As edX , Coursera, and Udacity continue to build and launch
massive open online courses (MOOCs)—and other would-be contenders approach the
field—evidence and opinions are accumulating about how best to use such courses,
the experience of learning this way, and possible applications of the evolving
technology. Herewith, a survey of some recent perspectives, and some news
updates on the users of an early HarvardX
course and Coursera’s expansion into professional education.
Where the Learners Are
MOOCs have been touted as opening avenues to education for huge
audiences in developing countries, but a pressing U.S. application lies in providing remedial or entry-level required
classes for students at community colleges and financially hard-pressed public colleges
and universities. Following an experiment in which San Jose State
University (SJSU) blended edX’s course on electronic circuits with its
classroom teaching, enhancing student learning, the institution has extended
that experiment to 11 California campuses and agreed with edX to adapt courses
in sciences, humanities, business, and social sciences.
Tamar
Lewin of The New York Times, who is
reporting a series of stories on online education, put this venture into a
broader context:
Nearly half of all
undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work
before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be
costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished
prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public
institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must
take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds
of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.
Of the SJSU-edX blended-learning experiment, she wrote, “It
is hard to say…how much the improved results come from the edX online
materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small
group projects, rather than lectures.” (Lewin also covered a separate SJSU
venture with Udacity that provides online mentors around the clock to help
students through online basic-math courses—another pilot being expanded in
scope and subjects.)
Lewin reported the reaction of Josh Jarrett, a
higher-education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is
supporting development of MOOCs for basic and remedial education, in an effort
to enhance student completion of higher education:
“For us, 2012 was all about
trying to tilt some of the MOOC attention toward the more novice learner, the
low-income and first-generation students,” he said. “And 2013 is about blending
MOOCs into college courses where there is additional support, and students can
get credit. While some low-income young adults can benefit from what I call the
free-range MOOCs, the research suggests that most are going to need more
scaffolding, more support.” [He continued,] “We want to bring all the hyperbole
around MOOCs down to reality, and really see at a granular level that’s never
before been available, how well they work for underserved students.”
SJSU, Lewin added, hopes to have fully online
offerings for introductory and basic courses, and blended instruction for
higher-level courses.
As states from California to Florida
explore expanding online education for credit, either through legislative
mandates, financial support, or both (the excellent reports from Inside Higher Ed’s Ry Rivard are cited
here), “State
U Online,” a policy paper from the New America Foundation,
outlines a strategy for public systems to adopt online courses aggressively,
separating them and credit from any given institution, so students could access
needed classes flexibly.
Preparing and Teaching a MOOC
Two teachers have written for The Chronicle of Higher Education about
their experiences in devising and delivering MOOCs.
Karen
Head, an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of
Literature, Media, and Communication, received a Gates
Foundation grant to explore teaching first-year writing in a massive, online
course, to be offered via Coursera. She has blogged
on her progress for the Chronicle,
reporting in an April 29 dispatch, “The time demands, logistics, and politics
of developing a MOOC will bury you—particularly if you do not have tenure.”
Preparing three lectures for delivery during a single week, she noted, required
her team to devote “about 20 hours to[?] planning and developing content,” plus
an additional eight hours to rehearse the lectures and four hours to record
them; editing, done elsewhere, followed. Further work was required to
incorporate quizzes or work to be done during pauses in the lectures.
Lecturing to a camera, she reported, was not
wholly satisfying because “I crave the connection I have with students in a
traditional course [and] this MOOC format is in direct opposition to everything
I believe good teaching to be.” Once the course launches, she expects to have
many more and new sorts of connections, but “I will never know” these unseen
learners as well as students in a real classroom—an outcome that hampers her
own understanding of how to teach best.
To date, Head noted, “there is simply no way to
adequately evaluate the writing of thousands of students”—a prerequisite for
certifying their work for credit. Instead, the course will rely on peer
assessment. As for the promise of machine grading: “For now, I will say that
such mechanisms remain unable to provide substantive evaluation….”
Wesleyan
president Michael S. Roth somehow found the time to bring “The Modern and the
Postmodern” online, via Coursera. His Chronicle account, “My Modern Experience Teaching a MOOC,” also
published April 29, perhaps reflects his freedom from the untenured professor
Head’s anxieties and the more advanced nature of his course. As the first
liberal-arts college to join Coursera, Wesleyan was obviously open to
experimentation. Roth embarked on his own experiment with some skepticism: “It
seemed clear to me that whatever learning happened online via lectures,
quizzes, and peer-graded essays was very different from what I’d experienced in
residential colleges.”
