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MOOCs

Teachers know that, when it comes to class size, certain thresholds matter.

OK. It's almost a platitude.

A class with fewer than 10 students lacks energy, and is hardly worth teaching.

This is not true. And it is a very stupid statement. Or just naive maybe.
 
Daniel Duffy said:
Since studies are grade-based these days students tend to be less rounded and mean lacunae in their knowledge.

One big problems is that many academics have not been trained in presentation skills. A counterxample is Gilbert Strang (coincidentally my academic grandfather in the geneaology tree).
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One problem of the grade-based system is it camouflages the absence of any deep or substantial learning. The instructor "grades by the curve" -- which tacitly propagates the illusion that something must have been taught, which a few mastered, many mastered to varying extents, and some mastered not at all. One dishonest twit of a professor I know, who couldn't teach if his life depended on it, spends most of his time and effort in constructing symmetric grade curves. This is symptomatic of an assembly-line educational system. The admins of such systems -- whether at school or university -- are quite happy with this simulacra of education. MOOCs fits snugly in this assembly-line conception.
 
The big problem is the purpose of modern day education. Students treat education as a product that they buy for a price. That price consists both of a sum of money and a sum of effort. Unfortunately, in the UK and US, due to the monetary cost of education, students expect to be given a 2:1 degree (or whatever the American equivalent is) for a modest amount of effort, regardless of their mastery of the subject. Professors construct bell-curve exams. If they don't, the distribution is heavily distorted so that it resembles a bell-curve.

I find it striking that in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands the graduates are of a much, much higher quality than those of the UK/USA. German physics courses have enormous drop-out rates, for instance, because the professors do not pander to the pressure imposed by students with an expectation of receiving a good degree due to being from a wealthy background and simply showing up to their lectures.

This is of huge detriment to the UK/US, but nobody seems to give a toss. The UK highlights its fantastic historical achievements, many of which have not been equalled and rarely surpassed since the end of WWII. The US highlights its current status as world number one. Neither seem to understand the concept of 'future' and the importance of investing in proper education. Proper education does not mean graduating a nation of bell-curves from university. You want to heavily skew your exposure to the long tails.

The long tails are already in the library, reading texts which surpass the standard of most MOOCs many times over. What you want to do is to create an environment which rewards and enables the long tails.

MOOCs do the opposite, because even for excellent performance you get little credit or respect in terms of a certificate which you can shop around to the highest bidder, which is actually what US/UK education is all about these days.
 
Barny said:
This is of huge detriment to the UK/US, but nobody seems to give a toss. The UK highlights its fantastic historical achievements, many of which have not been equalled and rarely surpassed since the end of WWII. The US highlights its current status as world number one. Neither seem to understand the concept of 'future' and the importance of investing in proper education.
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I'd argue that this is because there's no conception of a future any more in the US and UK. So cynicism is rampant -- and that includes the cynical fashion in which commodified education is sold and "consumed." Speaking of the death of the future, incidentally, I'm reminded of Bifo Berardi's book, After the Future. A synopsis/interpetation is here.
 
Barny said:
I find it striking that in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands the graduates are of a much, much higher quality than those of the UK/USA. German physics courses have enormous drop-out rates, for instance, because the professors do not pander to the pressure imposed by students with an expectation of receiving a good degree due to being from a wealthy background and simply showing up to their lectures.
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Barny, while taking into account one source of pressure in one model, I think you're dismissing another source of pressure in another model (very much including "countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands"):
As a result, government funding is distributed across universities following a dominant dual
system of funding allocation that distinguishes between core and competitive funding. Core
funding is often assigned to universities that perform both teaching and research. This public
funding is generally allocated via funding formulas, typically calculated using a set of institution size-related criteria (e.g. number of enrolled students or number of staff), and increasingly via output-based indicators (e.g. number of degrees awarded or number of graduates).
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Source: http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=4099 (emphases mine)

Why?

bigbadwolf: again, by singling out the US and the UK, are you implying that the aforementioned funding formulas don't fit your description of "assembly lines" (your words, not mine)? Why?
 
The mainland of Europe is -grosso modo- socialist when it comes to education. People here have an incorrect perception of what 'elitist' means. Good and bad students are put in the same class, with disastrous results, sometimes.

And money (or lack of it) is not the driving issue, indeed.

There is sometimes a mentality of doing enough to get by ('zesjes mentaliteit) . That's because you don't want to be seen as being elitist. IMO uni primary degree education is too long (5-6 years). It is called an MSc, but that's inflation.

So, saying that one place is better than another place is too general.
 
http://printculture.com/the-future-of-the-university-a-vision/

Q: Are MOOCs going to change the college/university system?

A: No. The system exists partly as an educational tool, but also as a credentialing mechanism. Until MOOCs are offered for credit, they are essentially the equivalent of books or those eight-CD “History of Jazz” sets you could listen to in the car. The revolution in higher education will happen when universities start offering MOOCs for credit, allowing them to become MOCCs: massive online courses for credit. When that happens everything will change.

Q: Why?

A: Right now there are about 4,100 universities and colleges (including two-year colleges) in the United States. You can figure that most of these places have at least one person who teaches advanced algebra. In twenty years there will be maybe 200-400 left, because if someone figures out how to do a MOCC for advanced algebra, there will be absolutely no reason for many universities to offer their own courses. A good MOCC is like a good textbook. You don’t need 4,000 textbooks; you need four or five.

