Category: MOOCs

Back in January, before the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC got started, there was a bit of talk on the WPA-L and Tech-Rhet mailing lists about a bunch of folks from those communities signing up for the course. I know several did. I wonder how many others there finished; anyone?

Anyway, I finished it.  In brief, I was disappointed and it will definitely figure into my part of the roundtable about MOOCs I’m on for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. The title of my contribution for that is “MOOCs: the M is for ‘meh.'”

Continue reading “E-Learning and Digital Cultures ends with a Meh #edcmooc”

Another busy week around here with school and everything else, and I’ll probably post later this week at least one more time about E-learning and Digital Cultures as that MOOC wraps up.  But for now, I thought I’d post a whole bunch of links I’ve come across this week. In no particular order (other than how they’re open in my browser):

• “The History of Distance Learning- Inforgraphic” from something called “eLearning Industry.” A pretty selective “history” but a history nonetheless. Among the fun facts is the claim that in 1728, “The first recorded instance of distance learning occurs in Boston, USA, when a ‘Caleb Phillips’ advertises private correspondence courses in short hand in the Boston Gazette.”
• “New courses from Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley,” which is a blog post from “The Do It Yourself Scholar” about the edX consortium.  I haven’t been paying much attention to edX, but they’ve been focusing heavily in things like computer science, they’re only offering a few courses, and they are a not for profit.
• I learned about this via Stephen Downes, but this link is to Audrey Watters’ blog Hack Education: “Coursera, the other Stanford MOOC Startup, Officially Launches with More Poetry Classes, Fewer Robo-Graders.” This was actually posted back in April 2012 so I’m not quite sure why Downes is posting it now, other than to point out the irony of what Coursera is not doing well.
• From CHE comes “How EdX Plans to Earn, and Share, Revenue From Its Free Online Courses.” Even though EdX is a not for profit, it still has to sustain itself, so they need to make some money. Basically, edX (and is that an e or an E?) is going to charge universities for using its platform, which (the article claims) is in these universities’ interests because of the cost of production of these courses and such. That doesn’t make any sense to me because online courses are basically a web site and I think MIT can host its own web sites.  Two other bits from this piece I’ll quote here:

Both edX models offer higher shares to universities than agreements with Coursera do, but only once edX has collected its minimum payment. Coursera offers universities 6 percent to 15 percent of the gross revenue generated by each of their MOOCs on its platform, as well as 20 percent of the profits generated by the “aggregate set of courses provided by the university.”

There is no minimum payment to Coursera—meaning universities are guaranteed a cut of any revenue for their MOOCs on Coursera, even if the company offers a smaller piece of the pie than edX does.

and…

The details of edX’s financial arrangements do not answer the crucial question of how the MOOCs will make money in the first place—and, in edX’s case, whether courses that do make money will make enough that universities will see a cut.

The organization is still “in start-up mode,” said Mr. Agarwal. “We don’t quite know what the key source of revenue will be.”

• From Inside Higher Ed comes “Twice as Many MOOCs,” which is about both Coursera and edX adding more partners and extending the international reach of MOOCs. Among other things, this article quotes folks from both Coursera and edX that they want these courses to be counted for credit, but even beyond that, the article claims “MOOCs are proving useful” for providing “inverted classroom” experiences (e.g., watch the lectures online, come to class to do stuff) and because “precocious high school students” are using MOOCs to make their college applications stronger. Ah yes, that’s a revenue stream….
• In a related story, CHE’s “Competing MOOC Providers Expand Into New Territory– and Each Other’s,” which points out there are three universities– Rice, U of Toronto, and a place in Switzerland– that have partnered with both Coursera and edX.
• “North Korea launches two MOOCs.”  Funny.
• From Trent Batson comes “Common Misperceptions of MOOCs and Open Learning.” He says he’s trying to take on the NYTimes editorial “The Trouble With Online College,” but I don’t think that’s quite right.  I think Batson is pointing out some of the potential benefits of some of the “open learning” that can come from MOOCs; I think the NYTimes was pointing out that MOOCs (and online teaching generally) are not a solution to the problems of higher “education.” Regardless, this is a good piece I will want to come back to for some upcoming talks because Batson too is reflecting on his experiences as a MOOC student.
• From the blog iterating toward openness comes “MOOCS and Digital Diploma Mills: Forgetting Our History,” which is basically a lot of still very relevant quotes from David Noble. Another good resource for some of these talks and other things about MOOCs and such. I don’t completely agree with Noble, but I think the basic point that Noble’s critique of online teaching 15 years ago is still relevant.
• Stephen Downes’ “Beyond the Buzz, Where are MOOCs Really Going?” which is his critique of a Wired magazine article about MOOCs. As Downes’ points out, Wired doesn’t exactly have a stellar record when it comes to predicting the future, as is the case with MSM generally.
• Finally and also from Stephen Downes, “When MOOCs melt down,” which is about the story behind the story of Richard McKenzie abandoning his MOOC.  Downes is talking about this CHE blog post, “When MOOCs melt down.” The short version is it would appear that McKenzie didn’t exactly quit because of lazy students but rather he was driven out of the MOOC because he was a bad teacher. Downes suggests this shows one of the strengths of Coursera in exposing bad teaching, but I think it is a good example of how Coursera isn’t paying a lot of attention to the quality of their courses.

