Demystifying the MOOC

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/demystifying-the-mooc.html

by phjohnst • 12 years ago

51 28 12 years ago

Chevalier3• 12 years ago

It's not MOOCs that depend on mystification -- it's traditional universities. Whether for-profit or non-profit, these are institutions that rake in upwards of $50k per year per student in exchange for mostly worthless seminars on art history and communications. The only way they get away with this incredible fraud is that the fading mystique of a bachelor's degree (and increasingly the mystique of master's and doctorate degrees) has become a minimum threshold requirement to enter the professional workforce in a self-reinforcing inflationary cycle.

I feel compelled to cite my own Ivy League professional degree every time a discussion on education comes up. I'm not speaking from envy or resentment. 99% of the education I received was doodling during unbelievably inefficient lectures and handing in token papers blaming the holy trinity of colonialism, race, and gender for every possible subject matter -- literary analysis, cultural study, or virtually any field where the professor wouldn't dare to mark down politically correct answers. I can only imagine how much more worthless the experiences have been of students studying less rigorous majors at less rigorous universities.

Without default-proof student loans, few students would be stupid enough to borrow such vast sums of money for such useless degrees. Nobody has ever deemed an author or a poet worthwhile on the basis of their certificates rather than their body of work. There was a time not so long ago that nurses, cops, and teachers didn't need infamously pointless certification to do their job. Even professional fields, like my own career in law, was traditionally an apprenticeship rather than a three-year slog through relatively pointless studies in exchange for (based on a ten-year repayment plan) more than a half-million dollars in debt.

But at least I received a professional degree. Undergraduate degrees outside of STEM fields (which may reasonably require certification) are increasingly justified by the mystique of "teaching you how to think" or, in William Deresiewicz's language, building a self and developing a soul.

To quote Steven Pinker's excellent takedown of Deresiewicz: "Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it. I submit that if “building a self” is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time." 1

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Let's take down this article point by point.

(1) "There are several reasons for the disillusionment. First, the average student in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job."

It takes remarkable inculcation of the "whitey is bad" mindset to think that intelligent, driven people studying in their free time is bad if they're educated white men. Would the author condemn MOOCs if they were instead dominated by impoverished African women?

Nor does this argument in any way mean that since white people are studying, nobody else may study. Young white men are overwhelmingly the early adopters of ANY revolutionary technology, including the Internet and cell phones. Every time access to knowledge was pioneered by young white men, the resulting benefits were quickly taken up by the rest of the world as soon as infrastructure was established.

(2) "A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail."

Yes... that's what happens when you study a subject in your free time, which vanishingly few of us have. Most of my colleagues can barely sleep, much less have dinner with their girlfriends or sustain marriages with their increasingly dissatisfied wives.

And we're the lucky ones! Poor and middle-class Americans work absolutely ridiculous hours at multiple jobs for virtually no pay and certainly no benefits or savings. Worse, the bottom 85% of the country have increasingly abandoned marriage and important social support structures in favor of having children without partners or with a rotating cast of partners... with all the consequent dysfunction that you might imagine.

I myself have signed up for a number of MOOC courses in computer science that I've barely started, for lack of time and focus. I'm hoping to transition soon to a job that allows me regular hours and secure employment so I can spend my free time learning for its own sake... but until then, my MOOC courses will remain incomplete (and failed) and my favorite books will remain unread.

If this point argues anything, it's that leisure time is valuable. I don't see why a teenager would be better off paying $50k+/year to attend lesser quality artisanal lectures from lesser professors than they would be simply spending those years living in a city and studying Harvard's MOOCs at Starbucks.

(3) "What’s more, for many instructors, the courses are on-the-job training in online education. Two-thirds of MOOC professors surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013 said they had never taught a fully online course before their first open online class."

Jesus christ. Really.

In the first place, MOOCs have barely entered their first couple years of existence. No kidding you don't have many people experienced in broadcasting lectures online. Why would this negatively impact the quality of these experienced professors' lectures?

In the second place, the author says the solution is to introduce certification in teaching MOOCs. Can't cut out that institutional middleman, can we?

In the third place, inexperienced adjunct professors absolutely DOMINATE college teaching. The tenured professor who earns six figures is vanishing quickly in favor of bloated administration and harried graduate students who waste their youth on useless doctorates and burn out on underpaid teaching positions. If Selingo wants experienced senior professors teaching courses, I can't imagine a better source than any given MOOC.