Q: So why will you still need 200-400 people?

A: Because education with humans will be offered at a premium cost point. We all believe (and I think it’s true) that education with humans in a classroom is better than online learning. People who can afford it will still send their children to schools with human teachers. The elite small liberal arts colleges will probably come through this revolution largely unscathed; so will the top private universities. I’m guessing that there are 200-400 of those around. Maybe it’s fewer.

Q: Will everyone else be educated by MOCCs?

A: Yes and no. You can predict that there will be an entire hierarchy of human involvement, setting up tranches designed to market and offer courses to the maximum number of people at the maximum number of efficient price points. So for instance the cheapest possible offering will be a MOCC with completely automated grading and crowdsourced discussion. Slightly above that you might have moderated discussion, or even live online chat (which is now offered for language learners by companies like Rosetta Stone); for grading you might have human-graded essay exams, or even human-graded writing assignments, with human feedback. (I do not believe that writing assignments will be machine-graded in the near-future.) Obviously “live” versions of any of this will cost more than online ones, and synchronous ones more than asynchronous ones.

At that point you can basically imagine that the cheapest offering will be the all-automated MOCC, and the most expensive one will be the algebra seminar with 15 students offered by a full professor. Costs will array themselves accordingly.

Q: Which courses are most likely to end up as MOCCs?

A: Anything that is being taught now as a large lecture with little or no discussion and machine-graded exams will become a MOCC in the next five to ten years (Alexander Halavais agrees). This includes a huge variety of general education courses at public universities, from the humanities to the sciences and everything in between. Similarly anything that has exams that can be largely machine-graded risks becoming a MOCC sooner rather than later. I don’t know much about accounting, but I am guessing that much of an accounting degree could be placed online, for instance.
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bigbadwolf said:
Standardised low-quality junk food for the mind. Would you like a coke with your order, sir? Would you like to biggie size it?
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It takes years to get industrial courses up and running and face-to-face feedback. Tight ship.
 
A good test of maturity of any product - whether it be hardware or software - is how many iterations thereof there are. This is similar to verson number concept.

Example: documents that 'hang' in the state 'verion 0.91'.
 
I think you guys are missing the point, which to me is NOT to replace traditional courses, but to supplement them.

Talking strictly about the STEM material, it's tremendously helpful to have people organize the information into a coherent course, including assignments and exercises, and a huge value to those who actually do them. And when it comes to people already out in the workforce (myself for example), being able to apply what you learn becomes more important than a credential. The application to the real world problem becomes in itself the credential.

For all intents and purposes, those people that sign up and don't bother doing any work don't matter. They don't get anything out of the course, but they wouldn't have learned the material anyways.

TLDR; the payoff function for these courses is VERY convex. While I agree they won't revolutionize teaching, they are on the whole a huge net value to society.

Edit: I also forgot to mention that deep student-teacher interaction might not be critical for the level of courses offered (generally lower level except the CS ones). And also, as a student, you have a MUCH larger peer group to discuss things with on course forums. While most will be newbies, all it takes is one very good person to bring the others up to speed.
 
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I think you guys are missing the point, which to me is NOT to replace traditional courses, but to supplement them.

On the contrary! Just look at the most recent posts. We do get the point because we have made most of them :) especially bbw, polter and barny.

I think bbw and myself were referring to/asking about the quality thereof. And with any product, this quality can be quantified.

MOOCs can have spin-off advantages which is positive. But the core process is the course contents which should be scientifically studied. Everything else is 'after sales' :D
 
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Yes, but what any given student derives from that quality is highly convex, given that so many MOOCs are free.

All I need to get some small bit of value from a MOOC is sign up (5 minutes) and look through the syllabus for gaps in my knowledge (5 minutes), then watch the appropriate lectures (no extra time beyond a normal lecture's cost).

As long as a MOOC is not so terrible that it just constitutes noise, it's easy to extract the valuable signal.
 
bigbadwolf said:
They won't die. They won't be any worse than the 300-student calculus classes. The problem is such classes are a travesty of true education, which involves more interaction between teacher and taught.
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Yike Lu said:
Yes, but what any given student derives from that quality is highly convex, given that so many MOOCs are free.

All I need to get some small bit of value from a MOOC is sign up (5 minutes) and look through the syllabus for gaps in my knowledge (5 minutes), then watch the appropriate lectures (no extra time beyond a normal lecture's cost).

As long as a MOOC is not so terrible that it just constitutes noise, it's easy to extract the valuable signal.
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How would you summarise the intrinsic educational qualities therof?
 
Yike Lu said:
I think you guys are missing the point, which to me is NOT to replace traditional courses, but to supplement them.
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Au contraire, mon ami: the long-term intention is to have MOOCs replace traditional courses. That's the idea. And while Coursera, Udacity, etc., are free right now, the idea is that eventually they'll charge for their offerings. Though thinking about this a bit more, you are technically correct that at the moment, these MOOCs can serve as a supplement. When people have to pay real money for the offerings, they will no longer be seen as a supplement but rather as a lower-cost alternative to traditional courses.
 
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