But he found the course, once launched, opened up
new possibilities. While Wesleyan prides itself on diversity, it was a new
experience to have students forming Spanish and Portuguese study groups, and self-assembling
study sections in Bulgaria, Russia, and India. Three couples—all with Ph.D.
degrees—enrolled together, while some students provided excellent lists of
supplemental readings. “My MOOC,” he wrote, “has impressed upon me aspects of
difference and inclusion I don’t often encounter on campus”—among them,
students who reported never having had the opportunity to pursue higher
education.
As for reports that many students who enroll fail
to complete a course (see below for the experience of Harvard’s David Malan in
his computer-sciences offering via edX), Roth wrote, that is “like saying
someone ‘failed to complete’ The New
Yorker in the week she received it.”
Reflecting on the communications he received from
students, Roth concluded:
Turns out the “massive” part
of these open courses is the least interesting thing about them. My students
don’t feel like a mass. It’s the differences among them, and how they bridge
those differences through social networks, that energize their MOOC experience
and mine.
Studying Online
In two recent newspaper articles, adults have described
their experiences taking online courses, clearly without credit or credentials
in mind.
“When it comes to Massive Open Online Courses,”
wrote A.J.
Jacobs, an editor at large at Esquire,
in “Two Cheers for Web U,” published in The
New York Times, “you can forget about the Socratic method. The
professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more
accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.” One professor described the class
as “‘conversations in which we’re going to talk about this course one to
one’—except that one side (the student’s) doesn’t ‘get to talk back directly.’
I’m not sure this fits the traditional definition of a conversation.” The
result, given MOOCs’ huge enrollment, is “a strange paradox: these professors
are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history.”
Jacobs enrolled in 11 courses, principally from
Coursera, but he also “dabbled” in edX and Udacity offerings. Most of the
professors were well informed and entertaining, he reported. But “While MOOCS
are a great equalizer when it comes to students around the world, they are a
great unequalizer when it comes to teachers,” giving rise to a list of online
celebrity professors who come to define their fields—a possible risk to “the
biodiversity of the academic ecosystem.”
He found the courses supremely convenient: “MOOCs
shift control to the student,” who can, like Jacobs, watch lectures while on
the treadmill or eating, and at whatever speed he liked. Nonetheless, he was on
his way to completing just two of those he signed up for—suggesting the need
for “a virtual dunce cap.” And he found out why it is easy to cheat in MOOC
exercises: he was able to Google answers to quiz questions for a genetics
course.
He reserved his lowest grade for interaction with
the teaching faculty, and urged experiments with “an online-offline hybrid
model,” student study groups in various locations, and so on.
Student-to-student interactions, on the other hand, were relatively easy to set
up via social media, course discussion boards, and even face-to-face meetings.
Some of the latter proved unsatisfying, however, when peers failed to show up
at appointed times and places.
All that said, Jacobs found that the MOOCs
“provided me with the thrill of relatively painless self-improvement and an
easy introduction to heady topics.”
In a somewhat gimmicky exercise, Jonathan Haber,
a writer in Lexington, Massachusetts, enrolled in 32 courses—including the
HarvardX versions of Michael Sandel’s “Justice” and Gregory Nagy’s “The Ancient
Greet Hero,” and Wesleyan president Roth’s class on modernism and postmodernism
(Haber is a Wesleyan graduate)—aiming to earn a “one-year MOOC BA” by the end
of 2013. The Boston Globe’s
higher education reporter, Marcella Bombardieri, interviewed him about his
experiences. (Haber blogs about his experiences here.)
Among his observations from the Globe article:
I’m taking a couple of
Harvard courses. They just ask you to answer a couple of multiple-choice
questions at the end of each lecture and do some readings and contribute to
discussions. They are very meaningful courses, but it’s basically reading
comprehension. Even though one of the best courses I’m taking is this edX
course on the Greek hero….It’s really challenging. Even though they only ask
you a few questions, they are the right ones.
[On the course discussion
boards] Weirdly, it works best when fewer people contribute. In my Harvard
Justice course everybody is required to respond to a…prompt every
week. But because thousands of people are taking part in this course, whenever
you type in something really clever, or you see something clever and you
respond to it and think you are starting a conversation, you log in five
minutes later and it’s a thousand comments down now.… At least half the people
taking the courses are outside of the US, meaning that English is not
everybody’s first language. Generally I found that any discussion that goes
over 25 comments is gravitating toward the mean, which is the same old stale
left/right debate. If the discussion goes on over 25 comments usually it’s
because they’re having a fight over Ayn Rand.
[On peer grading of
assignments] There are 25,000 students enrolled in the class…so they have set
up [a] peer grading mechanism where every student who submits a paper is also
required to grade three of them, and to grade them based on a specified
rubric….A rubric that is simple enough for anybody to use is going to
generate papers that anybody can write, in which case how meaningful are those
going to be? Frankly, most of the papers I have written so far are, compare
Baudelaire and Freud, now compare Rousseau and Marx.
