The potential of MOOCs is (potentially) amazing. Massive Open Online Courses, where hundreds of thousands of students take a single class, make many delirious with hope for the spread of knowledge, unlimited by tuition costs, geographical distance, and suspect merit selectivity. I’m interested, too. I’ve taken a couple of classes and marveled at many more. I’ve always wanted to learn about Cryptography and now I can take a class from Stanford? Life is good.
Peter Norvig, in The 100,000-student classroom, does a good job of summarizing the amazing potential. MOOCs allow everyone (or everyone with a reliable Internet connection) access to some of the finest minds at the finest institutions. And MOOCs, as Norvig discusses, can leverage some of the best practices of online education, including
- One-on-one tutoring (or simulated one-on-one tutoring). Norvig, Khan Academy and most other MOOCs use handwritten presentations – a la writing on the whiteboard – to simulate personal tutoring).
- Short snippets in the form of videos. Videos or sections of videos can be replayed. It is much more difficult to convince live professors to endlessly repeat themselves.
- Embedded quiz question to get interactivity. That the quizzes are generally checkboxes does not mean they are always the lowest on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Some require significant offline thought to synthesize and apply.
- Forums/peer instruction. Just like in traditional class, students interact with each other (and for brief, somewhat chaotic moments, with their instructors) via social media.
The explosion of MOOCs seems to have tapped into a huge hunger for more education, at least within a certain segment of the population. Hundreds of thousands of people apparently want to know about game theory, or artificial intelligence, or robotics.
And many commentators see MOOCs as the disruptive innovation that will challenge and change higher education. Sehreen Noor Ali, recently discussed the potentially revolutionary nature of MOOCs in PolicyMic’s Online Universities: The Future of Elite Education:
“In fact, one could argue that in terms of strict content, a student could take a 32-course load through a MOOC with partnerships with the top universities — mixing and matching Princeton and University of Michigan courses, for example — and learn just as one would at a brick-and-mortar institution. With a focus on peer collaboration, assessment, and online pedagogy, it won’t be long until high-quality MOOCs can prove they deliver just as strong learning outcomes and the social experience to go with it.
I hope she is right.
Massive Open Online Courses. What’s new about MOOCs is really the massive open part of the title. Online courses have been around for a while. We know a lot about what makes online courses successful – and for who and in what environment. Many of the best practices noted by Norvig, above, are really best practices culled from years (but not too many years) of online distance education assessment.
But the verdict on massive open is still out. And for all their “democratizing of education,” they are still attracting a relatively small segment of the population. Is Coursera’s “Education for Everyone” really possible? Consider what little we know about early participation:
Casually interested, but not committed. Norvig acknowledged that 160,000 people registered for his class, and 20,000 finished all the coursework (requiring 50-100 hours of work). 20,000 is a huge number, and even the casual participant likely got something out of the course, but fairly dismal rates of completion of distance learning classes has a long history, even when there is a significant incentive to finish.
Self-selection. One of the wonderful things about MOOCs is that anyone can sign-up. (I took a class at Stanford!) But this type of learning isn’t for everyone. Participants who self-select into a MOOC are probably already fairly well educated, which is good since one of the determinants of how likely a student is to persist in and complete an online class is college status and graduating term. In a course with no credit and with little external recognition, we should expect only a small completion rate. (Full confession, I didn’t always persist.)
Another factor: high grade point average (better students are more likely to be successful). (For a complete list of the factors, see Factors Associated With Student Persistence in an Online Program of Study: A Review of the Literature, by Carolyn Hart.) Neither of these factors is inherently bad. After all, who do you want taking courses at University of Michigan or Princeton? But MOOCs in their early implementation may not be truly reaching the masses.
Learning style differences. Hart also outlines the barriers to students completing online ed courses, and one of the most interesting barriers is learning style. Students that prefer verbal to written information tend to get frustrated and drop out. I thought this was an interesting finding. I much prefer written communication (give me a big book to chew though any day), but I found the written communication lacking. There are very few associated resources to meet the needs of students who aren’t responding to the videos. (It is a free class. Did I expect to have to buy an expensive textbook?) But good teachers in traditional classrooms usually accommodate the various learning styles by reinforcing the teaching with different tools.
(For my friends in electronic publishing, difficulty accessing resources, primarily electronic libraries, was another barrier to success.)
Alternative accreditation. MOOCs are also going to have to wrestle with issues of accreditation and credentialing. What will it mean to have taken a MOOC class from Harvard? Is it something you can brag about to a prospective employer? Or is it more like a community ed class on organic gardening? Good to know, and good for you that you continue the pursuit of knowledge, but not really relevant to the job. Does “open” get a plus for self-selection or a minus for lack of selectivity?
Customized learning experience. One of the most promising aspects of online education is the opportunity to create customized learning experiences based on information the computer gains about where an individual student is struggling or excelling. This is, reportedly, one of Khan Academy’s strengths. Developing a thoughtful and meaningful pathway through information that keeps students engaged, learning and appropriately challenged will make all the difference. But most of the emerging MOOCs (and they are emerging, and, will, I think, get better), only offer one path.
The business model. There has been much discussion on how MOOCs will make money. Online ed in its many forms has proven several different models, from Florida Virtual School (tuition) to Lynda (subscription) or the Khan Academy (not-for-profit). But how will MOOCs make money? Will MOOCs make money? Right now MOOCs are largely free to participants, and are funded by large institutions with deep pockets. But they are clearly in search of a business model.
In How will MOOCs Make Money? (from Inside Higher Ed), Steve Kolowich proposes the following potential models:
- Convert a small percentage of participants to paying customers seeking certification (part of Udacity‘s model)
- Match qualified participants (or successful completers) with headhunters
- Match unsuccessful students with traditional programs
- Charge for the other aspects of the college experience beyond the classroom
- Add premium experiences (such as charging for human feedback or more in-depth assessment)
Some of these seem more likely than others, but none of these seems to be a slam-dunk. Institutions like Harvard and MIT (EdX) might not need to figure out the business model right away, but eventually MOOCs will need to address this, and how they address it will determine just how disruptive MOOCs are to traditional education.
Effectiveness. Finally, we will need more research to determine if MOOCs are broadly effective in extending knowledge. There is anecdotal information that some students have found their MOOC classes wildly beneficial. And as the technology and best practices get better, more students will be successful. But MOOCs are in the new, shiny stage at the moment. What will they look like in a few years?
Joshua Kim contends that authentic learning does not scale, from Playing the Role of MOOC Skeptic: 7 Concerns (from Inside Higher Ed). “A real education requires the development and nurturing of real relationships.” I wonder if social media of today and tomorrow can bridge the gap toward real relationships?
In Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy, Anderson and Dron in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education, review the evolving pedagogy of the new online environment. The new, highly connected environment focuses on “building and maintaining networked connections that are current and flexible enough to be applied to existing and emergent problems,” instead of on the acquisition of facts.
It is hard to get passed the idea that a basic acquisition of facts is necessary for solving problems, but maybe traditional pedagogy doesn’t apply in the strange new world. We may need a whole new framework to assess the emerging educational system, instead of applying dated (and media-inappropriate) pedagogy.