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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."
The same thing that happened to the 1950's and 1960's era dream of delivering education by television, so that schools would be nothing more than broadcast studios and children could learn comfortably nestled in their suburban homes. People (cue indignant dissent here) like interacting with people, and classrooms, whether university or grammar school, are inherently more suited to most people's personalities and social desires than 1960's television lectures or today's failing MOOCs. Technology can cut corners and increase efficiency ("one prof for 100K students" chant the university accountants), but it can't provide the subtle reinforcements of being in a room with people.
I completed the Stanford AI course, recently did a course in communications from the University of Amsterdam. In both cases, time management was a problem for me, I simply had other things to do, and drifted away... catching back up in the nick of time. Trying to fit distance learning into the regular schedule of campus life seems to be the problem here... it is definitely not the depth of material that is any kind of a stopper.
I think that guided deep dives into topics we would otherwise not understand, is going to be how we keep accumulating knowledge as a species in the future. Deep diving takes time, and unlike the real diving... it doesn't all have to happen in one shot.
On a side note... it is worth at least $20 to me... possibly much more... if someone can give me the deep dive that results in me understanding the Higgs field, and the Higgs particle. A true understanding... not some vague notion of mexican hats and potential.
the people who go to MIT, Harvard and other top schools aren't more intelligent than anyone else, they put the effort in. they study until they are sure they will get an A, do their homework, etc. that's why the schools are selective.
MOOC's take anyone who wakes up one day with dreams of being a top programmer. when it's time to put the work in they go back to their old ways and find reasons why they are too busy to do the work. TV, netflix, going out drinking with the Bro's, gaming
Isn't Sesame Street the original, and most successful, MOOC?
For another point of view ...
This week, Russ Roberts chatted with former Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller about the present and future of online education.
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...
I have signed up for dozens of Coursera classes, but have not taken the complete course even once. The fact that they are free allows me to sign up for a class without even thinking if I have the time to watch a single video. If I watch a single video, and learn a single fact, then it was probably worth it to me. And if 100,000 people sign up and only half watch a single video and only half of them getting anything useful from the video, that was probably worth the time for a professor to create the class.
I have learned to write a parser for a personal SQL engine optimization project. I have learned a great deal of machine learning from a few different classes that I have used in my profession. I have learned interesting material about Economics, Sociology, etc. I could have learned all of this from books, but while I am an avid reader I still feel those lectures helped me learn quicker and probably even gave a more complete level of understanding.
That is worth something to me, and I hope that the professors would feel that it was worth their effort to teach people like me even though I never completed their courses. I hope that as this catches on there will be a big enough market for these professors to get paid well for their effort. I would pay $100 to even $500 for some of these classes, even if I never complete them or get a certificate.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There are a few fundamental issues here and people from both sides of the classroom tend to ignore them. I have some education as a teacher and did actually teach undergraduate and graduate classes at a Uni.
Students are surprised that these courses are often demanding, that there is homework, etc. Hello, these are university level courses, what did you expect? This ain't vacation or World of Warcraft, only with a free diploma at the end.
Teachers are surprised that their classroom-oriented methods don't work when put online. Surprise, recording a lecture on a video, slapping it online and expecting the students to not get bored from the droning and just give up on this is silly. Especially when various extrinsic motivation that keeps students staying put in the auditoriums (like having paid expensive tuition or actually being able to obtain a proper, full degree) is missing. Lectures are boring as hell even when in person, it is probably the worst way to teach/learn. Recording the lecture, removing the personal contact and slapping the thing online only makes it worse. No fancy "e-learning" platforms can fix that fundamentally broken model.
Unfortunately, many unis see the "e-learning", online courses and what not as a great way to save money - no need to pay for so many classes, so many teachers, teachers can spend time doing research instead of teaching, etc. Win-win, right? Wrong!
The technology alone won't make the students learn - the role of the teacher as a facilitator and guide to learning is indispensable. Give students Minecraft (or a tablet or some other technical gimmick) and they will spend 99% of the time fooling around because of the distractions. They need someone to actually show them the relevant bits, explain what is not clear and guide them through the classwork - that is what the teacher is for. Non-interactive video cannot really replace that. While the classic lecture is also horrible from this point of view, the drone at the blackboard can be at least interrupted and asked extra questions. With video this is difficult or outright impossible.
Another crucially important thing for both the student and the teacher is feedback - "Am I doing OK?" "What needs to be improved?" "How to improve it?" If the only "feedback" for the student are automatically marked quizzes or the final mark/score for the course/module, as is often the rule, that really doesn't help them at all - they have perhaps failed the course or received a poor mark already. They need the (formative) feedback while still working!
Also the feedback for the lecturer is important - very often the students don't get anything from the class, because the lecturer mumbles incomprehensibly, is not organized or overloads the students. However, the typical way to collect feedback are some satisfaction questionnaires at the end of the term/module - way too late to fix anything. And now add yet another layer of insulation between the lecturer and the students - the non-interactive videos - and the realistic amount of feedback both sides can expect becomes exactly zero ...
During my teaching I was trying to get away from lecturing as much as I could - which can be surprisingly difficult, with the university administration explicitly expecting you to lecture. Where I could, the classes were focused on discussion, group work and projects. I was even turning the classes completely inside-out - had the students read the classwork from the textbook, do the exercises at home and then the class was spent explaining what wasn't clear or needed more guidance. There is little point in spending class lecturing for hours stuff that the students can read faster and more comfortably in a book. It did work, for the most part - even though the classes I was teaching were "hard" stuff - like programming, basics of computer graphics, introduction to artificial intelligence, image processing. However, do this with an e-learning system that is explicitly structured around lecturing!
I find these onlin
Indeed. The same BS happens over and over again, because these "educators" are even too stupid to know the history of their own field.
A friend of mine was a lecturer at the German distance University (Fernuniversitaet Hagen) for a few years. The had no video-lectures, but made sure that student had local learning groups, could phone the lecturers on problems, and once or twice a year came in for seminars for a week. All this emulating the classroom is nonsense as it ignores that most of the learning is done outside of the classroom.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What's being ignored is centuries of research has found the classroom environment really good for teaching. Books TVs and correspondence courses have all tried to replace it.
The latest whizbang technology isn't always the best answer.
Classrooms will be around until somebody find something that actually is better