(4) "Coursera and edX, the two main MOOC providers, are essentially acting as gatekeepers for American higher education online, replicating in their virtual world the pecking order in the physical world as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings."

INCREDIBLE. In an effort to decry free access to the best educations, Selingo complains that MOOCs generally pursue the best professors from the best universities, as defined by the best students. Because in the absence of MOOCs, anyone could attend Harvard courses for free from anywhere in the world at their own schedule. Calling MOOCs "gatekeepers" rather than educational institutions requires the highest level of intellectual dishonesty.

Selingo also implies that these talentless schmucks from Harvard are crowding out more talented professors from no-name schools. Not only is there literally nothing keeping a competing no-name from publishing their own course, there's nothing keeping them from publishing their own PLATFORM to rival Coursera or edX. It's not as though Udacity has a long brand history or a monopoly on competent teaching.

Nor are existing platforms hostile to non-Ivy courses in the first place. I'm currently working my way through some UToronto courses in computer science, an opportunity I would never have had otherwise. Of course, I could have attended a vastly inferior course at a local college at amazing expense in terms of time and money... but at least I would have employed inferior institutions and kept the student loan money rolling in.

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To Selingo's credit, he acknowledges that MOOCs allow students to study their passions at their own pace. To introduce that obvious fact after this series of libelous attacks on MOOCs doesn't feel particularly redemptive, but... let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

I actually purchased Selingo's book when it was published, in aspirational hopes of working through my enormous backlog of unread books in the near future. Of course, by Selingo's calculations, my failure to complete his book signals the pointlessness of book publication. I should instead pay enormous sums to have vastly inferior writers cobble together their own inadequate interpretations on the subject of MOOCs three times a week, in a schedule that prevents me from maintaining worthwhile employment and forces me to take out predatory student loans that fund such middlemen institutions.

We should expect these attacks to continue as the value of worthless degrees is called into question. There are going to be a LOT of unemployed doctorates and administration in the coming decade, most of whom have no practical skills except professional outrage. Allow me to state the obvious: MOOCs are an unqualified blessing on the world, and impart the best parts of an education without the cost of kids' youths and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are the future of education. And that is a wonderful, wonderful gift to every generation to come.

1. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league...

droithomme• 12 years ago

Excellent take down. I'd also like to add that Mr. Selingo's paragraph here is so disingenuous that it can not be considered anything but a blatant lie:

A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail. A well-publicized experiment backed by Gov. Jerry Brown of California at San Jose State University flopped. In one of the MOOCs, just 25 percent of students passed; in another, only 50 percent passed, much lower rates than for the on-campus equivalents.

The experiment in question involved a remedial algebra class offered to students at SJSU who had not only failed "elementary math placement tests", but who had previously paid for and taken a on campus "SJSU Plus math" course and failed it. These were not normal students, these were from among the 50% of entering high school graduate students who were incapable of meeting basic requirements. They paid $150 to take the remedial class, much less than normal tuition at SJSU. When you fail the remedial class at SJSU, you are kicked out of the university and made to go back to community college and reapply to SJSU later. These students were given a chance at a second chance - to try their hand at an online class.

The results[1] were that the SJSU on campus college algebra class has a 64.7% pass rate. The Summer 2013 pilot of the on line version had a 72.6% pass rate. That is a higher rate. For the remedial math class called Entry Level Math, the on campus pass rate has been 45.5%. For the on line summer 2013 pilot the pass rate was 29.8%. That is lower. However, in this case these students had already failed the on-campus one and were selected from that population. They were not the general population of students. The class was not replacing an on campus class since these students did not have the option of taking remedial class a second time, their only option was to leave the university and go to community college.

When offering the same class to the general population of students, and not students that have failed remedial classes already, results are always better. The numbers for college algebra are above and represent a tremendous tuition savings. For SJSU's Circuits and Electronics class, 40% of on campus students got C or lower. For the online version of the same class, offered for SJSU credit through the EdX platform, only 9% got a C or lower. [2]

In reporting these results, Mr. Selingo states that "when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail". This claim is false.

1. http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2013/sjsu-plus-fall-2013-update-...

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/california-to-g...

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

Isn't there a statistical issue akin to mortality being swung by massive infant mortality.

The barrier to entry to MOOCs is very low (submit your email address, for example), whilst the barrier to entry to traditional courses is high (pay large amounts of money and often move home too).

Many people will, I imagine, sign up for MOOCs but fail early, within the first couple of weeks. There's a similar thing in multi-year university courses I think, some will fail their first year, those that make it through that will have a far higher rate of success.

