Category: MOOCs

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The end of the Duke Composition MOOC: again, what did we learn here?

I have a boatload of MOOC reading links I feel compelled to write about, but I want to write about about the just ended English Composition I: Achieving Expertise.  Just the other day, I received what I suspect will be the last email from the folks at the Duke Comp MOOC I’ve been in for the last 12 weeks.  Here’s what it said (in part):

Congratulations are in order for the 1289 students who earned a Statement of Accomplishment for English Composition I: Achieving Expertise. About half of those students had a score of 85% or higher. As such, I decided to award a Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction to those students.

Let me pause there for a second: in the first of many updates/announcements from Denise Comer at the beginning of this MOOC, we were told there were over 60,000 “students” “enrolled;” in this last announcement, we learn that 1289 earned the “statement of accomplishment” (aka “completion”) for the course.  That’s just over 2%. Oh sure, the very definition of what counts as a student and what it means to enroll in a MOOC is fuzzy, but even by most MOOC standards, that’s poor.

But let me back up a bit:

Continue reading “The end of the Duke Composition MOOC: again, what did we learn here?”

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Three MOOC readings and the (almost) end of English Composition I

The end of English Composition I from Coursera/Duke is near, and I’ll be sure to write something up about that in the next week or so– probably after the Computers and Writing Conference coming up this weekend. The short version for now is it has been a struggle for me to keep up at the end, both in terms of the way in which the class has been paced/the work has piled up, but also just in terms of basic motivations of the “why am I here in the first place” variety, feelings that surly fuel the dropout rate of these kinds of classes. More on that below when I talk about the Koller et al essay.

But in the meantime and while I get ready to leave town, I thought I’d start a post about three MOOC readings amongst the many that have been piling up around me. As is usually the case, this is mostly useful to me so I can come back later, but some of this might be useful to others too.

But before I even get to that, I am pleased and proud to point to my June 2013 College Composition and Communication piece “MOOC Response about ‘Listening to World Music,'” which is part of a special “symposium” section of the journal. (That link is behind a firewall just for NCTE members, though I might put a version out on this web site sooner than later for everyone to read.) I think it turned out well, though I would have preferred a more interesting title and I’m surprised that this is just two pieces, mine and one by Jeff Rice (his essay is at the same link as mine). What I also think works well is that both Jeff and I are both writing about the “Listening to World Music” MOOC, and I think our commentaries overlap and diverge in interesting ways.

Okay, on to three MOOC readings after the break.

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Composition I goes on and on and on….

I’ve been a lot more busy lately than I was anticipating because this is May and it is supposed to be time off or at least “the quieter time” of the summer seasons at EMU.   But besides teaching an online version of English 444 with some new elements that are keeping me busy, I’ve been going to a lot of meetings/workshops lately– all day Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of last week, half the day yesterday, half the day today, etc..  I’m moving offices this afternoon and tomorrow. I am slowly but surly working with Charlie Lowe on editing/putting together a collection of essays on MOOCs (more on that coming soon I am sure. ) And then there is all of the stuff in “life” around the gardens and the house, too.

So I have an excuse of sorts as to why I’ve had such a hard time keeping up with Composition I, and I really hit a wall with the third assignment, the “Case Study.” More below, but the short version is the whole course is just becoming more and more of a slog. Continue reading “Composition I goes on and on and on….”

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Week 6/7-ish of Composition I

I actually don’t have too much to report about the Duke Composition I class because, well, not much has been going on in it lately– other than me not getting some things done that I should have gotten done.  Nothing is really different; there is just more of it. More on this below, but just to get repetitive: it still feels very anonymous and locked in lost time to me.  When a class like this is taking place face to face and in a small group, the interaction becomes critical to the whole point of the class.  When that’s not there, well, what’s the point?

But first, many MANY MOOC article links and the like, so many I’ll just mostly link here:

