There is a fascinating new concept in higher education. For those who don't follow higher education closely, the topic for to day is Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Note that Wikipedia indicates the entry is written like an advertisement. Policy makers and politicians love MOOCs. After all, once a course is up and running, it costs very little to teach, say, 10,000 people at once. That way you have No Child Left Behind.
It's simple, really. A professor (or just some woman named Julie) designs a course on, say, economics. You watch the videos. You answer the questions at the end of the videos. You are given a certificate of completion, suitable for framing. Best of all, these courses come at no charge. If you have an internet connection and a suitable amount of intelligence, the world can be had through MOOCs. In fact, you can even get an electronic copy of The EdPunk's Guide to a DIY Degree gratis. Note: funded by Gates Foundation--more on that later.
Then again, it's not really that simple. People are only toying with ways to encourage class participation (forced blogs, requirements to respond to two blog entries, blech). There are exercises that can be interactive, sometimes. The topics range from the mundane (College Algebra) to the fantastic (Robotics). Sometimes, the only place to catch a course on a specific topic is a MOOC. That makes them exciting. On the other hand, these "class participation" attempts are lame. The certificate (suitable for framing) is really just a piece of paper you printed out on your Hewlett-Packard failure of an inkjet printer (READ THIS LINK!). When finished, your "credential" isn't really accredited.
The only real issue I can see involves that University of the People (pictured above). They have hired Dr. David Harris Cohen away from Columbia to become their Provost. Dr. Cohen's job is to garner accreditation. If you can string together a bunch of MOOCs and call it a degree...and that degree gets accredited...then an education based on MOOCs becomes possible, though not probable. I can't imagine how difficult that would be, but I know that policy makers see this as a panacea to education for "those" kids. That way, you can offer everybody a college degree, knowing full well the "right ones will fail." The rich kids get the 12:1 student-faculty ratios and lots of help from caring professors. The middle class (if they exist) get great sports teams and graduate students. The poor kids get videos with quizzes.
I signed up for a MOOC. I failed. Does that affect my credit score? For some reason, I got distracted from hours of video on whatever topic it was.
Still, I managed to watch the entire Trailer Park Boys series, during that same time. I highly recommend my approach. We all take pride in different things, though there was no certificate at the end of my substantial effort. Perhaps that's my calling in education: a MOOC on a vulgar series from Canada.
MOOCs typically come from large universities. Here's Stanford's latest effort, Coursera. MIT and Harvard put their MOOC catalog online. The University of Michigan offered one on model thinking that was tempting.
MOOCs could be quite effective as tools at schools, particularly useful on liberal arts college campuses, and especially helpful for flipping classes. If you want to see the longest infographic I've experienced, it can be found here. It tells in several ways the concept(s) of flipped classrooms. I like the idea. "Watch the lecture. Then come to class, where we will experience it." Perfect.
MOOCs also work as study aids, as well. Always helpful to have a full set of videos from Coursera on Economics 101 when you're supposed to be taking the course in real life. Miss a lecture? You've still got another waiting for you. In one flipped classroom, the professor has a list of 30 lectures (some his own, some from others) that he sees as the best of the best. Student have to have watched those before pouring in to class the next morning, where they apply physics lessons to experiments. That's nice, especially when a school like the University of Texas is killing off biology labs to make room for more students.
MOOCs have a key issue, in that they seem to take the human condition out of learning. It's interesting to me how U Phoenix is still working on ways for students to interact. This is one of many reason I don't think I'll ever take that "institution" seriously, outside its business model and it's stadium naming rights for the Cardinals. If MOOCs are the future, then they threaten community colleges, lower-tier public institutions, and for-profit ventures. The threat is deep because it is political in nature.
On the other hand, expensive schools will be fine. Strange, but true. Nobody headed to an LAC is trying to get by on the cheap; they've made a decision to invest in their education. The act of choosing a MOOC shows a lack of that very investment. And if your education isn't worth a full 20 of your dollars, then how many hours of your life do you think it is worth?
What is the "success" rate for foreign language courses like Rosetta Stone and Fluenz? Note the lack of links--DON'T BUY THESE! I've failed at this approach, as well. I learn more Spanish in a night in Mexico than I learn from all those stupid videos and cds. This MOOC approach is a working theory. Nothing more. "Students" in these are lab rats for now, and the experimental result will be no difference at best and awful at worst. In real life, forward-thinking institutions will have more tools, despite the current focus for MOOCs. For that, we can be thankful to the Gates Foundation, who are supporting MOOCs as yet another stupid idea. Maybe a small school MOOC, Bill...
By the way, if there was ever a MOOC setup, then the Khan Academy is a primary example. Well-designed and often interesting, Salman Khan is an interesting online teacher. His TED Talk was amazing, and his initial efforts were noble: helping his cousins from afar. K-12 uses the Khan Academy like that; mostly through teachers referring students to Khan for another approach to the same types of questions in a class. The Henley family uses Khan that way, especially for Algebra right now. It was designed for that, originally. Nobody in K-12 is leading a major charge for dropping teachers and curriculum and just using Khan.
Higher education needs to learn from the K-12 public schools. This is yet another example.
No comments:
Post a Comment