013 might be dubbed the year that online education fell back to earth. Westervelt joins others in citing the higher failure rate of online students as evidence that MOOCs aren't all they're cracked up to be. But viewed another way, the ability to try and fail without dire debt or academic consequences that's afforded by MOOCs could be viewed as a feature and not a bug. Being able to learn at one's own pace is what Dr. Yung Tae Kim has long argued is something STEM education sorely lacks, and MOOCs make it feasible to allow students to try-try-again if at first they don't succeed. By the way, if you couldn't scrape together $65,000 to take CS50 in-person at Harvard this year, today's the first day of look-Ma-no-tuition CS50x (review), kids!"
Really weird.
If you want a higher education system where people can just show and shine without going through the rigamarole (ie: completing High School, testing, admission, paying $20k, etc.) then a lot of people will try. Since that rigamarole is actually useful in determining who would be a good student a lot of them will be bad students. They won't be prepared to do homework, they will have other time commitments, they'll turn out to be pretty damn smart (say IQ 120), but not as smart as they thought (IQ 130), etc.
But apparently everyone actually in higher ed assumes that some guy works 60 hours a week, should pass at exactly the same rate as the kid who managed to get a 4.0 from all his teachers in high school and spends all his time on Academics.
But apparently everyone actually in higher ed assumes that some guy works 60 hours a week, should pass at exactly the same rate as the kid who managed to get a 4.0 from all his teachers in high school and spends all his time on Academics.
I think that's it exactly. I have tried a few of these MOOC classes on a couple different websites (I am primarily a teacher, so not only do I like learning new things and refreshing myself, but I also enjoy seeing different teaching styles to try to integrate into my own).
I have taken a few that were very delightful -- it seems some of the computer science theory classes are the best MOOCs, possibly because they are the most used to working with computers and through the internet?
But many treat the online MOOCs EXACTLY as they would a university course. I have an interest in physics and engineering, for example, so I signed up for a class about photovoltaics, hoping to learn enough to maybe make better decisions in the future about a PV system for my house. Instead, what I got was a few rambly lectures about how photovoltaics are the future, and then straight into a homework assignment requiring some calculations and formulas never elucidated anywhere in the material. Luckily I am comfortable with integrals and was able to complete the first assignment, but I simply gave up after this as it was not a good first impression. Perhaps it was better in later weeks? Who knows. And I think this is the point -- the Lecture-then-let-the-students-struggle-to-solve-homework-problems-never-discussed-in-class model is INCREDIBLY frustrating to begin with, but then to do it completely online without much of a place to turn to? (No solid connections with students or faculty). Its a model for disaster.
MOOCs I think can succeed, but only if we actually take the opportunity to re-think how we present knowledge and check understanding. The university system is, IMHO, beginning to unravel and show itself as not being sustainable. Simply thinking universities can continue on exactly as-is but "in the cloud" is stupid, and this is why many MOOCs are failing to keep their students.
... and hence it cannot "drift off course". Leaning is hard. Teaching is hard. The actual delivery method is mostly immaterial, "online" courses are not better than well-written textbooks. There is no space for "automation" here. What is better is face-to-face teaching by a really talented teacher, studying with like-minded other students, etc., but that is a thing that most of the proponents of online teaching do not understand. Knowing a few of them, my guess would be that they are pretty bad at face-to-face teaching as well.
As such, all this online teaching nonsense is basically hurting education, because it offers dysfunctional "alternatives" with a lot of hype surrounding them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What an abhorrently overly simplistic question. Really? MOOCs provide an abundance of value to the curious mind. Many participants, I assume, are very much like me. They occasionally complete an entire course, but only sample sections of most. I'd much rather watch a great set of lectures on neural networks during my down time than watch the crap that passes for entertainment on broadcast and cable television. Moreover, experimentation in format and content delivery will most certainly transform more formal education services for the better. Rock on MOOCs and those who love them.