Because I have a Coursera account (which apparently makes me a “Courserian”), I received the email below this morning about seventeen more universities joining in with Coursera. You can read the whole thing, but to me, this is starting to have the feel of the metaphorical freight train and a lot of institutions are seeing themselves on the tracks. They either have to jump on the train or get the hell out of the way.
Oh, and I could be wrong about this, but I’m willing to bet that all 33 universities associated with Coursera haven’t really had any sort of online course offerings to speak of before Coursera came knocking. So again, the “next big thing” in online teaching is being lead by institutions who haven’t done much of it. Hmmm.
More great universities. More amazing courses. Huge Coursera welcome to our 17 new partners!
Dear Courserians,
Today, we are thrilled to welcome 17 more universities — including four international schools — onto Coursera:
Berklee College of Music
Brown University
Columbia University
Emory University
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Ohio State University
University of British Columbia
University of California, Irvine
University of Florida
University of London
University of Maryland
University of Melbourne
University of Pittsburgh
Vanderbilt University
Wesleyan University
View a full list of schools and courses here.
These 17 universities will expand the course offerings even further, adding new classes in the fields of music, medicine, and humanities (among other disciplines) from renowned professors like Arnold Weinstein of Brown University and Grammy award winning Gary Burton from Berklee College of Music. We are proud of the diversity of the course offerings — from “The Science of Gastronomy” from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to “Financial Engineering and Risk Management” from Columbia University. Many of these courses are pushing the boundaries of what was thought to be possible to teach online.
Working with schools, professors, and students over the past six months has taught us that online education has an incredible power to bring people together and open up doors that might otherwise remain shut. If you haven’t already, read Laura Cushing’s first-person essay of how online courses have given her the opportunity to learn more than she ever thought was possible.
We are deeply inspired by these stories — your feedback continues to help shape the evolution of our course experience.
We’re learning along with you, and thank you for being part of this!
Happy learning!
Daphne, Andrew, and your Coursera team
I probably have only two or three more posts in me about MOOCs generally and World Music in particular. This is one that I’ve been working on off and on while the course was wrapping up. I don’t know if it’s really done, but I decided to go ahead and post it because the World Music/Coursera people sent around a survey about the course. Here’s the link to it; I’m not sure if just anyone can get to it or not. Most telling to me was the last question: “If Penn hosted a World Music Extension experience based on the priorities you selected, what rate (US $) would you be willing to pay to enroll?” The answer space was a sliding scale going from $0 to $500. This email also said “we are working on grades; and the certificate system, which comes from Coursera, is currently being revised, so information about certificates will probably come later next week.” So wish me luck on that.
So, while I wait to find out if I’m “certifiable” from this class or not, I contemplate the basic “what did we learn here” questions of this experience. What exactly was this? What would I pay for this? And is this the future of education? I’m tempted to just point everyone to these last lines from the Coen Brother’s black comedy Burn After Reading and leave it at that:
But I will add more for now and I am hoping to write more about this and other MOOC-iness later.
The first thing I’m still wrestling with is just what exactly a MOOC is and what is it for. I can tell you what it’s not: I don’t think this version of a MOOC is “educational” in the sense of having all three of these components:
Learning, or the opportunity for people to learn.
Teaching, which is the active involvement of a person(s) who is in some sense an expert in the subject and process.
Credentialing, which is some sort of evaluation process that others acknowledge and, explicitly or implicitly, has merit and value.
I blogged in more detail about what I mean by all this here back in April. Some may think I’m setting the “educational” bar too high, but I’m trying to get away from the way the word is casually tossed around, especially in the press reports that have suggested that MOOCs are the next big thing.
Okay, learning: yes, World Music was clearly a “learning opportunity,” but so what? Learning is really the easiest part of education because learning opportunities are everywhere; almost any content provides it. I learn a lot from watching cooking shows or DIY home improvement shows on TV, not to mention listening to NPR or browsing web sites or even reading those old world content management systems, books. The World Music MOOC provided learning for learning’s sake/learning as “infotainment,” and it’s a resource for the motivated self-learner/student of life, which is fine. Creating content that people can learn from is easy and it scales well. So yes, there was learning– or at least the potential of learning.
How about teaching? Not really. All the lectures and graduate student discussions were recorded months ago and there was minimal interaction from Professor Muller and her grad assistants in the class. Teaching, as opposed to content, requires some give and take exchange with an expert who has enough experience with that content to at a minimum guide the student interaction and make some judgement of student success. This teacher/expert presumably is a human, though, as I was discussing with a colleague the other day, maybe a teacher could theoretically be a machine with enough artificial intelligence to anticipate and respond to questions from the student. To the extent that students can teach each other (and I think that’s limited), Coursera didn’t work because the discussion forums were almost useless.
And just to head this off at the pass: yes, it is possible for one to “teach one’s self” how to do something just from the content, but as I wrote about back in May playing off of some posts from Aaron Barlow, few of us are “true autodidacts,” self-motivated or self-disciplined enough to do this effectively. Most people who begin something as “self-taught” eventually seek the help of some teacher or other expert. Also, I think there’s a limit to what one can teach themselves: learning something procedural like computer code or how to juggle (I taught myself to juggle when I was in middle school) probably lends itself to self-instruction more than learning about a more abstract concept, like “World Music,” or learning something procedural but with a high degree of difficulty and complexity, like surgery.
