"...making the case for human intervention in teaching, at least for those students who are not 100% self-motivated and self-assured (that is, those students who actually need to be educated, rather than left to educate themselves). Two relevant notes of today."
This is really important. The discussion about education in this community (HN), and the a lot of the discussions I've seen related to the MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students.
> MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students
I think MOOC's could benefit from face-to-face coaching. Students need someone to see them, to acknowledge their efforts, to monitor their progress and give them encouragement or advice when needed. This is the job of a coach, or educational counselor, not a teacher.
The teacher can very well be teaching the course on video, but the student needs to be observed by a real person in order to get that special feeling that motivates and makes the whole process efficient. A bunch of counselors distributed to major cities could serve a lot of students taking online courses, but they need to feel accountable to a person, not just a website. It's easy to do that and fits well with the online delivery model.
MOOC's could be a great solution to life-long learning and keeping up to date with relevant skills. Especially in computer science, a 4 or 5 year college program is too long - by the time the students finish, many specific technologies they learned might be already obsolete. Instead, coming back for a course or two every year might work much better in the long run.
MOOC's might still work out if they could be coupled with employment from the start - let Coursera or Udacity partner up with various companies and create relevant courses, and use this opportunity to teach and rank the participants and in the end, offer jobs to the ones that are up to par with their skills. This would make MOOC's much more valuable than what they are now.
True. I think the focus on self-direction is a tangent. The real potential for MOOCs is individually tailored pacing and material at scale. Self-direction is all well and good for the students who are capable of such. But even for those who aren't, there's great promise in the idea of "custom" curricula and even "custom" pacing of standard courses.
Our current education system is based on standards and Gaussian distributions. Some aptitudes appear to be distributed that way. But a lot of things aren't, like learning styles, speeds, comprehension methods, imagination, specific interests and aptitudes, and so forth. We can't dream of assigning an individual tutor to every student in the country. But we can dream of a world in which technology enables every student in a standard course to learn in a personally optimized way.
I agree with the main point - that MOOCs work best for students who are self-motivated - but I think you're not giving the average college student enough credit.
From my experiences as a student in both environments, I think the motivation required to successfully complete a college course is about the same as completing a MOOC. I don't think that an increase in the amount of content delivered online at a college level would increase the failure rates, because the students who aren't self-motivated would fail out anyway.
Much of the discussion I've seen of MOOCs is how the format enables more interactivity by enabling learning where lecture and associated self-check exercises are delivered purely online, and interaction time with other live humans -- whether co-students, individually-selected tutors, or formal group classrooms with faculty instructors -- is used to provide direct Q&A and support on substantive assignments (which may also be delivered and graded online) -- and a significant subset of that discussion has centered around use of existing MOOCs or custom online courses built on their open platforms as support for "flipped classrooms".
I agree with you.
In my startup (marketplace for face-to-face teachers) we see clearly that most of the students are not self-motivated and self-assured when in difficulties.
It is the rigor of the schedule appointments, the expertise of the face-to-face teacher to adjust the learning progress and his direct feedback that are helping efficiently our students.
MOOC’s are still experimenting on the best way to massively transmit knowledge and it will take time for them before being as efficient as a human teacher.
This reads as a little conceited or else disconnected. I'm not saying I don't disagree, because I believe that MOOCs are probably better as a supplement to college, but another fact remains that some of us don't have the same opportunities to go to those same hand full of colleges. In other words, I think a huge part that is missing from this is the discussion of inequality.
MOOCs are not going away any time soon. There are professors and educators definitely taking the time to create quality lectures and make sure you get the help you need, and I don't think that's much different from attending an actual college. The only thing missing is probably the importance of human interaction.
Also, I'm not sure about that math because even he seems skeptical about it. Hope somebody can help enlighten me.
I completely agree. The "foundational premise" of MOOCs isn't just about the cost of college, as the author claims... it's about access more broadly, of which cost is just one part. Sure, your average middle class American teenager has plenty of education opportunities -- people in full time jobs, distributed around the world, in rural areas, working full time and odd hours? Not so much. For these people, MOOCs truly are an "anything is better than nothing" proposition, and they don't have to replace college to be wildly successful. In fact, they can serve as a medium for elite universities to access talent they otherwise would never find -- as in this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/the-boy-genius-of...
"The only thing missing is probably the importance of human interaction." That's it, right there. Because, for the majority of students, human interaction isn't merely important, it's critical. The problem with MOOCs is that, because of this, they can never (baring some serious breakthroughs in strong AI) provide that key component, but we pretend that they're an adequate---some go so far as to claim superior---replacement for traditional education. In the end, MOOCs end up being a smokescreen that helps universities and governments avoid making substantive changes to address the affordability of education. The fact that it also helps them collect tuition from more students without spending any money on infrastructure or professor salaries on top of that is why so many University administrators become visibly aroused at the mention of MOOCs.
