Colbert isn’t the first to talk about MOOCs, but he is one of the funniest. He also makes some good points. While public universities do have a higher mission than just/solely making money, and therefore have some incentive to provide a tiny taste of their education online, free is rarely a sustainable business model. At the moment, MOOCs are novelties, and generally only seriously educate a small portion of the enrolled students. And the education is really “ed lite” compared to what they can learn in a more traditional learning environment. But a small portion is still a lot of people, and who doesn’t love the wondrous stories of the 13-year old Pakistani girl finally getting to learn about a topic she loves?
I like MOOCs. I really enjoyed the Knight Center’s infographics course taught by Alberto Cairo. So, it is as a fan that I say that experimentation is great, but we need to move to something a bit more substantive. Some of the best experiments in online education are floundering.
Florida Virtual School — one of the true pioneers in virtual ed — is reporting a 32 percent decline in enrollment. Many other states are expressing concerns about the performance of the virtual schools (often contracted to for-profit companies). We haven’t figured it out, yet.
But it is fun tryin’ to.
Anat Agarwal of EdX (and many, many others) have lauded the beauty of the online environment for asking questions, and the power of peer-to-peer teaching online. No argument. But we need better tools for making sense of endless discussions on a topic. Someone posts a question and 200 comments later you can’t remember what the question was, much less figure out which of your 200 peers posted something approximating “truthiness.” Designers of online education systems: figure out how to make the online relationships and peer sharing meaningful, and you’ll have gone a long way to making online education work. Recorded lectures are the easy part.