So to continue the cooking show analogy: sure, I can learn a lot about how to make Linguine Con le Vongole and Penne Puttanesca by watching Mario Batali on Malto Mario,but that’s different from Mario actually teaching me to make this stuff– answering my questions about measurements, checking on my work, offering me pointers, etc. And by the way, I think this is true with even this segment of the show, where Mario actually does something closer to teaching than happened in World Music in that he actually interacts with people who are there while he’s cooking, answering some questions and explaining some finer points of techniques. But he’s teaching them, not me.
Again, content scales easily and teaching doesn’t, which is why education is still expensive.
And just to repeat again a reoccurring theme: specifically with “World Music,” the production values of the video lecturers and graduate student talks in this class were piss-poor. This whole experience could have been dramatically improved if there was even a tiny bit more time and thought put into how the course should be presented. I think the usefulness of Khan Academy is highly over-rated, but at least this guy can give a presentation. These videos and a few other really well-done instructional sites (like Instructables or Code Academy) can come pretty close to teaching, particularly when dealing with very procedural instruction. But it still ain’t teaching, and Sal Khan has made it clear in a number of places that he sees his materials as a supplement for actual teaching and not a replacement for teaching.
I think MOOCs could provide something closer to what I mean by teaching if there was less “freeze-dried” lecture content and a lot more interaction between the professor and graduate assistants and students. I think this is possible because even though all the hype around MOOCs have focused on the large number of students who sign up for these courses, the real number to focus on is the number of students who are active in the class. So in the case of World Music, we were never really talking about 30,000 students, but rather 3,000. I suspect that ratio is pretty consistent across these different MOOCs.
Of course, even if the class were “only” 3,000 students, effective teaching would take more than one professor and one or two GAs. In other words, you still have the problem of scale, again bringing us back to the reason why universities have lecture classes in the hundreds and not thousands and why universities employ graduate assistants and other part-time labor to supplement (well, in many ways surpass, but that’s another story) the labor of faculty.
Credentialing? Clearly not there yet. The peer rating/review of short writing assignments failed for lots of reasons I’ve already covered and which I am hoping to write about in more detail later. But if I were to sum it up in a long sentence: because there was no instructor involvement, because there was no reason for students to take the process seriously, and because the peer rating instrument itself was so poor, the results of the process were meaningless. If the Coursera people came to me asking for advice on what to do about this, I’d tell them to abandon the short writing assignments entirely and to focus instead on measuring student writing and involvement in the class with the discussion forums. To me, that’s a much better level of judging engagement with the material and it would be a lot easier for peers to rate. As it was, there was no accountability in those forums, and as a result, the discussion was scattered, meaning that to the extent that there was any assessment process for the class, it was all based on this heavily flawed peer rating of short writing assignments, the quizzes that popped up immediately after videos, and a final that repeated many of those quiz questions.
This missing credentialing piece is critical. Unless you believe that there have been tens of millions of dollars invested in Coursera et al for quasi-charitable reasons, the goal of these corporate MOOCs is to have them be worth something to consumers (both students and other stakeholders, notably employers), to have them “count” in the real world.
My guess is that Coursera is working on two angles to get over the credentialing problem. The long-term/long-con business plan is to convince the world that corporate MOOCs are in and of themselves valuable, thus bypassing entirely the whole college degree process. Who needs a bachelors degree–especially in jobs where a college degree might not be needed at all (e.g., sales) or fields where people already succeed without degrees (e.g., computer coding, especially for various web/mobile apps) –when you can take a curriculum of sorts through these different platforms, and/or when you can demonstrate what it is you have learned/know via various MOOC certificates?
Given that a college degree has been the ticket to the white-collar class in the U.S. and beyond for quite some time and with higher education, we’re talking about international institutions that have been around for hundreds of years, I think this is a very long con indeed. So the more realistic and shorter-term goal seems to be to get these classes to count as transfer credit in some fashion– general education, for example. As CHE reported, Colorado State is going to accept a Udacity Intro to Computer Science course on building a search engine as credit after the faculty reviewed it, and according to this CHE piece, edX is planning on offering proctored exams for some of their MOOCs; the exams will cost $89. This could be a good deal for students if it worked, much like the CLEP test. (By the way, one of my other MOOC-oriented posts is going to be on that Intro to Computer Science course, but I need to monkey around with that one a little more first).
But there are at least three catches.
First, getting these classes to count as real college credit depends on the educational system that MOOCs are supposedly trying to disrupt. This strikes me as awkward: “We think we can provide a better education to students than traditional universities, so we want traditional universities to let students take our courses and then have you count them for credit at your university for a degree.” Rrrright. Second, as every transfer student knows, the portability of credits from one institution to another varies wildly. It’s all fine and good that Colorado State is contemplating taking that Udacity Intro to Computer Science course, but if there are only a handful of institutions that follow suit, that doesn’t do much good.