This is really the most important aspect of MOOCs. For me it's not about the students who would be going to college anyways, it's all the students(not just 1st world) that wouldn't be able to attend these colleges/universities still having the opportunity for a good education.
MOOC don't have to replace all colleges to be wildly successful. It is enough if they become known as the best place for self-motivated, bright people to get an education. When that happens, MOOC will be the new college. That is, completion of a course of study from a MOOC provider like Udacity will be a strong signal to employers that a student is quality.
At that point, the question employers will be asking traditional students is: why didn't you do your education online where it is faster, of better quality, and much cheaper? The fact that a person needs the hand-holding and extrinsic motivation of a traditional college is not a plus.
Most of my development work in recent years has been on learning management systems (LMS). I've built lots of different types of LMS's for different types of schools and students.
When the MOOC "bubble" started, I was sort of stunned that so many schools thought that they could deliver a valid learning experience by just posting videos and syllabi online. Everyone's been doing that since 1995. MOOC was just a way to say "lots of people are watching our videos in the same sequence!" The model started breaking down quickly as soon as tracking objectives, assessing students, and interacting with instructors came into play. That's when you're into LMS territory.
LMS seems to be a bad word when you talk to MOOC advocates. Like so many buzzword people, they say that MOOC's are "disrupting" the traditional LMS.
But at the end of the day, if you're going to be successful with a MOOC, you're going to have what amounts to an LMS to deliver it. There's no magic bullet shortcut there that combines ("mashup"- another favorite buzzword for people reinventing the wheel) all the things you need to deliver a successful learning experience.
MOOC people say they're disrupting learning systems by mashing up all these things. It's a great idea- but once you actually implement, you've built an LMS.
My current client's LMS could easily, today, deliver a class to 100K students with manageable interactivity and assignments (and delivery on mobile devices), and yet the client wants to throw the thing away because it's 10 years old. Most universities who have failed with MOOC's would spend a million bucks or more to have this LMS, and the client is just going to throw it away. Wasting money seems to be the true meaning of "disrupt" in the learning context.
Compare D2L and Blackboard on one hand and the edX platform and Coursera on the other. Are they all LMSs? Absolutely. Is there some buzzword-mongering out there. Undoubtedly. But if you can't see (or, as a user, feel) any significant differences between those two groups of products, I'd suspect your faculties of discernment have been stunted.
Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.
Well MOOCs may not appeal to everyone but they are extremely useful to anyone who wants to learn about certain advanced topics on their own. It will not disrupt college education, since its not the courses or content that matters but the credentials.
MOOC's promise is not about disrupting the privileged collegiate experience for the few entitled attendees. MOOC's promise is for the rest of the world.
"And none of this is to suggest that institutions with very high prices ... aren't going to collapse. THEY WILL. And there may well be more people who get smart <who> go to a lower priced school rather than to the unaffordable "best" school they get into."
(Emphasis mine & I removed the aid discount, since that's all that it really is - a discount.)
Notice that "best" is not really the "best" it's only conditionally the "best".
And when this is applied world wide, MOOCs will transform education, and vast numbers of educational institutions will pivot towards research, private industry partnerships or disappear altogether.
In the end I believe that with MOOCs the world will be smarter, and the elite institutions more exclusive and elite. They will return to being class dating organizations that they once were before the idea of them being meritocratic academic institutions overtook them.
Harvard, Stanford will survive. MIT, CalTech will excel. Cornell, Brown, UPenn, Yale, Princeton, the UCs, etc will struggle. None of them will be able to support their capital loads when the educational opportunities are presented significantly cheaper elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the Student Loan bubble will have burst, and student credit will be severely curtailed, and we see a significantly changed educational future.
It's a shame to see that your comment got voted down.
That said, it is a good example of why the "downvote if you disagree" policy that has been encouraged here is a rather idiotic idea.
Your comment is clearly not commercial spam or anything of that nature. And it does present an argument, with justification for why it may hold true.
It might "offend" thin-skinned people associated with some of the well-established academic institutions you'd listed. That's not a problem with the comment, however, but rather with the people who can't stand to read an argument that they may disagree with badly enough to want to censor.
I don't know if I agree or disagree with what you said, but I do know that it wasn't a waste of my time to read it, and it did get me thinking somewhat. The most bothersome part was dealing with the unnecessarily gray text.
While the article may be correct that MOOCs will not achieve the oft-stated outcome of displacing the current higher educational system, I think the argument that the author is making regarding the affordability of college is off base.