  • I was going to post this list of links and my latest response to the Duke MOOC earlier this week, but I got distracted and busy with other things.  I’m glad I waited now because just the other day from CHE comes “Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC” by Steve Kolowich.  Go read the whole thing– well worth it– but to summarize:  faculty in Philosophy at SJSU (which MOOC followers will recall is one of the first universities in the U.S. to very publicly incorporate MOOCs into engineering courses) have refused to teach a philosophy course with an edX MOOC developed by Harvard’s Michael Sandel because the SJSU faculty see MOOCs as a tool to replace them, and they go further to suggest that Sandel and “professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them.” Sandel wrote this response where he claims to know “very little” about what edX was going to do with his course and where he says he “The last think I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.” Three observations/tangents here:
    • Alert readers will recognize that Michael Sandel is the guy that Thomas Friedman has a middle-school crush on in this column from March where he once again spouts off crazy stuff about MOOCs and transforming education.
    • I’ve been raising the concern about MOOCs from elite institutions having the effect of further marginalizing the likes of SJSU (and EMU) for quite some time.
    • You know, I’m not going to say that Sandel is lying in his response where he says he had no idea how edX might try to use his online course materials. But either Sandel is not being entirely truthful or he is not quite as brilliant and broad of a thinker as Friedman and the folks at edX might think.
  • “I’m Failing My MOOC” by John Warner, from Inside Higher Ed and also about the same Duke Composition I course.  I mostly agree with Warner’s main review: the content of the MOOC is okay to pretty good, but “content by itself is a very limited part of what matters in terms of teaching and learning.”
  • “Students Avoid ‘Difficult’ Online Courses, Study Finds” in CHE by Ann Schnobelen. I don’t know if this is really about MOOCs and I don’t know if this is really about the kinds of online courses I teach, but basically, the study (with only 46 students) suggests that students pick classes to take online that they find easy to “teach themselves.” I can see the point and see how it connects with the potential role of MOOCs, but in my experience, most of my students who choose to take classes online because of how it fits into their schedules and lives.  The most typical student in my undergrad online courses are women (single or not) with babies or very young children at home.
  • “MOOCs and the Quality Question” by Ronald Legon, an Inside Higher Ed piece about the evolving nature of MOOCs. The term “MOOC 2.0” comes up, which strikes me as a tad premature.
  • “Of Machine Guns and MOOCs: 21st Century Engineering Disasters” by Pat Lockley at Hybrid Pedagogy.  It’s kind of an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure it’s an argument that really holds together for me.
  • “The War on the Humanities has Three Fronts (Part 1: The Right Wing),” a post on Karen Michalson’s blog.  I think Michalson has a lot of good points here about how things like MOOCs are favored by the right wing (which generally is not that crazy about paying for this pesky “public” education in the first place) and she links to a lot of good stuff. The problem though is she avoids the hard to escape reality that MOOCs in higher ed are getting the most traction in Democrat-thick California.
  • “The World is Not Flat” by Ry Rivard is an interesting (albeit long) InsideHigher Ed piece that makes a pretty compelling argument that the American/English-speaking version of MOOCs might not work in all parts of the world and may represent a sort of “intellectual neo-colonialism (PDF).” That link leads to a book/collection of essays published by the Commonwealth of Learning in 2012 called Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education: Reflections from Practice.  Definitely something worth looking at later: basically, it’s a collection of essays about international trends in Open Educational Resources (OER) and online instruction in higher ed.
  • “Before MOOCs, ‘Colleges of the Air'” by Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez and on the CHE  blog/site about classes that were offered over the radio back in the 1920s and 30s. Good stuff, and another one of those pieces that suggests to me that there might still be a project in me about technologies of teaching before the computer– especially in “distance ed” and “correspondence” formats.  And this quote rings especially true for me:  “The problem of what MOOCs add up remains. While some universities have promised to accept them for credit, in the long term, we may find, as proponents of radio did, that the courses play at best a minor role in helping students earn degrees.”  Oh, and speaking of which:
  • “MOOCs, History, and Context” in Inside Higher Ed where Arthur Levine talks about literally hundreds of years of transformations in higher education to MOOCs in, well, context.
  • “Duke Faculty Say No” also by Ry Rivard and Inside HigherEd.  Faculty at Duke forced the university to back out of a deal with nine other universities to “create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates,” apparently with an outfit called Semester Online and a deal that has been in the works since 2012. And as a reminder of something I’ve mentioned here before: while Duke seems perfectly willing to support its faculty developing MOOCs that might someday be offered for credit at other institutions by Coursera, they are not willing to accept those credits at their own institution.  By the way, Semester Online seems somewhat reasonable to me:  “Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, only a few hundred students were expected to enroll in each course – which would feature a mix of recorded lectures and live discussions – but each course would be divided into sections of no more than 20 students led by an instructor, perhaps a graduate student.”
  • Finally, there’s this strange “map” of the “Major Players” in the MOOC Universe from CHE:

There are many problems with this, but I’ll just mention two for now.  First, Khan Academy is not a MOOC in any way, shape, or form. Not even close. Second, Cathy Davidson is just not that big of a player in the “MOOC-iverse,” and even she says this in this post, which ultimately brings things back to HASTAC.