Third, I’m afraid that ultimately the real impact of corporate MOOCs on higher education– if they are even modestly successful at granting actual college credit for their courses at some universities– is that both the explicit and implicit distance in the value of degrees from different types of universities will only widen the already existing gap. As it is, there is a bias against online versus “real” classroom experiences, which is what is so maddening about Coursera and the elite institutions “discovering” online teaching in the first place, as if this hasn’t been going on at places like EMU for years. If we add MOOCs into the mix, I think that simply expands the already existing gap between elite and non-elite universities.
In fact, just to be overly cynical for a moment, this is perhaps the main reason why elite institutions have gotten into the corporate MOOC business in the first place. It’s a good PR and “branding” move for them to offer up some content for free, recognizing that content in and of itself– especially without teaching and credentialing– isn’t worth anything to their bottom line. At the same time, if corporate MOOCs take off, then that only rarifies all that much more the elite sort of instruction at the top of the heap, making the rich even richer. Seems like a win-win for the likes of Stanford, UPenn, and U of M.
But I digress.
Even if I can’t exactly come up with an answer to the “what exactly was this” question (other than to say that it is not “educational” per se), I can come up with an answer to the “how much would you pay for this” question: $0. Judging from what I’ve seen in the discussion on the Facebook group for the class, I’d say that my answer is in the general price range of my fellow students (though one went as high as $25). In fact, now that I think of it, I’d say that Coursera has more or less the same problem as Facebook: I know lots of people who are wildly enthusiastic and near obsessive users of Facebook, but I don’t know anyone who would actually pay for it. Content (aka learning) in and of itself has very little value on the internet.
That said, if there was a test or certification that you could use to get general education credit transferable to a community college or a university as part of some other more traditional degree program, that’d probably be worth something. I don’t know if that’s a multimillion dollar business or not, but I am awfully confident that it is not “the future of higher education:” that is, maybe these kinds of MOOC, CLEP-like tests/classes will be a part of the system, but I find it extremely unlikely that they will replace the system.
And if MOOCs do replace higher education as we know it, well, then I want out– or rather, I suspect the administration will be kicking me out.
Well, that’s it: I’ve reached the end of Coursera’s World Music, and it seems like over the last seven weeks the MOOC talk in CHE and InsideHigherEd and other places has done nothing but get even more out of hand. I was going to catalog/index all of the articles I’ve seen one way or the other on MOOC-madness just this past month and then have a “grand statement” on what I think of MOOCs and all MOOC-iness. But it was all proving too much for one post, so I’ll concentrate here on just the end/last week of World Music.
This last week of class was on the Buena Vista Social Club specifically and Cuban music generally, and I appreciated this as a close-out to the class. I learned a few new things about Cuban music and it’s fun listening to it– I have several examples in my iTunes. Of course, all the previous problems of the class were still there: the bad public access quality production of the videos, the unrehearsed lectures, the rambling grad student responses, and the generally thin content. Largely absent by now were students in the conversation forums specifically about this week’s materials. I would guestimate there were about a total of 200 or fewer posts last week, which isn’t a lot for a class that supposedly has thousands of students. The Facebook page for the class has been a lot more active lately, largely made up of fans and world music enthusiasts more than students, if that makes sense.
There was one more peer review based on the week six unit on the Kalahari Bushmen. As I posted here last week, I rushed to complete the assignment and I wrote something very short not based on the material (I was supposed to watch and respond to a movie but I skipped it) but rather based on what I thought “the teacher would want.” And guess what? I got a 9 out of 1o! Here’s what my student reviewer peers wrote:
student2 → Interesting general conclusion but lack sufficient information about your argument. You think Voter ID laws are racist, you may be right but “half” the USA politicians claim you are wrong. Give some reason for us to believe you, explain why or link to a website link or two that explains. Are you saying building a border fence was racist? Again, you may be right, but tell why we should believe you instead of the officials who say “no, it was for national security.” Is all use of art for money “selling out/buying in”? The essay is a good outline of points, but your arguments need development and support.
student3 → Well written, although you seem angry about it. Relax! The class is almost over.
student4 → You make a good point about the “fine line!” I’d like to have seen more of your personal reaction added to your essay. Do you think it is right/wrong, good/bad, etc. for each of the examples you gave. You showed how the question is not simple, and yet we still need to evaluate it critically and form an opinion!
student5 → great piece – no reference to the video clip that was required for that question, though.
I’ll return to the problems of Coursera peer review in another post that’s coming, but as a student, I am once again left with the feeling that it just doesn’t matter what I write. Garbage in, garbage out.
Instead of a writing prompt, this week featured a 100 multiple choice question final. I got a 73. I didn’t exactly study for this test and I am sure some simple review of the stuff we had done before would have probably helped my score quite a bit. It was also a test fairly easy to cheat on take advantage of the open book/open note format of things. I had plenty of time to do some Google searches for some of the questions that were stumping me, and if I had thought about it ahead of time, I probably could have opened up parts of the course in another browser to look stuff up as I was taking the test. Plus, if I’m understanding things right, it appears that I could even retake the exam if I wanted to, which seems like quite the advantage, especially if I had saved the original exam.