The lower risk/barrier to entry is part of the reason to offer MOOCs IMO, you're enabling many people to try tertiary education for whom the risk-reward analysis is simply too adverse otherwise.

Surely provided MOOCs enable more people to acquire a given educational level they are working, whether that is cost effective or not I guess is the question to ask then.

Chevalier3• 12 years ago

Wow, I had no idea. I assumed, as pbhjpbhj wrote, that MOOCs' high incompletion rate was due to the complete absence of barriers to entry. I've enrolled in dozens of MOOC courses to have access to their course archives in the future, contributing to the "failure" ratio.

Completion is already an extremely suspect metric by which to grade MOOCs, but it's particularly dishonest when you depend on expulsion-level populations. As most anti-MOOC arguments depend crucially on the San Jose study as evidence that lectures must be live and artisanal to work, I expect to refer back to your post quite often in the near future. Thanks for the heads up!

hmsimha• 12 years ago

Your comment is one of the best deconstructions of common criticisms of the potential of MOOCs that I've read. If you pastebin it (or add it to your blog if you have one) and submit it, I think it would be worthy of its own discussion. It's certainly more informed than the parent article.

Chevalier3• 12 years ago

Well, thank you. It's quite flattering to be praised at HN... but now that it's the morning after, I cringe at my post's unclear language and incomplete arguments.

There's a very real possibility that I'll take up a 40-50 hour/week job by summer 2015, which means I'll have time to read neglected books, study wishlisted MOOCs, and maybe even write something worth publication and discussion.

clarkevans• 12 years ago

I'd elaborate on your 3rd point: some administrative units that are coordinating MOOCs underestimate the amount of time needed to plan, construct, and iteratively develop a truly excellent experience. The outcome is more or less predictable. I think a MOOC might probably be more like an iterative project (with bug fixes, updates to reflect new information, changes to reflect better explanations, etc.) -- it's not really "done" so much as "evolved". Designing a course is hard enough; designing one that can rest alone without direct feedback of the professor who gives the lecture series is more like a book project: those can take months and months of preparation and refinement. If you don't get credit for this effort, how could you dedicate time to it?

Once universities gives on-line MOOC career kudos similar to a book (or at least a peer-reviewed articles), the incentives to make the lectures truly great will emerge. I think this could transform community colleges and even some state colleges into institutions that provide one-on-one tutoring to those who really need/want the guided tour.

As a side note: Art History can be fascinating -- it's an excellent way to teach people to slow down, look closely, and form well-written, coherent logical arguments supported by evidence. It has a low barrier to entry. Unfortunately, I think much college eduction today is trying to make up for a completely broken primary and secondary school experience. Perhaps that should be our focus? Perhaps MOOCs will help in this regard -- by providing excellent eduction accessible to young children.

hga• 12 years ago

The Art History course I took was great ... but then again it was in the '80s and race, gender and class (or colonialism) weren't its major food groups; hmmm, the professor wasn't young.

dougabug2• 12 years ago

"Coursera and edX, the two main MOOC providers, are essentially acting as gatekeepers for American higher education online, replicating in their virtual world the pecking order in the physical world as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings."

Much in the same way the NY Times is a gatekeeper for journalistic and editorial mindshare. Both confer/act as a conduit for prestige, and neither is immune to competition.

I will say that personally I find MOOC's far more interesting and relevant than the NY Times.

soneca• 12 years ago

And it is a good thing that the privileged people (to not keep using the stereotype of white men) are the early adopters. It would be irresponsible to make people whose time is much more essential to their survival to experiment new tech. A tech that might not deliver the expected value yet. A lot of non-profit do this and it is cruel when the experiment fail to deliver the value, which is often that case, as in any innovation process. Also, it is a great thing that the same tech might affect both the lives of privileged and unprivileged people. This a technology (in the broader sense of the word) that really reduces inequality. If both the son of a Harvard alumni and the son of a brazilian street-sweeper learn how to learn through the computer and internet, then it is a true uniting technology.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever seen a post that uses "politically correct" unironically and is worth reading.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Regarding #2, it's not a '"whitey is bad" mindset' to say that if your goal is to expand access to education, and you're primarily reaching people who manifestly already have access, then you're failing at your goal.