Harry Lewis in the article states: "At Harvard and a handful of other schools, nobody graduates with any debt (unless they have intentionally borrowed so they could avoid making money in the summer, etc., and even then the amounts are likely < $10K)."
While according to Harvard itself: "The total 2013-2014 cost of attending Harvard College without financial aid is $38,891 for tuition and $59,950 for tuition, room, board and fees combined."
Unless summer+part time work is a lot more lucrative than I am aware of, the only way this would be true is if the students (or their parents) were financially well-endowed. A student that doesn't have rich parents is going to be incurring a fair amount of debt or spending way too much time working instead of studying.
Edit: Harvard is generous with its financial aid, so the author's message is more accurate than I understood (at least for Harvard). Learned something.
> Unless summer+part time work is a lot more lucrative than I am aware of, the only way this would be true is if the students (or their parents) were financially well-endowed.
Or if, as is often the case at wealthy private colleges, Harvard has extensive school-provied need-based financial aid in grant, rather than loan, form (as well as any academic scholarships) which assure that the full cost is only paid by (some of) those who are financially well-endowed, while those who aren't financially well-endowed (as well as some who are, due to academic scholarships) are paying much less out of pocket (including loans as "out of pocket" for this purpose.)
Done properly, the flipped classroom + MOOC format would allow for more personal interaction than the traditional university setting currently does for all but the best students at the most elite schools.
That they haven't succeeded says less about MOOCs than about the distribution of institutional power in traditional universities, where your typical administrator will see MOOCs merely as an opportunity to cut costs that wouldn't have to be cut if administrative bloat weren't crowding out everything else.
What if we had online courses where the best educators in the world created interactive training material. Schools still exist and students are required to come to classes where they go through the training material. The staff simply enforces discipline. Students can mail in questions to elite people in the field and use college simply as a networking arena.
[+] [-] glesica|11 years ago|reply
This is really important. The discussion about education in this community (HN), and the a lot of the discussions I've seen related to the MOOC movement (or at least where it has seen success), tends to focus on self-motivated, usually high-aptitude students. But, almost by definition, those attributes do not describe most students.
[+] [-] visarga|11 years ago|reply
I think MOOC's could benefit from face-to-face coaching. Students need someone to see them, to acknowledge their efforts, to monitor their progress and give them encouragement or advice when needed. This is the job of a coach, or educational counselor, not a teacher.
The teacher can very well be teaching the course on video, but the student needs to be observed by a real person in order to get that special feeling that motivates and makes the whole process efficient. A bunch of counselors distributed to major cities could serve a lot of students taking online courses, but they need to feel accountable to a person, not just a website. It's easy to do that and fits well with the online delivery model.
MOOC's could be a great solution to life-long learning and keeping up to date with relevant skills. Especially in computer science, a 4 or 5 year college program is too long - by the time the students finish, many specific technologies they learned might be already obsolete. Instead, coming back for a course or two every year might work much better in the long run.
MOOC's might still work out if they could be coupled with employment from the start - let Coursera or Udacity partner up with various companies and create relevant courses, and use this opportunity to teach and rank the participants and in the end, offer jobs to the ones that are up to par with their skills. This would make MOOC's much more valuable than what they are now.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|11 years ago|reply
Our current education system is based on standards and Gaussian distributions. Some aptitudes appear to be distributed that way. But a lot of things aren't, like learning styles, speeds, comprehension methods, imagination, specific interests and aptitudes, and so forth. We can't dream of assigning an individual tutor to every student in the country. But we can dream of a world in which technology enables every student in a standard course to learn in a personally optimized way.
[+] [-] malexw|11 years ago|reply
From my experiences as a student in both environments, I think the motivation required to successfully complete a college course is about the same as completing a MOOC. I don't think that an increase in the amount of content delivered online at a college level would increase the failure rates, because the students who aren't self-motivated would fail out anyway.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaetan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobcostas55|11 years ago|reply
There is very little evidence that university education actually does anything other than act as a signal for students' already-present aptitude.
[+] [-] memonkey|11 years ago|reply
MOOCs are not going away any time soon. There are professors and educators definitely taking the time to create quality lectures and make sure you get the help you need, and I don't think that's much different from attending an actual college. The only thing missing is probably the importance of human interaction.
Also, I'm not sure about that math because even he seems skeptical about it. Hope somebody can help enlighten me.
[+] [-] cek994|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajarmst|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacksconfidence|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpatru|11 years ago|reply
At that point, the question employers will be asking traditional students is: why didn't you do your education online where it is faster, of better quality, and much cheaper? The fact that a person needs the hand-holding and extrinsic motivation of a traditional college is not a plus.