Anyway, I’m not quite sure what my grade means yet, though I am hoping I am going to get some kind of certificate I can print out and put up in my office. Or maybe a t-shirt that says “I survived to the end of World Music” on it.
Just this morning, the Coursera (or the folks at UPenn running the class, I’m not sure which) sent around an email with some interesting stats on the course. Here’s what they sent (with a few comments from me along the way):
Users Total Registered Users 36295 Active Users Last Week 3859
So, just over 10 percent of the students stuck it out until the end. I don’t care how much a course does or doesn’t cost, a teacher who had that kind of drop-out rate in anything approaching a “normal” setting would be likely looking for a job.
Video Lectures
Total Streaming Views 206621
Total Downloads 67884
# Unique users watching videos 22018
I’m not sure what this means, but I think it means that videos were watched by 22,000 people, though obviously, a lot fewer people at the end were watching them.
Total video submissions 353999 # Unique users submitted (video ) 9822
These numbers seem kind of out of whack for me: how doe they get 350,000 quiz submissions from just shy of 10,000 quiz submitters? Maybe that’s 350,00 quiz answers?
Peer Assessments Total Submissions 8077 # Unique users who submitted 2731
Total Evaluations 45242 # Unique users who evaluated 2191
Again, less than 10 percent of the students who were “enrolled” in the class participated in the peer review process.
Discussion Forums
Total Threads 8045
Total Posts 17339 Total Comments 5419
Total Views 243711
Total Reputation Points 6947
Given the number of students who started , this isn’t a lot– like an average of 1.5 comments per student just assuming that we count the students who finished. Just to give a point of comparison on the opposite side of the spectrum: a couple years ago, I taught an online graduate course called “Rhetoric of Science and Technology.” It had (I think) 13 students and there were a total of 884 comments in the discussions, or (if you include me in the mix) an average 60 or so comments per student. That’s the difference between an online class where the discussion matters and counts for the grade and one where it doesn’t– not to mention the difference between an online course of a manageable size where students are actually involved in the learning process and a MOOC.
So for now, I’m left with two thoughts. First, the reporting on the number of students enrolling in these MOOCs is pure hype and nearly meaningless. As I mentioned last week, what is clearly happening here is 30,000 (or so) people signed up for World Music the same way that people sign up for lots of internet services, just to check it out. It’s not just that they didn’t stick with it; they never intended to stick with it.
Second, I am just baffled and puzzled as to why this attrition rate isn’t being described in the media as one of the reasons why MOOCs are a failure as a solution to the educational crisis. EMU only graduates about 30-40% of the students within five years of starting their degree and this low graduation rate is considered a major part of the crisis in higher education; 90% of students who started World Music dropped out (and there is no reason to believe that these are atypical results) and Coursera is being trotted out as the solution to the higher education crisis.
WTF?
More MOOC summing up is coming, along with news (I hope) about a certificate or a t-shirt or something.
Jeez, MOOC-mania is busting out all over! I was going to begin this post by posting a ton of links to other sites and references to MOOCs that have cropped up in the last week, but there are just too many. If this is the “year of the MOOC,” last week felt like the week of the articles about the year of the MOOC. But two resources I’ll point to that also point to a bunch of other links:
Then there was the MOOC MOOC, a massive (though in this case, I think it was less than 1000 people) open online course about MOOCs that lasted a week. I unfortunately didn’t have time to actually participate– day job, class I’m teaching, World Music class I’m taking, etc.– but if you follow that link and then check out each of the day’s activities, you’ll see lots more info and links.
As is so often the case in education, what’s emerging for me is a simplistic and reductive view of “good MOOCs” versus “bad MOOCs.” And to give credit where credit is due, “Good MOOCs, Bad MOOCs” was the title of a pretty insightful column from Marc Bouquet. Good MOOCs are characterized by the socialization and openness of learning (and learning for the sake of learning is in and of itself its own reward), they highlight how knowledge is constructed by participants, and good MOOCs are more or less run by people out of the goodness of their hearts as experiments of one sort or another– like the MOOC MOOC. I don’t think anyone in the Good MOOC world is thinking “we’re going to make a lot of money at this.”
Bad MOOCs are also social and open, but they present knowledge as a product apparently possessed by the elite (why else would Coursera focus on partnering with the most prestigious American universities?) but also as something that can be delivered from an expert to students, and ultimately those students can somehow be tested or credentialed as having gained enough mastery to have that learning experience validated by others. I don’t want to speak too much about the sincerity of Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, but it seems a given that if you’re going to raise $20+ million in venture capital, someone somewhere is thinking “we’re going to make a lot of money at this.”
It’s all more complicated than that of course, and I don’t want to rely too heavily on the caricature. The good MOOC people ain’t all good and the bad MOOC people ain’t all bad. But as is often the case in education when innovation and corporate values rub up against each other, the conflict is about how teaching ought to take place (and fundamentally the elimination of most faculty from the process) and how (and if!) we can reliably and ethically credential students on their experiences in MOOCs. Good MOOCs are not (or at least not much of) a threat to the status quo, whereas bad MOOCs are.