 

There are many other things I should be doing other than posting here again today, but there were a couple of things that came through the intertubes at me about MOOCs that I have to note here. If nothing else, I suspect both topics will figure into upcoming MOOC talks.

First, from CHE comes “Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching.” It seems to be an emerging story, but here’s a quote from the lead:

Students regularly drop out of massive open online courses before they come to term. For a professor to drop out is less common.

But that is what happened on Saturday in “Microeconomics for Managers,” a MOOC offered by the University of California at Irvine through Coursera. Richard A. McKenzie, an emeritus professor of enterprise and society at the university’s business school, sent a note to his students announcing that he would no longer be teaching the course, which was about to enter its fifth week.

“Because of disagreements over how to best conduct this course, I’ve agreed to disengage from it, with regret,” Mr. McKenzie wrote.

I’m going to assume that this is again evidence that the people who are teaching these MOOCs are doing it out of the ego boost they get for teaching a class of tens of thousands er, I mean the joy they get from extending education learning to tens of thousands around the world and to participate in the experiment. I would assume that if McKenzie were being paid to do this, Coursera or UC-Irvine or both would have not allowed him to simply quit like this.

But it would appear that McKenzie was having a hard time with the “uninformed” and “superfluous” responses in the discussion forums, the fewer than 2% of students who participated in the discussions, and the complaints students had about his assigning a textbook that cost money and the workload requirements.  In other words, McKenzie was trying to maintain the same standards for his MOOC as he would for the same college class at UC Irvine.

Some of the comments in the discussion on the CHE piece suggest that he’s being naive if he thinks/thought that students taking this free MOOC ought to be held to the same standards as students in a regular course, that he’s being unreasonable, etc. Now, I don’t know anything about Richard McKenzie— I don’t know if he is/was considered one of the great professors of economics at UC Irvine, if he’s considered a grumpy crank who teaches classes no one can pass, or what. He’s obviously a well-published scholar.  But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a college professor teaching a MOOC with the premise that the class ought to be every bit as rigorous and “real” as any other class.  And it is again another example to me of how Coursera et al aren’t ready for “prime-time.”

Second, there’s this post from Cathy Davidson, “If MOOCs are the answer, what is the question?” and this response from Sui Fai John Mak, “Discourse on MOOCs: where should it be heading?” Among other things, Davidson points out that the problems of the rising costs of higher education predate MOOCs by a long time and there is no evidence at all that MOOCs will have any impact to change that, either.  At the same time, MOOCs demonstrate that people want higher education, and not just in applied stuff like computer programming. Here’s a quote:

Enter the MOOC: whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt that seemingly everyone wants–really, really wants–more not less higher learning. Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the conversation has now shifted from “is college worth it?” to “how can we make necessary, important, invaluable learning available to the widest number of people for the lowest cost”?    I certainly have.

Those who hate MOOCs and reduce them solely and only to a device by the neoliberal rich to diminish the role of the tenured professor should at least be using the vast popularity of online courses to argue the value of a college education.   It’s demonstrable.  It’s massive.

