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The MOOC Revolution That Wasn't
An anonymous reader writes: Dan Friedman at TechCrunch is ready to call Massive Open Online Courses a failure. Originally hailed as a revolution in learning, MOOCs have seen disappointing course completion numbers. Coursera and Udacity, two of the most prominent online learning hubs, have seen about 8 million enrollments in the past few years. Unfortunately, half of those students didn't even watch a single lecture, and only a few hundred thousand completed the course they signed up for.
Friedman says, "[N]ew technologies enable methods of "learn by doing" that just weren't possible before we could deliver immersive experiences to people's laptops and phones. In the 1960's, Jerome Bruner expanded an educational theory known as constructivism with the idea that students should learn through inquiry under the guidance of a teacher to grasp complex ideas intuitively. That process of trial, failure, and then being shown the correct path has been proven to drive student motivation and retention of learning. What we don't yet know is if that process of trial and failure can become 10x more engaging when delivered through a new medium such as Minecraft or Oculus. ... These new immersive worlds promise to hold the attention of students in ways textbooks never could."
Friedman says, "[N]ew technologies enable methods of "learn by doing" that just weren't possible before we could deliver immersive experiences to people's laptops and phones. In the 1960's, Jerome Bruner expanded an educational theory known as constructivism with the idea that students should learn through inquiry under the guidance of a teacher to grasp complex ideas intuitively. That process of trial, failure, and then being shown the correct path has been proven to drive student motivation and retention of learning. What we don't yet know is if that process of trial and failure can become 10x more engaging when delivered through a new medium such as Minecraft or Oculus. ... These new immersive worlds promise to hold the attention of students in ways textbooks never could."
From TFA:
Having the full attention of an instructor accelerates an individual’s learning by focusing them on the right problems at the right times, and having a real relationship with one person provides students with accountability. At Thinkful, we see a spike in learning the day before students have sessions with their mentors. Students want to achieve more because of their relationship, and that motivation translates to more efficient learning. We’re now working to apply that same social pressure throughout the week to bring up overall learning time further.
In other words, our competitors in the online space have been doing it wrong. But we've come up with something so New and Improved, we don't call it MOOC. Whether you're an angel investor or just want to learn some new stuff, you owe it to yourself to check us out today.
For the record, correspondence courses have been around since 1892. But somehow MOOCs are "disruptive" (have classrooms and disruption ever gone well together?). Here's a quotation from Wikipedia to add context:
In the United States William Rainey Harper, first president of the University of Chicago, developed the concept of extended education, whereby the research university had satellite colleges of education in the wider community. In 1892 he also encouraged the concept of correspondence school courses to further promote education, an idea that was put into practice by Columbia University.[12][13] Enrollment in the largest private for-profit school based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the International Correspondence Schools grew explosively in the 1890s. Originally founded in 1888 to provide training for immigrant coal miners aiming to become state mine inspectors or foremen, it enrolled 2500 new students in 1894 and matriculated 72,000 new students in 1895. By 1906 total enrollments reached 900,000. The growth was due to sending out complete textbooks instead of single lessons, and the use of 1200 aggressive in-person salesmen.[14][15] There was a stark contrast in pedagogy:
The regular technical school or college aims to educate a man broadly; our aim, on the contrary, is to educate him only along some particular line. The college demands that a student shall have certain educational qualifications to enter it, and that all students study for approximately the same length of time, and when they have finished their courses they are supposed to be qualified to enter any one of a number of branches in some particular profession. We, on the contrary, are aiming to make our courses fit the particular needs of the student who takes them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The eye is bigger than the stomach. That is certainly part of the MOOC "failure". However, I don't consider it a failure. They have hundreds of thousands of students that finished a course. Is that failure? In comparison to the 8 million enrollments perhaps, but in comparison to the zero that would have done the course without MOOC, it isn't. I did a course. Followed all classes, didn't bother to get a grade or certificate, because (a) I couldn't put in the effort in the single week there was to do the project, (b) I didn't care about the certificate. It was just to learn something new. And I'm grateful to coursera that they offered this possibility.
The same thing that happened to the 1950's and 1960's era dream of delivering education by television,
So, you never heard of the Open University?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I have this problem as well with not just online courses but several video "tutorials". It's been numerous times recently that I've googled for for "how do I ...." and the top results have been videos. I typically have some idea on how to do what I'm looking for, and I just need to verify some details. So now, Instead of quickly skimming a text (or even a slideset) to find the exact bits I'm looking for, I have to try to fast-forward a video to a point where it gets interesting.
This is especially problematic when you are just looking at a talking head droning on, or just a video of someone doing stuff with an application. One exception has been when I wanted to cut down a tree in my back yard. There was no danger to surroundings since the house wasn't anywhere close by, so I figured I could just cut it down myself. In this case, the videos on how to use a chainsaw helped a lot, since it showed actually *stuff happening*, not just a talking head.
If these video lectures would even have transcripts, that would increase their usability tremendously. Considering that youtube is now offering closed captions created with voice recognition, such transcripts could perhaps be generated automatically soon...
As a counter example I've signed up for 6 and completed 4 (Machine Learning, Mobile Robotics, Cryptography I, and Introductory Python Programming). Granted a couple of those I only partially completed the first time and went back and took again due to time constraints. I think the whole article is based on a false metric (percent sign up vs complete). Here's the real metric, which is cost/student to successfully enable a student solve problems as required by an employer. I think the book is out on this one, but having interviewed 100's of engineers and made about 100 hiring decisions over a 25 year career, I certainly would not care how someone learned to do the work, and if you can answer all the technical questions I have on a subject that's good enough for me. If you have to rely on a accreditation to know if someone can do a job for you I think your career working as an engineering manager will be brief. I've used remote learning based on other methods (itunes U, MIT open courseware, and even back in the day grad courses on remote sites via closed circuit tv). With the exception of closed circuit TV, a good MOOC course is much better than the other forms because you get early feedback on where you are missing material. I looked at the paper in the article noting that the "non matriculated" classes are less effective than the "matriculated" classes. No duh. But the point is the non matriculated classes are free, or very close to it. You just need to be motivated. I looked at the guys website (thinkful), I have to applaud the fact that they are trying a startup to teach people, but the fact that they want $300 a month for the service and the way mentor's are hired makes it look a little like a multi level marketing scheme. The advantage of Moocs is they scale up and it doesn't matter if the class has 10 students or 100,000. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems nobody ever "mentored" me in engineering school. I went to lecture, read the books, did the homework and took the exams. The only difference I see with Mooc's is a computer is doing most of the work that was done by the Professor and TA's and no partial credit on exams.