Denzel2• 12 years ago

MOOCs are merely a stepping stone along a much broader movement. They were based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how degree-granting institutions work. For most people, knowledge gained during the pursuit of a college degree is secondary to the projected $17,500 increase in salary. [1] MOOCs have no such carrot motivating people to complete them.

Online courses are just that: courses + the internet. Anyone can load up on MIT OCW, Coursera, and Udacity lectures that have a value of ~$0 on a resume. What does a 10x improvement upon education look like? What happens when we stop watching talking heads in a video and start taking part in individualized tracks that can prove our knowledge of a subject to a certain degree of certainty, as it evolves over time, for any subject. The issue has never been learning, it's been proving that you know what you've learned.

As it stands now, college degrees serve as a signal for what someone knows. No matter how outdated that notion is.

[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-...

iopq3• 12 years ago

No, you prove what you know at a technical interview. I think a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge. There are really useless people with Masters degrees in CS.

Denzel2• 12 years ago

You and I may believe that a college degree is not the best indicator of knowledge, but industry at large (both inside and outside of technology) does not. Furthermore, proving a lifetime of learning and knowledge in the span of at most 8 hours is dubious at best and impossible at worst.

iopq3• 12 years ago

Of course MOOC students "fail" the courses, the whole point of it is to do self study, not to adhere to deadlines. Why would I follow an artificial deadline for my own studies?

Thlom• 12 years ago

I've taken a few courses, but "failed" all of them. I don't understand why the courses are designed from the constraints of college life and not the possibilities of Internet?

mafribe• 12 years ago

The "constraints of college" are a key part of what makes education work. Deadlines are an anti-procrastination device.

This is rarely acknowledged.

scobar• 12 years ago

The author seems to have completely overlooked that a "young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job" can generally afford more time for continued education than those who may benefit most from MOOCs. Also, those without personal experience may not fully grasp how mentally exhausting poverty with no fallback options can be. MOOCs alone probably won't maximize the positive effects of high quality, affordable, and easily accessible education. However, they are an extremely important first step so that other disruptions can help those who need MOOCs take advantage of them.

Advancements in AI and automation are going to replace a lot more jobs, and MOOCs are a great way to quickly/affordably retrain for a new profession. The end goal of my current project is to reach a point where we can actually pay people a livable wage to educate themselves with MOOCs as they pursue their desired professions. MOOCs have already been incredibly helpful for me personally, and I believe that they'll be considered one of the most important innovations in the future.

linux_devil• 12 years ago

I have a link to share (Why the “Low MOOC Completion Rate” Statistic is a Bogus Argument) : http://augmentedtrader.com/2013/07/24/why-the-low-mooc-compl...

This blog is written by one of the Coursera Course(Computational Investing) instructor. I will quote him "Much of the criticism of MOOCs centers on supposedly low completion rates. And these rates do seem low when compared to completion rates of regular university courses. But the comparison isn’t apples to apples. Let’s dive in by considering what does it mean to start a course. "

amoonki• 12 years ago

I think the author's criticisms are mostly invalid (see Chevalier's comment for a great takedown). With MOOCs, I worry more about these things instead: 1) MOOCs lack the social/deadline pressure to get people to finish their work, and 2) people learn by doing things actively, which is much harder to encourage over the internet.

For 1, as a person with ADHD I struggle to get work done. The deadlines and social pressure to meet them are sometimes the only thing forcing me to actually do work. If people formed local communities to push each other to finish their MOOCs, that would help, but this isn't built-in to MOOCs directly like it's built-in to traditional universities.

For 2, I think people only learn when actively doing something. Passively listening to a lecture does nothing; the lecture only becomes knowledge when you think about it or use it in some way. Active learning exercises are harder to build in to MOOCs because one of the best ways of evaluating learning - having someone "qualified" look at your work and provide feedback - isn't scalable. Multiple-choice questions are too easily gamed and rarely encourage deep thinking. Things like discussions, or iterative feedback on problem-solving, or essay critiques are much more useful, but again, not easily scalable.

It might be that forums where other students critique your work or help you through difficult assignments could be a good substitute. But maybe not. I'm a teaching assistant for a computer science department, and it's difficult to encourage a student in just a right way to help them get the answer for themself. It's tempting to just give out the answer, which isn't helpful for the student but is much easier for me. The collective wisdom of a forum might not be a good substitute for the subtle patience of a professor.

However, neither of these concerns mean we shouldn't pursue MOOCs. I want MOOCs to one day be a complete substitute for a university education. But to do that, concerns like these will need to be addressed.

Demystifying the MOOC

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