Okay, after all that (!), a few words about the Duke Composition MOOC:

Continue reading “Week 6/7-ish of Composition I”

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Week 5 of English Composition 1

Before news about Composition I, some MOOC reading round-up:

  • As Nick Carbone pointed out on the WPA-L mailing list, it seems like journalists taking and reporting on MOOCs has become all the rage as of late. Just goes to show you that contemporary journalism gets everything interesting from blogs like this one. From the Larry Gordon of the LA Times comes “Hitting the MOOCs instead of the books” about his experience in a “Principles of Public Health” course from UC Irvine, and in the New York Times A.J. Jacobs’ “Two Cheers for Web U.!”  I think I like the NYTimes piece a bit better because of its humor and snark (favorite line: “The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.”), but both pieces are ultimately pretty fluffy written by good writers who haven’t thought a whole about education since they were in college.
  • “MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online courses” by Audrey Watters on The Digital Shift blog is a solid essay about MOOC stuff, though I have to say it sounds like something I’ve read already.
  • “They mean to win Wimbledon!” is a post by Jonathan Rees that circles around an obscure Monty Python sketch to make the point about MOOCs being this invasive species trying to take over higher education. Interesting enough reading, but….
  • …. the main reason I’m linking to it is because it discusses this essay from Inside HigherEd, “EdX Rejected.” In what is clearly at odds with the race into the MOOC business by so-called elite institutions, Amherst College said thanks but no thanks to edX’s invitation to join their consortium.  It’s a good read that speaks highly of both Amherst’s administration and faculty.  My favorite responses quoted in the piece are from Adam Sitze, who is a law professor.  There’s this:

Sitze, though, compared edX and MOOCs to a litany of failed dotcoms, including other education ventures with similar ambitions. He said MOOCs may very well be today’s MySpace – a decent-looking idea doomed to fail.

“What makes us think, educationally, that MOOCs are the form of online learning that we should be experimenting with? On what basis? On what grounds?,” Sitze said. “2012 was the year of the MOOCs. 2013 will be the year of buyer’s regret.”

and this:

Faculty also worried about edX and its broader effect on higher education, particularly edX’s plans to grade some student writing using only computer programs.

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’ ” Sitze said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Amherst is an unusual institution even among elite institutions, teaching all of its courses in seminars and never with multiple-choice exams. Still, I think it’s an interesting development.

Anyway, on to English Composition 1:

Continue reading “Week 5 of English Composition 1”

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An idea for a CCCCs panel: How about the teachers amongst us who have been MOOC students?

I might have an idea for a proposal for the annual Conference of College Composition and Communication, which will be happening in 2014 in Indianapolis March 19-22.  The theme in the call for proposals (this is a PDF) is “Open | Source(s), Access, Futures,” and it’s right up my alley in a number of different ways. But one of the bulleted prompt/questions is:

How can composition and communication help shift conversations about MOOCs and other kinds of online courses and mobile learning away from market driven fantasies and into pedagogy in the service of a critically engaged democracy?

On the one hand, I am a little leery of proposing something “MOOC-centric” because I think I’ve done enough MOOC writing between this blog and some other things coming out/in the pipeline. And I am sure there will be lots of other panels with titles like “MOOCing Around With the Future:  Open Source(s), Open Access(es).”  On the other hand, MOOCs really are an important topic right now and lord knows I’ve been doing enough writing and thinking about it to have something to say at this conference. And I know I’m not alone on that.

So how about a panel of CCCCs-like people (professors, grad students, non-tenure-track folks of various stripes, etc.) who are in the field in some general sense as a teacher (writing or otherwise) who have taken a MOOC or two as a student and are reporting back on that to this group? I think this might be useful and interesting because I continue to see a lot of articles written from the perspective of people who have (or will) teach in a MOOC environment and a lot of articles written by people who are really just speculating on what MOOCs might be like, but I still haven’t seen that many pieces from students., even when those students aren’t really “students” but more like curious participants.

I’m imagining something more roundtable-like:  that is, rather than 15-20 minute presentations from three people, I think the ideal format for this would be a half-dozen folks offering five to seven minute opening thoughts and then a discussion.

Anyone out there interested in something like this or some other MOOC-like idea?