Anyway, on to week 4 of World Music after the break. Last week’s topic was on pygmy music, though it really is beginning to feel like less about music and more about the anthropology/sociology of different peoples and how that’s all tied up into geopolitics. Professor Muller spent most of her lecturing time discussing the ways in which the Pygmy people have been misused and abused by colonizers up until this day– even the word we use to describe this group of nomads in central Africa, “Pygmies,” is a slur that the people themselves don’t use. But there was very little time spent on the musical traditions of these folks, and the only connection to a western tradition (which I think in some ways is what defines “World Music” in the first place) are the appropriation of some Pygmy-styled techniques in Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” (it’s the kind of whistling sound at the beginning) and in the Madonna song “Sanctuary.” On the one hand, I totally understand why so much of the discussion and the class is about these non-musical issues, and I’m grateful for it too. I didn’t know that much about the Pygmies before this. On the other hand, I kind of thought that in a class called “World Music” that there would be more examples and discussion of the music.
There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (or maybe it’s just on the web site, I’m not sure) called “Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses.” I’m quoted in it as is one of the frequent commentators here on this MOOC stuff, Laura Gibbs. You can go read it if you want and other than the one issue I raise in the comments, I think that Jeff Young’s take on this in the article is pretty accurate.
I’m guessing I’ll be writing more about the whole peer review thing this week(end?) as part of my ongoing MOOC-iness, but three other things I’ll mention for now:
“Dozens” of plagiarism incidents out of 39,000 students (this is how many are in the class the article is about) is actually not that bad, when you think about it.
The short writings that I have peer reviewed as part of my participation in the World Music class so far seem to be both not plagiarized and surprisingly earnest in addressing the assignment. Mind you, that’s a small sample– like 8 examples– but still.
Plagiarism in these writing assignments is only as important as the class itself. In other words, if the value of the Coursera credit/certificate/badge/gold star/fuzzy feeling is ultimately high (for example, it actually counts as honest-to-goodness college credit toward a degree at the University of Pennsylvania or wherever), then this is an enormous problem. If the value of the experience is not (for example, it’s all about sharing in a personal learning experience with a community of other interested people and that’s it), then it’s not. Not be too clichéd about it all, but in the “personal growth” scenario, cheaters only hurt themselves.
Last week was a tricky week for me in the World Music MOOC because I do have a day job that required some attention, it was a busy week of teaching in my SOPOC and I was traveling (I began writing this post from a family gathering in Iowa). So I am falling behind. I missed the deadline for peer evaluations (again), I have really been having a hard time keeping up with the video lectures, and I just barely got my assignment in on time.
But this has all been quite useful for me to think about as a teacher.
When my ego and/or self sense of importance is unchecked, I am certain that the classes I teach are critically important to my students, at least as important to them as they are to me. The reality is students (like all people) have complicated lives that involve families, jobs, distractions, surprises, and a whole lot more than my their classes. So the moral of the story for me this week is it is probably useful to remember that usually my students have other things to do besides worrying about me.
This week has been about Tuvan throat singing, which is this weird kind of tonal singing/sound from a region in central Asia sort of between Mongolia and Russia. A bit more on that and more on the logistics of the class below, but I have to say that the earworm I’ve been rolling over and over in my head this week is a song by Dan Bern song “Go To Sleep.” Here’s a link to the MySpace version of it (go figure, there is still a MySpace!); here are the lyrics I’m thinking of:
Enough of this throat singing already
If you wanna sing two notes at once
Why don’t you do like everyone else
Get a multi-track machine
Lay ’em down separately
Make a little harmony
Maybe a bass track
Like one from the Rolling Stones
None of this long lost art
This archaic stuff
Go out and make something
And once again, here I am near the lake, checking in on my online class (which I like to think of as SO-POC– that is, a “small online partly open class” because anyone out there is welcome to visit, join the discussion, do the assignments, whatever, but I won’t grade your work or give you credit if you aren’t enrolled at EMU), and checking my email when I see this from The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses.”
CHE obtained a copy of the contract between Coursera and one of its partners, the University of Michigan. Of course, even what’s here is kind of a “let’s throw stuff against the wall and see if it sticks” sort of plan/model. To quote:
Coursera is following an approach popular among Silicon Valley start-ups: Build fast and worry about money later. Venture capitalists—and even two universities—have invested more than $22-million in the effort already. “Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow,” says Daphne Koller, the company’s other co-founder, who is also a professor at Stanford.
Certificates, which a student would purchase some kind of certificate or badge or whatever (presumably after completing a course, which is a different model than tuition, which is paid up-front) that isn’t actually credit but which the student post some place. As in on their LinkedIn account, they have a “badge” that says they passed Listening to World Music. (BTW, since that one starts in 3 days and I like world music, I might sign up).
Secure assessments, which is basically the same thing as certification– students would take (and pay for) some kind of test.
