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."

Comments

What did they expect?

[TWX]

When it's free, and there's no penalty for failing to participate, and it makes the news as a fad, then this is the expected result, not some outlier.

If anything they should be happy that a few hundred-thousand of the eight million actually completed it; assuming they're around 5% completion that's pretty good for something that there was no obligation to participate in, that required a fairly large amount of time committed that might not have been considered in advance, etc.

It's like an extreme version of the affluenza-type kid that's had everything handed to him going off to college because it's automatic; he does poorly and skips a lot because he has no stake in what happens. His parents pay for everything and he has none of his own cost on the line.

Re:What did they expect?

[CODiNE]

Not only that, they are using completion to rate success. I disagree.

I took the massively parallel computation course online somewhere... It was great, I got a basic understanding of CUDA, compute units, transferring data, running carefully designed and constrained code on it, I learned about memory access issues and ordering data so it can be easily streamed. Etc

To me that was extremely valuable information. I did not complete, stopped about halfway because I didn't need to learn it in depth and I don't plan to specialize in that.

However now I know what kind of data the GPU can process, the basic workflow for doing that and approximately how much time it would take me to get up to speed and make something using that if I needed to.

I feel the course was a success to me, but to them I'm a failure statistic. Perhaps a large percentage of their students are joining classes without the intention of completing them and they need to reevaluate where their value lies to different users.