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English Composition I Week 2 and 3

April is always the cruelest month in academia because it’s near (or, at EMU, is) the end of the semester, which means there are all kinds of last meetings, end of the school year celebrations and recognitions, planning for spring/summer teaching, etc., etc. So I’ve fallen behind in the English Composition I MOOC, though I did manage to throw together write an essay for peer review. Here’s an update on some of what’s been going on in the class, at least for me. It rambles on quite a bit in part because this post (and other posts, of course) are as much notes for future MOOC writing as they are anything else.

Continue reading “English Composition I Week 2 and 3”

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Week 1 in Duke’s “English 1” MOOC

Every time I turn around, there are more good/interesting MOOC articles to post about/write about, but since I am already behind in getting this post up and running, those new articles will have to wait until I post again later this week. But before I get to some thoughts on week one of “English Composition 1: Achieving Expertise,” which is a Coursera MOOC by Duke’s Denise Comer (and a cast of others in various support roles), a bit of a link round-up in MOOC news that I thought was interesting:

  • A whole different/similar thing is happening “down under” with an Australian MOOC Platform.
  • “Who Owns a MOOC?” From Inside Higher Ed, this is about how these Coursera courses might figure into collective bargaining issues and issues of who owns the content of courses. What this article says and what I’ve heard before is the faculty doing these courses are essentially giving away their content and time: that is, Coursera has contracts with universities and not professors, and so the extent to which faculty are beging compensated for this work depends entirely on the institution, and from what I can tell from what I’ve read, most faculty are doing this MOOC thing as an overload because vanity? ego? they want to participate in a new and interesting experiment, or, in the case of Comer’s MOOC, research (see below).

California is a complicated place when it comes to MOOCs since we’re seeing them roll out there as experiments, which obviously has a lot of people nervous. But as I understand it, one of the more unique situations in California is you’ve got thousands and thousands of students out there who can’t even get into the community college system because the classes are full and the waiting lists are long. In other words, MOOCs aren’t the immediate threat that they would be if EMU started taking that credit. At least I don’t think so.

  • Along these lines regarding California and MOOCs:  “A Massively Bad Idea” by Rob Jenkins in CHE, which points out clearly and calmly the simple facts that MOOCs (and online classes, for that matter) are not a good idea for “remedial” classes and/or “underprepared” students.
  • “SXSWedu: A MOOC Love Fest,” which reports on a keynote panel that featured Andrew Ng, edX’s Anant Agarwal, and some of the other usual MOOC suspects. A lot of self-congratulations here, basically.
  • “The Professors Who Make the MOOCs” by Steve Kolowich at CHE. It’s the results of a survey of some of the faculty who have taught MOOCs, and as is typical of surveys like this, the results seem contradictory.  On the one hand, in response to the question “Do you believe MOOCs could eventually reduce the cost of attaining a college degree in general?” 45% said “yes, significantly” and 41% said “yes, marginally.” On the other hand, 72% of those surveyed did not think the course deserved “formal credit” at their institutions and 66% didn’t think their institutions would be granting credit for MOOCs either. So how does a course that doesn’t lead to credit help lower the costs of higher education?
  • But it would appear that a lot of the mainstream media is (slowly but surly) starting to raise some questions about MOOCs as being the solution to everything.  For example, there’s “Open web courses are massively overhyped” by Michael Skapinker from the UK’s Financial Times (with an annoying login process).  The basic three reasons he says MOOCs are overhyped:
    • “What students learn is less important than where they learnt (or didn’t learn) it.” That’s spot-on, IMO, which is why the pecking order in higher education is still alive and well.
    • “It is difficult to concentrate on a video lecture.” Maybe. It’s difficult to concentrate on a badly produced/delivered lecture, especially if that lecture is nothing more than a talking head.
    • “The number of people who attend lectures in person is growing.” And here he’s talking about speakers at festivals and such. I don’t exactly see the connection to MOOCs or regular teaching, but whatever.
  • I’m not sure how I came across this, but from Quartz comes “The dirty little secret of online learning: Students are bored and dropping out” by Todd Tauber. It more or less covers a lot of familiar territory but it’s worth taking a look at even if you’ve been down this MOOC road already because he has a boatload of good links in this piece.
  • Finally I stumbled across it via Stephen Downes: as far as I can tell, Laura Gibbs is already offering some pretty solid feedback and critiques of Duke’s English 1 course, here so far. There’s a Google+ community for the class that I just joined, too; though since I don’t do a whole lot with Google +, I don’t know how active I am likely to be in said community.

Okay, on to Duke’s English Composition 1:

Continue reading “Week 1 in Duke’s “English 1” MOOC”