Comments on: Trouble in River City

By: Jack

Jack — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:54:38 +0000

Very interesting article. MOOC’s are the equivalent of a GED. In some sort. Both offer a diploma for a lot less work . I also know that when I was in college I took 2-3 video classes, these were jokes of classes but I got credit. You watched videos and took and test with no professor. This was in a Division 1 school also.

By: Keith Wilson

Keith Wilson — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:01:40 +0000

No mention of MOOCs in today’s article in the Washington Post about the UVA situation: http://wapo.st/Ma7bOI

I took a Game Theory course “at” Stanford this spring, and found it very useful for a reason that doesn’t seem to quite fit into any of the categories you mentioned. Perhaps this is because my situation is abnormal – I already use game theory for poker, and in fact game a talk at Swarthmore about this (as you know). The online course gave me a sense of what constitutes assumed knowledge among game theorists, something that I find valuable but that I’m not sure I could have gleaned easily by studying wikipedia.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 16:19:52 +0000

Stefan and Cassandra are definitely correct that a high-quality assessment scheme in a MOOC (or older forms of distance education) is more time-consuming, more labor-intensive, than a face-to-face interaction. Similarly, creating high-quality multimedia materials for a truly digitally-native course is going to be more time-consuming and labor-intensive, not less. The real potential of MOOCs to be a *better* form of education in certain ways will not be tapped by treating them as a way to cut corners. It’s just that on the content-creation side, if you invest in high-quality at the outset, it can be shared with far more students than otherwise. On the assessment side, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to cut corners if you want the learning outcomes to be comparable with face-to-face instruction.

By: Contingent Cassandra

Contingent Cassandra — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 23:48:09 +0000

I think you’ve nailed it with #3; MOOCs are, basically, a form of publishing/information delivery, with a bit of interactivity built in. That’s not a bad thing, and can be effective not only for “how to,” but also for more purely intellectual content (think some souped-up hybrid Teaching Company lecture/high-quality documentary/well-designed companion website — or book — that offers some primary materials). When created by elite universities, MOOCs are basically a public service, or perhaps even, eventually, a modest revenue-generator along the lines of the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Classics, which both of my grandfathers, men born in the very late 19th century who had practical professional educations — 2 years of higher ed plus apprenticeship/certification in fields that today would require at least a B.A. and probably an M.A. — enjoyed reading, for their own edification, and to allow them to interact more easily with colleagues and clients from more privileged backgrounds. But the quality of the interaction still matters. One could discuss a classic in a book club formed of like-minded readers, and get a lot out of it, but it still didn’t quite measure up to discussing the same book in detail with the professor who wrote the introductionm which is presumably why both grandfathers happily spent some of their hard-earned dollars on Ivy/Seven Sisters educations for their own children.

By: Stefan Hessbrueggen

Stefan Hessbrueggen — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:54:54 +0000

I’ve taught philosophy at a distance teaching institution. My estimate is that the average effort per student is approx. 1,5 of normal teaching load. One example: grading a distance teaching course paper requires about one typed page of detailed commentary. Writing this takes about an hour. Explaining the same content to a person in my office may take 15 minutes.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:32:09 +0000

Sure, that’s what makes them a novel and effective new form of instructional publication. Potentially, at least. But grading per se isn’t novel in this kind of massified education–correspondence courses are a fantastic example, because that was a big part of how they worked from the outset. You’d mail in your assignments and your tests and get them back graded. If that was all you needed for highly effective massified education, we’d have arrived at that point ninety years ago.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:23:41 +0000

Amusingly written piece.

What about graded assignments?

What about forums for students?

It seems to me like you analysis of MOOC’s leaves out some of the interactivity of them.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:22:32 +0000

Amusingly written piece.

Well, what about when these courses have graded assignments?

What about discussion forums among students?

I think your analysis of MOOCs leaves out some of the interactivity.