[+] [-] michaelvkpdx|11 years ago|reply
When the MOOC "bubble" started, I was sort of stunned that so many schools thought that they could deliver a valid learning experience by just posting videos and syllabi online. Everyone's been doing that since 1995. MOOC was just a way to say "lots of people are watching our videos in the same sequence!" The model started breaking down quickly as soon as tracking objectives, assessing students, and interacting with instructors came into play. That's when you're into LMS territory.
LMS seems to be a bad word when you talk to MOOC advocates. Like so many buzzword people, they say that MOOC's are "disrupting" the traditional LMS.
But at the end of the day, if you're going to be successful with a MOOC, you're going to have what amounts to an LMS to deliver it. There's no magic bullet shortcut there that combines ("mashup"- another favorite buzzword for people reinventing the wheel) all the things you need to deliver a successful learning experience.
MOOC people say they're disrupting learning systems by mashing up all these things. It's a great idea- but once you actually implement, you've built an LMS.
My current client's LMS could easily, today, deliver a class to 100K students with manageable interactivity and assignments (and delivery on mobile devices), and yet the client wants to throw the thing away because it's 10 years old. Most universities who have failed with MOOC's would spend a million bucks or more to have this LMS, and the client is just going to throw it away. Wasting money seems to be the true meaning of "disrupt" in the learning context.
[+] [-] jmromer|11 years ago|reply
Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.
[+] [-] vivekn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eruditely|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckFrank|11 years ago|reply
"And none of this is to suggest that institutions with very high prices ... aren't going to collapse. THEY WILL. And there may well be more people who get smart <who> go to a lower priced school rather than to the unaffordable "best" school they get into."
(Emphasis mine & I removed the aid discount, since that's all that it really is - a discount.)
Notice that "best" is not really the "best" it's only conditionally the "best".
And when this is applied world wide, MOOCs will transform education, and vast numbers of educational institutions will pivot towards research, private industry partnerships or disappear altogether.
In the end I believe that with MOOCs the world will be smarter, and the elite institutions more exclusive and elite. They will return to being class dating organizations that they once were before the idea of them being meritocratic academic institutions overtook them.
Harvard, Stanford will survive. MIT, CalTech will excel. Cornell, Brown, UPenn, Yale, Princeton, the UCs, etc will struggle. None of them will be able to support their capital loads when the educational opportunities are presented significantly cheaper elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the Student Loan bubble will have burst, and student credit will be severely curtailed, and we see a significantly changed educational future.
Kodak indeed.
[+] [-] Pacabel|11 years ago|reply
That said, it is a good example of why the "downvote if you disagree" policy that has been encouraged here is a rather idiotic idea.
Your comment is clearly not commercial spam or anything of that nature. And it does present an argument, with justification for why it may hold true.
It might "offend" thin-skinned people associated with some of the well-established academic institutions you'd listed. That's not a problem with the comment, however, but rather with the people who can't stand to read an argument that they may disagree with badly enough to want to censor.
I don't know if I agree or disagree with what you said, but I do know that it wasn't a waste of my time to read it, and it did get me thinking somewhat. The most bothersome part was dealing with the unnecessarily gray text.
[+] [-] molbioguy|11 years ago|reply
While according to Harvard itself: "The total 2013-2014 cost of attending Harvard College without financial aid is $38,891 for tuition and $59,950 for tuition, room, board and fees combined."
Unless summer+part time work is a lot more lucrative than I am aware of, the only way this would be true is if the students (or their parents) were financially well-endowed. A student that doesn't have rich parents is going to be incurring a fair amount of debt or spending way too much time working instead of studying.
Edit: Harvard is generous with its financial aid, so the author's message is more accurate than I understood (at least for Harvard). Learned something.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
Or if, as is often the case at wealthy private colleges, Harvard has extensive school-provied need-based financial aid in grant, rather than loan, form (as well as any academic scholarships) which assure that the full cost is only paid by (some of) those who are financially well-endowed, while those who aren't financially well-endowed (as well as some who are, due to academic scholarships) are paying much less out of pocket (including loans as "out of pocket" for this purpose.)
[+] [-] cowbell|11 years ago|reply
Of those who graduated... of those who found a job at all.
>$59,950 for tuition, room, board and fees combined
If a summer job could pay for that, then why would I need a college degree to make $47K annually? Harry Lewis is le trollin.
[+] [-] ambler0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmromer|11 years ago|reply
That they haven't succeeded says less about MOOCs than about the distribution of institutional power in traditional universities, where your typical administrator will see MOOCs merely as an opportunity to cut costs that wouldn't have to be cut if administrative bloat weren't crowding out everything else.
[+] [-] simula67|11 years ago|reply