In all, Haber concluded, the MOOCs now available
are “an interesting work in progress.”
Drawing a Line: Amherst and Duke
In mid April, the faculty of Amherst College,
which had been wooed as a partner by edX, voted not to join. As numerous
reports noted, Amherst is the prototype liberal-arts institution: its faculty
members focus on seminars and other personal instruction. After the institution
rejected affiliating with for-profit vendors (including
2U, which seeks to offer courses for credit), it explored an edX
contract. But at the April 16 vote, a majority preferred to chart their own
course for Amherst online.
Among the concerns, Inside Higher Ed
noted, were the degree of compatibility between a “purposefully small
residential community” focused on education “through close colloquy” and the
inherently massive nature of MOOC instruction. (Witness the comments, above, on
the difficulty of effecting teacher-student interaction in some MOOC courses.)
There were also concerns about conferring Amherst-branded course-completion
certificates to edX students, thus diluting the meaning of the college’s
education. Expense—reportedly $2 million for a five-year affiliation—was an
issue, too. Professors on the losing side of the vote, who favored an edX connection,
said they hoped to influence online course design by importing the
small-college perspective.
In a subsequent
Crimson report on the vote,
Amherst life-sciences professor Stephen A. George was quoted as saying,
“Ultimately, we’re trying to help our residential students, and [it] wasn’t
clear exactly what the MOOCs would allow us to do which we couldn’t do in other
ways.”
edX released this
comment on the decision: “We are
disappointed that Amherst College will not be joining edX. Over the past
several months we have had many productive meetings and wide-ranging
discussions with Amherst’s administration and faculty. Amherst is a
wonderful institution and we would have been delighted to have them join.
We acknowledge that online educational platforms are not the appropriate
solution for all courses or all faculty.”
On
April 25, the Arts & Sciences Council at Duke voted narrowly against
letting Duke undergraduates receive credit for online courses offered through
2U, killing that institution’s participation in that venture. Although
the courses—to be created by elite institutions—are intended for much smaller
enrollments than MOOCs, and are to be accompanied by discussion sections, they
raise the same issues of credentialing and crediting that were raised at
Amherst. Duke remains a Coursera partner, offering MOOCs created by its faculty
through that platform for free (but not for credit).
Who the Students Are
The HarvardX May newsletter links to the CS50x blog by David J. Malan,
senior lecturer on computer science, who took his wildly popular
introductory course online via edX last fall. He notes that 150,349 students registered
for the course, of whom 100,953 “engaged” (watched content, asked questions, and used the course apps—whether
or not they submitted any work). Some 10,905 students (11 percent of those who
“engaged”) submitted an initial problem set; 5,259 took the first quiz; and
1,482 submitted the class project. Ultimately, 1,388 students (0.9 percent of
initial registrants) earned certificates; doing so required that they submit
all work assignments and achieve scores of 60 percent or higher. In contrast,
Malan notes, 703 of 706 students enrolled in CS 50 on campus last fall
“completed” the (nonvirtual) course.
Malan’s analytics show that daily engagement
trended down toward the end, from nearly 40,000 unique visitors during a peak,
early day, to about 2,500 by the end of the course. There was at least one
visitor from every country in the world, with Americans accounting for 29
percent of visits, and residents of India, ranked second, accounting for more
than 9 percent. According to the respondents, most enrolled to learn about
computer science; relatively few were motivated by the prospect of earning the
course certificate.
Online Education for Educators
As MOOC organizations seek ways to generate
revenue, professional and continuing education courses are a promising opportunity,
given the established conventions of paying for such services. (At Harvard, this
is obviously a very large business: for the Division
of Continuing Education, whose new leader, Huntington D. Lambert, is steeped in
online education; for Harvard
Business School, which earned $142 million in executive-education tuition in
fiscal year 2012, about 50 percent more than its revenue from the
M.B.A. program; and for Harvard Medical School.)
It comes as no surprise, then, that Coursera
has just deployed a series of professional-development courses for elementary-
and secondary-school teachers. The initial announcement
offers courses for free. Participating institutions include the College of Education, University of Washington; Curry School
of Education, University of Virginia; Johns Hopkins University School of
Education; Match Education’s Sposato Graduate School of Education; Peabody
College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University; Relay Graduate
School of Education; and University of California, Irvine Extension. Coursera
also announced affiliations with the American Museum of Natural History, the
Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions. The course line-up includes more than two dozen titles, with subjects ranging from
practical teaching skills to surveys of early-childhood development.
Can entry into offering courses
for K-12 students be far behind? The potential market, and demand among
hard-pressed school districts, would seem enormous.
Scorecard
Finally, the digital terrain has become so
densely populated so quickly, the Chronicle
of Higher Education has offered a diagram
of the “Major Players in the MOOC Universe,” flows of funds, and more.