Employee recruiting. This one is kind of interesting; basically, this would allow potential employers to “data mine” Coursera looking for successful students based not on a degree but on skills students might demonstrate through one of their courses.
Employee or University Screening. I think what this means is that if I was applying for a job where my knowledge of World Music was critical, a company could use my score in the “Listening to World Music” course as a way of making a hiring decision. It also means that if a university wanted to give an entering student a waiver for something, they might be able to use performance in that class– in other words, I wouldn’t get credit at such-and-such a university maybe, but I wouldn’t have to take a gen ed class in World Music. Or something.
Just to stop here for a second: it seems to me that each of these business plans depends on the rest of the business world decides that it is going to validate and/or accept MOOCs as a legitimate educational/certifying enterprise. Given the current reliance of the corporate world for a bachelors degree as an entry point into white collar jobs, that seems like kind of a bold assumption to me.
Anyway, back to the list:
Human-provided or manual grading. To quote, “Company will provide access to (paid) human tutoring, grading, or other forms of human academic support.” I’m not sure I understand this, but I think it means that maybe students would take these courses for free but they’d pay some kind of tutor.
Corporate/university enterprise model. Basically, Coursera would sell access to its courses to companies for in-house training and/or to “non-University academic institutions (e.g. community colleges)” (swear to God, that is a quote) with the goal of offering a high quality course at a lower cost than these non-University institutions.
So, let’s dwell on this for a moment. The first idea is corporate clients would contract with Coursera for training. This isn’t that far-fetched to me, but “training” is not the sort of thing that elite institutions do, and it certainly isn’t what’s likely to happen in that World Music course. Rather, most businesses are looking for employee training along the lines of what’s going on lynda.com or similar sites– and by the way, those places are making money and they rely on an individual instructor/contractor model, not an elite university model.
The second idea is to sell these “quality courses” to community colleges. First, the way this is presented in this contract is patronizing at best, but second and more important, there’s already a large enterprise doing this at community colleges and universities alike. It’s called “the textbook industry.” Now, Coursera courses might turn out to be great, but like textbooks, they don’t teach themselves.
Sponsorship, which is simply running ads along the classes. I don’t see how that makes anyone a ton of money, though that’s Google’s business model.
Tuition, which is basically reverting to the model that exists for higher education right now.
Two last thoughts here. First, I am certainly not a business person and the people starting this all seem like smart cookies to me. But I have to say this is starting to look like pets.com
Second, I think this passage from the CHE piece is spot on:
When I (meaning Jeffrey Young, the CHE writer) showed the Coursera contract to Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies, he found it “ironic” that major universities are embracing online education when they have been dismissive of earlier efforts by for-profit companies like the University of Phoenix.
“These are two of the most arrogant types of institutions—Silicon Valley companies intersecting with these elite academic programs,” he says. “Neither of them considers that anyone else has come to this place before they’ve arrived. They say, We’re here now, so now it’s sort of legitimate and for real.”
I guess time will tell if that arrogance is going to pay off.
I’m quasi-vacationing this week (that is, I’m away from home at a lovely vacation spot near Traverse City, but I am still teaching online and doing a ton of work stuff so am therefore not really “unplugged” from it all), and while I haven’t been keeping up with my RSS feed too religiously, it sure seems like the MOOC stuff just keeps on coming. For example:
In the New York Times comes “Universities Reshaping Education on the Web.” MOOCs are discussed as a “tsunami,” a “game changer,” an experiment too big to ignore, despite the fact that there is no evidence that these things will work, there’s no decent business model, and there isn’t even a good definition here as to what a MOOC actually is.
Coursera is adding a dozen more institutions, and Audrey Watters rounds up some other MOOC news.
The University of Washington is trying to offer “enhanced MOOCs” that might ultimately grant credit. Or not.
UVa is getting involved in this and apparently not getting involved early enough was one of the reasons why their board fired the president. Well, before unfiring her.
Alan “cog dog” Levine has a lovely song about all this (and the graphic I have borrowed above, too). And of course the great Stephen Downes links to smart stuff here and here.
It goes on and on and on! Anyway, a few quick thoughts for now:
I am far from against online education or incorporating new tools into learning, and I am also not at all against trying to innovative and even seemingly counter-intuitive approaches to pedagogy. These kinds of free-for-all, DIY, learning for the sake of learning communities are awesome in and of themselves. But they’re not a good way to “grant credit,” they’re not a way to pay the bills of higher education, and even the enthusiasts haven’t gotten that part of this MOOC thing worked out.
This is looking more and more like the 90s tech bubble where all of a sudden tech companies were claiming that they didn’t need to worry about sustainability of making a profit anymore. Or maybe worse, it’s looking like tulips. The thing that’s troubling to me about all this (besides the fact that the bean counters/board members of universities are the ones getting sucked into this and they control the money) is we might not even get to the potential good application of MOOCs before the bubble bursts and/or the administrators are on to a different craze.
When I mentioned all this stuff to my wife (who I was surprised hadn’t heard of this), she mentioned to me the definition of “mook” in popular culture: a contemptible, incompetent, and even stupid person. A different spelling for sure, but is there something about the similar pronunciation?