And here’s a good quote from Mak’s response that I think makes a lot of sense:

The current scenario indicates that we are at a state of fragmentation in the midst of Higher Education, where MOOCs, OERs, privatization, partnerships, alliances, and co-operation and collaboration are just part of these fragmentation and disruption movement.  The actual tsunami may not even be the MOOCs, but the technological, economic and social “revolution” uprising for fundamental human rights to Higher Education at a free or affordable cost and a quest for innovative and improved Higher Education.

George Siemens in his response to the fragmentation of Higher Education highlights the current trend of MOOCs and the possible future scenarios of Higher Education.

And I include that link to the George Siemens talk because that’s just more smart stuff to listen to/think about.

 

The March of the MOOCs continues as the American Council on Education has approved Coursera MOOC courses as being worth of actual credit– or, more accurately perhaps, “ACE CREDIT,” as the Coursera announcement puts it. The Chronicle of Higher Education article on this is pretty straight-forward, while the Inside Higher Ed piece is a little more critical (though not much).  Some “fun facts” I gleaned from both pieces:

• The American Council on Education’s project is being heavily subsidized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though Bill has said a lot of really ill-informed things about education in different forums. Just because you have a lot of money and are well-intentioned doesn’t mean that you know what you’re talking about.
• I’d never heard of ACE Credit before, but according to IHE, “ACE Credit has long used teams of faculty experts to review educational experiences — often on-the-job training and experience offered by the military and other government agencies, professional associations, labor unions and companies like Starbucks or McDonald’s. It has a network of nearly 2,000 colleges and universities who agree to consider the group’s credit recommendations, but decisions on accepting credits are made on a case-by-case basis.” Thus the “credit for life” element here.
• To get the credit, you have to go through Coursera’s “Signature Track,” which as far as I can tell is Coursera’s security system (this is where the typing patterns and webcam photos/ID documents come into play) along with “a proctored online exam” after the course is over. All for $190.
• As the IHE article makes clear at the end, these courses from Duke, UPenn and UC Irvine will not count as credit at their institutions.  “[Duke Provost Peter] Lange said Duke offers its students ‘an entirely different kind of educational experience’ than the one it is making available through its massive open courses, involving ‘substantial interactions between students and the faculty member.'” Well, alright then.

Interestingly enough, I took (and dropped out of) one of the courses on this list,  “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” taught by Mohamed Noor. I blogged about it a bit back here. I couldn’t stick it out because I was getting too busy with my own teaching, but I thought it was about as well-done as one could expect for a MOOC, but I also didn’t think it was so much a class as it was a textbook. I’ve written about this many times already, but the point is MOOCs are about providing content (and/or “learning opportunities”) and not about teaching.  Noor is a good enough as a pre-recorded lecturer, but that’s obviously not the same thing.

Three other quick thoughts on all this.

First, it seems a little shady to me that places like Duke are perfectly happy to offer their MOOC courses for credit at other institutions but not at Duke. Think about that for a second: is there any other course taught by someone at Duke and (presumably) approved by Duke where that is the case? I seriously doubt it. And exactly how much “interaction” is happening at Duke between Noor and his students? I would guess that when Noor teaches a gen-ed version of his class at Duke the amount of “interaction” he has with his meatspace students is about the same as he has with his MOOC students.

No, this is just academic snobbery: “this course that we’re sponsoring isn’t good enough for our students, but the ‘little people’ at that state school or community college down the road might find it useful. Better to have a video-version of our great minds than to have nothing at all.” And it is a good example of how these elite institutions granting “access” to their “great minds” rarifies their own standing in the academic hierarchy.  It’s like the difference between seeing Beyonce (or whoever– pick your favorite big star performer) on television versus seeing them live. No one would pay for the television appearance, but people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the “real thing.”

Second, as I also have blogged about here before, getting credit from “prior life experience” is tricky and is often the approach taken by diploma mills and other sketchy kinds of schools. At schools like EMU, this stuff only kind of counts. I will often see transcripts for students who were in the military who have all of these credits (maybe ACE CREDITS?) for doing “military things” and training, but that credit inevitably counts as electives and doesn’t do them a whole lot of good toward completing their degrees.

