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.
High School first then collage
By EmperorOfCanada
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2015-Apr-1 00:36
• Score: 3, Insightful
• Thread
If I were a kid in around grade 9 I would presently be MOOCing until I turned blue. My goal would be to basically bypass High School. At this point what are the various certificates good for? I don't think that anyone yet really knows. But I suspect that they will be worth more and more and definitely will be worth more than most half assed high schools. I can certainly say without hesitation that I have seen some online courses MOOC, the great courses, plus others that blow my old HS teachers clean out of the water and certainly blow most of my daughters' teachers clean out of the water. (and yes many online things suck too)
But if a grade 9 student has 10 or 20 MIT / Stanford courses under their belt and does well on the SATs then what university can honestly reject that student?
Right now it is all a little hazy but I suspect that a point will be crossed where quite simply the high schools will begin to lose the best and the brightest. Not the majority just the cream. This will leave the high schools with the mediocre and the crap students. Then the pressure will be on the better of the mediocre students to follow online as well leaving a pretty poor lineup of students. This will then start to whittle away at the better teachers who just can't keep going without at least the occasional success in their class.
The percentage of students who will no longer attend highschool still won't amount to a huge number but what will remain of the high school system will be pretty depressingly bad. Plus I just know that the officials will dumb down the standards to keep up with the ever lowering bar. I foresee the first sign of my prediction coming true when the school systems try to put pressure on the universities to not accept students on MOOCs alone or to try to make it so that you can't write the SATs without being registered with a bricks and mortar high school.
But in the very long term when the various online educational systems have been somewhat perfected I do see a day when many people are faced with the choice (or option) to go to their local po-dunk collage or take course from something with a kickass name. I don't doubt that a major part of higher education happens outside of the classroom but the simple reality is that many people are questing for that piece of paper to further their job opportunities and have various obsicals in their way such as money. Online education won't wipe out the universities or anything so silly but it could see some of the lesser universities lose a serious chunk of their students.
Also I see a demographic who will simply say, "OK I will do year one online and then the other three getting the campus experience, OK I will do the last two years getting the campus experience, OK the last year will definitely be the campus year. Look I have a degree, I wish I had done at least one year on campus." But I also see another demographic much like the one that avoided high school not able to go to the kick ass named universities and not willing to slum it in their local school, and thus doing the online thing even more.
But that all said, I think that where it will be most interesting is that right now it is very very very hard to get into a top tier school. But what if you have been taking MOOCs from a top tier school and have been kicking ass and taking names. Does that qualify you for a top tier school more than someone with a top tier SAT?
Then employers are going to be a whole other thing. Which would they rather see, a top tier certificate or a local podunk degree?
Re:Sounds familiar
By ranton
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2015-Apr-1 00:42
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
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.
Poor quality of courses
By Okian Warrior
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2015-Apr-1 01:26
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
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.
He's right, but the conclusion may require nuance.
By aussersterne
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2015-Apr-1 01:32
• Score: 3
• Thread
Here's the thing—we may not actually want every otherwise unmotivated late teen to be sitting dubiously through college courses just because it's either that or go back to their dorm and twiddle their thumbs. Some things:
- There is an oversupply of graduates these days in most fields and at most levels
- A dawdle-dawdle unmotivated student is not doing their highest quality learning
- Even students that will eventually use what they learn may not do so for years
- In the meantime, what they learned is getting very rusty between learning and use
So with these things said, *how about* a model in which:
- People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
I would think this would help to mitigate some of the particular supply/demand problems on all sides (for an education/for students/for graduates as employees).
The one caveat, and it's an important one, is that we do of course want people to be generally mature, thoughtful, capable, and culturally literate if they are goint to be participating in society, and right now high schools are failing utterly at even touching these points.
So to address that need, let's just require a minimal level of "general" college-level education, say a one-year or two-year degree that as no "major" or "minor" selections and issues no grades, but certifies literacy about politics/citizenship, social science (particularly social problems), national culture, basic quantitative reasoning, and so on—enough to become a careful thinker and to better understand "how to learn stuff."
This general education certification would be required in order to:
- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board
But would be disconnected from particular vocational or other subject-oriented learning issued via, say, MOOCS as well as face-to-face alternatives. And instead of a major in a single discpline, outcomes from MOOC courses could be used to calculate a nationally databased and relatively involved (many measures) "bar chart" for each student, that tallied their experience and competence with particular subject areas, expressed quantitatively as a figure without an upper bound, that is added to with each additional course, and perhaps incorporating quantitative feedback about their performance from employers as well:
So instead of wanting someone with 4-year degree and a "major" in computer science, employers could seek someone with their general education certification along with "at least a 1400 in OS design, a 650 in Java, and a 950 in medical organizations and systems" and so on.
Over the course of a lifetime, scores in any particular area could continue to increase, either by taking additional MOOCs to get more exposure, or by having employers report on accumulated skills and experience to the system.
So that someone that took only a few courses in X in school, but in the real world and on the job, became—over 20 years—the best X in the country, would have this gradually reflected in their national education/experience scores as the years of experience and successes mounted.
Meanwhile, we'd also no longer have the weird mismatches that come when an employee has a degree in Y but actually works in Z, and then has to explain this in various ways to various parties. First of all, at the level of the 1-or-2-year general education, they would no longer gret a "degree in" Y. That would be handed by MOOCs and represented in varous numbers that increased as the result of completing them.
But if someone did do an about-face and choose an entirely different subject or work area in life, this would also gradually be reflected in their education/experience scores. We'd know when someone who'd studied chemistry in their '20s finally became a "real biologist" because their scores
Things I learned in university
By umdesch4
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2015-Apr-1 02:05
• Score: 3
• Thread
Off the top of my head..
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.