My 1996 dissertation was called “The Immediacy of Rhetoric” and it was an examination of the impact of emerging and largely digital communication technologies (particularly the Internet, but television and lots of other things fit here too) on the ways rhetorical situations work. I use the word “immediacy” to suggest the double-edged sword of these kinds of situations. On the one hand, they have the potential of closeness and even intimacy since so many of the usual filters of message, rhetor, and audience collapse. On the other hand, immediate situations are also sites of chaos and confusion precisely because of these lack of filters. That’s the very short-hand/elevator-pitch version.
Two other things I’ll mention. First, somewhere in The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault says that when there are disruptive moments in history (I can’t remember the exact quote right now, but I think he and/or his translator even uses the term “rupture”), one of the first things we have to do to make sense of it all is smooth over that rupture with some kind of explanation. Or something like that. And one of the hallmarks that signals the end of discourse regarding a disruption in particular and a situation in general is self-reflexivity on the way the situation itself was communicated. This happens in main stream media all the time.
Second, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how memory works and the things I’ve read that suggests true multitasking is impossible– that is, we can’t really process two or more tasks at once, but we can shift between multiple tasks very quickly, often in a fraction of a section. I haven’t worked this out in my own head yet, but I think this is one of the reasons why that even with all of the speed, intimacy, and chaos possible with various immediate and fluid situations, we still ultimately make meaning of a rhetorical event afterwords in the same way we make meaning out of pretty much everything else, and we still need, desire and highly value a point of fixed closure– thus the ongoing role of articles, books, and similarly fixed vessels. Interaction, exchange, and commentary are all fine and good as part of a process, but we value (in all senses of that word– as a cultural value, an intellectual value, money, etc.) the last and fixed word.
So, the reporting of the Obamacare decision as an example of immediacy:
I found out about the June 28, 2012 decision while driving through West Virginia and Annette told me. She had found out via her iPhone while doing a reading of Facebook. So that’s a a simple simple example of how current and future technologies change the potential to interact in rhetorical situations: absent these tools, digital rhetoric/immediate situations aren’t possible. That might seem just obvious, though maybe not. I am reminded of a discussion I had with my dissertation advisor about a chapter describing the context of the internet in 1996. She didn’t think it was necessary because how much could change, really? After all, there were already 30 million users and Netscape; how much further could this internet thing go?
In any event, tools matter a lot. Of course, that isn’t necessarily uniquely limited to digital tools since the tools and technology of literacy, writing, printing (followed later by mass distribution technologies like affordable paper), audio recordings, film, video, etc. all have had significant technological/toolish impacts on how rhetorical situations in particular and rhetoric in general works. Or even is, since rhetoric was classically limited to live speakers.
A lot of humanities and comp/rhet types (academics in general, perhaps) downplay the role of technology in our thinking about how rhetoric (and just about everything else) works, I think because many/most humanities and comp/rhet types understand the theory a whole lot better than they understand the tools (or coding or “computers” in general). I’ve read lots of stuff in the name of “digital rhetoric” (and don’t get me started with “digital humanities”) where tools and technology are secondary at best, sort of the bottle holding the wine, and technology merely alters the speed and potential proximity of components of a rhetorical situation. But in terms of both digital rhetoric generally and what I mean by immediacy, that’s the whole point: the evolving speed and presence potential of new technologies have been in some sense gradual and historic (the way that postal systems and then the telegraph changed communication in the 19th century comes to mind now), and in other ways radically fast (the way we find out about emerging situations/events via social media on ever-connected smart phones). The tool is not the only thing that matters, but when it comes to contemplating “digital rhetoric” generally or immediacy in particular, it’s critical. Without contemporary and future-looking computer and media technologies, there’s no “digital” in “digital rhetoric.”
One of the first things that happened when the decision was announced (and that I missed because of being in the car and that I recap here with hindsight and memory) was CNN and FOX screwed it up. As NPR reported, reporters literally ran with paper out of the Supreme Court so that the results could be digitized– that is, broadcast, posted on the web, sent out as audio (analog in how we hear it though digital in how it is posted)– by rhetors (news outlets) to the audience. Dennis Baron had a blog post where he argued that this was an intentional misreading of the decision by these media outlets because they were mislead and because “everyone expected” the decision to be overturned. The media simply reported what they thought they already knew. But I think the right answer is it was sloppy reporting facilitated/enabled by the speed of immediacy, the lack of any interpretation/mediation of events, and the collision of the analog decision (available to reports first as dead trees text) with the digital world. The Supreme Court’s decision Obamacare is of course complex, but it is not misleading. The desire and potential to be the first to report the decision trumped the desire/need to actually be correct.
So again, immediacy is a double-edged sword. Digital media technologies can break down the boundaries between audience, rhetor, message, and interpretation itself, which has the potential for great intimacy. We can “be there” during riots in Egypt as part of the “Arab Spring” through not only major news outlets but thousands of participants in social media and video sites. On the other hand, these immediate situations also have the potential for great chaos and confusion precisely because of the lack of boundaries that define interpretation and expertise. Again, think of the chaos of the Arab Spring, especially through the filter of media, and the confusion of being flat-out wrong as was the case with the decision on Obamacare.
