The End of College? Not So Fast

An anonymous reader writes: The advent of MOOCs, Khan Academy, and the hundreds of other learning sites that have popped up caused many people to predict the decline of expensive, four-year universities. But Donald Heller writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that most of the people making these claims don't have a good understanding of how actual students are interacting with online classes. He points out that it's a lot easier for a 40-year-old who's in a stable life position, and who has already experienced college-level education to work through an MOOC with ease. But things change when you're asking 18- to 20-year-olds to give up the structure and built-in motivation of a physical university to instead sit at their computer for hours at a time. (The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.) Heller also warns that prematurely hailing MOOCs as a replacement for colleges will only encourage governments and organizations to stop investing in institutions of higher learning, which could have dire consequences for education worldwide.

Comments

Sounds familiar

[paiute]

One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.

Re:Sounds familiar

[ranton]

One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.

Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.

If you learned that in college you are among an elite few college graduates. Even above average college graduates rarely have these abilities unless they already had them before entering college. You seem to describe someone with ten years of experience working in a challenging environment with quality mentors, not a graduating college senior. That isn't to say it is important for most people to get 16 years of education instead of just 12. But most people I have worked with become useful and resourceful in their early 30's, not at the age of 22.

Re:Sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.

Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.

If you learned that in college you are among an elite few college graduates. Even above average college graduates rarely have these abilities unless they already had them before entering college. You seem to describe someone with ten years of experience working in a challenging environment with quality mentors, not a graduating college senior. That isn't to say it is important for most people to get 16 years of education instead of just 12. But most people I have worked with become useful and resourceful in their early 30's, not at the age of 22.

Let me guess... since he's on /. it could well be that *before* he went to college he had already mostly self-taught himself about computers, possibly programming, etc. Or in other words, he *already* knew how to learn things, research things, organize resources, and test his understanding with the computer. College might have helped *hone* those skills, but I agree, people either want to learn or don't - those who don't think they'll go to college and graduate with a piece of paper that will get them a 'better'/'more cushy' job making more money because of that piece of paper, no understanding that people become "useful and resourceful" by their depth of actual knowledge... and by knowledge I mean not only what you can learn in a book or a class, but what you've learned and *retained* on your own.

I got my Ham radio license in 7th grade, was playing with/learning electronics younger than that (I was drooling over the 1975(?) article in RE(?) on building the Altair 8800 - I was 11), taught myself digital electronics devouring the venerable TI TTL Handbook, building little projects for my TRS-80 (Model-I) in HS, etc. College taught me a lot more math/theory, but it didn't teach me the basics of *how* to learn, or instill the interest in me.

Education is only part of the real point

[schnell]

For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.

College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.

It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.

I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.

There are people who want to learn and not go to a

[Joe_Dragon]

There are people who want to learn and not go to a 50K-100K party to get a piece of paper.

My personal experience

[ScottJermaineGuyton]

I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.

Poor quality of courses

[Okian Warrior]

The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.

This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.

To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.

(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)

A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.

And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.

The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video.)

I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)

I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".

(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)

Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.

Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.

(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.

(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.

Re:College is way over priced (at least in the us)

[Half-pint HAL]

I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing

Most "free courses" are basically the introductory units from a university 101 class or a master's programme, and designed to advertise the school to you. Berkeley have some fantastic courses on Coursera -- they clearly put a lot of time and money into them -- but once you've signed up, you're a marketing asset for their (very) expensive accredited distance programme.

Besides, free courses tend only to be capable of teaching "basic skills" which can objectively be marked right or wrong, so "coding" but not "systems design". This means that the future for them is to remove some of the grunt-work from teaching staff, and allow them to focus on the higher-level abstractions. If there's any justice in the world, it will lead to a higher quality of education. Sadly, it is more likely to be looked at as a cost-cutting measure, and higher-level learning will be left by the wayside....

Re:There are people who want to learn and not go t

[tburkhol]

I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit.

No, that's exactly the point. Vast numbers of kids spend their first couple of years "growing up." Some of them fail miserably, most of them muddle through fairly well, and some of them excel. What company can afford to take the risk hiring an untrained person, without even a 'track record' of trainability, when that kid may decide he'd rather spend lunch drinking beers?

College isn't supposed to be job training - you may get some skills that are useful in a job, but the point is not to teach you how to be a junior programmer at Microsoft. College, especially residential college, is life-training: how do you balance your freedom to do bong hits all day with your responsibility to pay rent? How do you balance your desire to post /. with your employer's desire that you accomplish tasks? How do you get stuff done when your teacher/manager is a clueless moron? What kinds of tasks/problems do you enjoy?

If you've figure that out by the time you're 18, you're truly exceptional. Not special-snowflake exceptional, but Bill Gates exceptional. College, and even a job, are likely to hold you back. Unfortunately, many people think they are Bill Gates, when they are only a special snowflake.

Re:College is way over priced (at least in the us)

[u38cg]

The value of a degree is that it shows to an employer that you could get into a high value institution. That means the institution has no incentive either to expand provision or reduce fees (or indeed control costs at all). So unlikely to drop any time soon.