Speed matters a lot, too. Clearly that’s what is at work with the misreporting from CNN and FOX. Sure, this is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened and “scooping” the competition has been the hallmark of journalism dating back to its most yellow days. But the rapidness/simultaneity that is cause and necessity of digital media makes the speed all the more important.
Very shortly after the reports emerged, the efforts at closure (and to seal the rupture in the narrative) began. It’s an understatement to describe the decision as a surprise. Shortly after Annette shared the news via her iPhone, I turned on the radio. All I could find out in the middle of nowhere West Virginia was a conservative talk show, and clearly, the decision was an enormous rupture for these folks. The fact that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal minority on the court was inexplicable to the commentators and callers.
But within hours, explanations to close and reconcile the rupture emerged (and they continue, too). One theory was that Roberts’ decision based not on the commerce clause but on taxation was in reality his effort to give conservatives ammunition in the fall elections, and conservative commentators immediately changed their attack from being about “individual freedom and choice” to “the largest tax in history.” Quasi-conspiracy theorists suggested that Roberts changed his mind at the last minute, that Justice Anthony Kennedy was pressuring him to switch back, and that this last minute switch is evident in the text from the various decisions. Another theory suggests that Roberts made his decision in the name of protecting his legacy as Chief Justice in particular and the institution of the Supreme Court in general. And so on.
Interestingly enough, I have yet to hear a commentator on either the left or the right suggest that Roberts made the decision he made based on his interpretation of the law. Given that a lot of law professors thought the law was constitutional before the decision, perhaps the real answer is that Roberts did his job as a scholar of the law and a judge. But that account doesn’t explain how a conservative (Republican) judge could possibly side with a liberal (Democrat) policy, which is why I suspect this explanation has been largely discarded.
Neither speed nor the seeking of closure are uniquely digital, though I think they’re altered by the digital in some interesting ways and I think they are inescapable in digital environments. Even as we celebrate the fluidity of possibilities in digital rhetorical spaces, we crave and value in all senses of those terms the closure, finality, and even authority that comes from “print” (either the old-fashioned paper kind or the electronic new-fashioned kind exemplified by eBooks and electronic journals).
I don’t say this to dismiss digital rhetoric; I say this to simply point out that there still must be some unique value to books given that is where most of the scholarship on digital rhetoric has appeared.
Second, as I mention indirectly in this post about Daniel Kahneman, everything we describe about rhetoric (digital or otherwise) is definitionally a memory. This post– which I’ve been writing off and on for over a week now– is an effort to examine a specific event that I see as demonstrating characteristics of immediacy, but like any other analysis, it takes place in hindsight. We cannot really think about digital rhetoric as we experience it.
Anyway, a rambling what digital rhetoric means to me. I’m anxious to get back to reading others’ thoughts on this.
Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are not credit-bearing. But a pathway to college credit for the courses already exists — one that experts say many students may soon take.
That scenario combines the courses with prior learning assessment — a less-hyped potential “disruption” to traditional higher education — which is the granting of credit for college-level learning gained outside the traditional academic setting.
Here’s how the process could work: A student successfully completes a MOOC, like Coursera’s Social Network Analysis, which will be taught this fall by Lada Adamic, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. The student then describes what he or she learned in that course, backing it up with proof, in a portfolio developed with the help of LearningCounts.org or another service, perhaps offered by a college.
There’s also this handy flow-chart:
This isn’t a bad idea in theory and maybe even in practice. It kind of reminds me of the old days when future lawyers went and studied to take the Bar Exam without needing to go through that pesky law school business. I believe this is how Lincoln became a lawyer.
But it doesn’t take much to spot some potential problems, too:
“Credit for prior experience” is essentially the formula used by diploma mills to justify their fake degrees– the “PhD in life,” so to speak. So until that well-deserved bias is overcome, getting actual college credit from an actual college will be tricky.
The problem with prior experience is you have to actually have prior experience. I of course do encounter students at EMU who come into classes I teach with a lot of worthy prior experience. Just the other day, a new grad student asked me if she could get college credit for her prior experience as a teacher (the answer was no). But for the most part, the reason why students come to college in the first place is they don’t have prior experience. So while some combination of MOOC/prior experience thing might be useful for adults returning to college after years in the workplace, it isn’t going to be too useful for most of our students. And by the way, it’s the younger, more traditional college students who are going deepest into student loan debt.
What exactly would this credit “count” for, anyway? Take the example of the course mentioned in the introduction: that Social Network Analysis course looks like it might be pretty cool, but what exactly would we count that as at a place like EMU? It probably wouldn’t correspond to anything in the Written Communication major, and I don’t think it would count here as a gen ed class. So at best, someone could transfer this class as just “credit,” and any transfer student can tell you that that’s not very useful.
Even this article says that the process someone would have to go through to make MOOC credit count might not be worth it, “that students might decide it’s easier to retake an equivalent course at a traditional college than to seek prior-learning credit for a MOOC.”