Should this sort of life credit/experience count more than it does? Maybe. Maybe this is an alternative sort of educational experience for that student who is really just trying to apply for the manager/supervisor job where there is no real reason for a college degree other than a college degree is a convient way for employers to establish a baseline qualification. I’ve had plenty of returning students– folks in their 30s and 40s and older– who told me the only reason they were in college was because they had reached a point in their workplace where the only way they could advance or keep their current job was to get a college degree in anything. Well, maybe those kinds of students ought to have some kind of different certification process.  MOOCs and “ACE CREDIT” and the like might be a part of that.

Third, I’m not sure I’m understanding the “market share” for this kind of equivalency credit. Because even though they might say stuff like “Coursera is committed to seeing that our courses meet our students’ educational goals, from simply experiencing the joy of learning something new, to seeking improved employment opportunities, to working towards a degree” (that’s an actual quote, btw), we have to always remember that Coursera (and Udacity and others) are not charities. They have attracted millions of dollars in venture capital not simply because they intend to spread joy. 

But I am not sure I understand the potential market here. CLEP tests, the equivalent of AP tests, ACE CREDIT, “life credit,” etc., etc.: if you added that all up, would it even be a 500,000 people worldwide? That’s great I guess, but that isn’t exactly the Thomas Friedman-esque transformation of higher education as we know it, is it?

I actually almost signed up for the Coursera MOOC “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” and now that it has gone (apparently?) terribly wrong, I wish I had been there. As it is, I’m relying on the reports. The basics:

• According to this post and this post from George Siemens, the ironically named course was canceled in large part because of what sounds like bad planning and application. Comments on Siemens’ posts also suggest that it wasn’t Coursera who shut it down but the instructor, Georgia Tech’s Dr. Fatimah Wirth. More on that in a moment.
• Inside Higher Ed ran a piece “MOOC Mess” that also highlights the basic problems and that also links to a couple of other useful sites/links to things about this “mess.” For example…
• From How People Learn Online comes FOE MOOC Notes.  This is from a web site of a group of researchers at SUNY Albany and these notes appear to have been taken by Peter Shea. All you have to do is look through his five entries about the class to recognize that this was not very well thought-out to begin with and in less than a week, it went from being bad to being yanked off stage.
• And then from the site online learning insights comes “How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it.” One of the “fun facts” I gleaned from this reading was that Wirth was apparently having students do some sort of group project. In an online class with 40,000+ students. That might have been a really bad idea….

I’m working my way right now through E-Learning and Digital Cultures (with my English 516 students), so I don’t have the time nor desire to pile on too much more. I do want to mention two things for now though:

First, this reminds me of a conversation a friend and comp/rhet colleague and I had last summer on the golf course. I thought I had blogged about this already, but maybe not. We were talking about MOOCs and Coursera and the like, and as this person pointed out, Coursera is operating as a Silicon Valley VC start-up, which is essentially the opposite approach of the way higher education works. What he meant (and if he didn’t mean this, this is what I mean) is these start-up companies race to market as fast as they possibly can to attract users and attention and market share which in turn attracts more start-up money. This might make a certain amount of sense in developing an app where being first matters at least as much (probably more) than being best, and also where it’s always possible to push out an update of that app. In other words, the mode here seems to be to develop/build first and think later.

In higher ed and in my department– and certainly when it comes to developing new courses– we think first and then build. So, if Wirth proposed teaching a new course about the “Fundamentals of Online Education” at EMU, it would have had to have been reviewed and approved by all kinds of different committees within a program, a department, a college, and beyond. All along the way, different faculty and administrators would have insisted on seeing documentation (a syllabus, a bibliography, sample assignments, etc.) to get an idea of how this was all going to work. And if that had been done with a course like this at EMU, I’m guessing that at some point, someone along the line would have said “you know, having students do group work in an online class where there’s thousands of them all over the world is insane, right?”

But since Coursera seems most interested in capturing the MOOC market with sheer volume, vetting courses appears to be something to worry about later. This isn’t the first example of how that strategy might not be a great one with courses, but it is certainly the most dramatic.

Second, I find it intriguing to think of the “control” of these courses and the implications that has for the rights of students and beyond.  Siemens points out rightfully that what’s really awful about Wirth just turning her course off was it usurps the rights of the learners. “This incident is significant. MOOCs are nothing without learners. In this instance, it looks like the instructor decided to shut down the course. Faculty own the content, Coursera owns the platform. But neither should own the conversation. That belongs to the learners. The difficultly is that many learners interact in Coursera forums.”

But beyond that important and basic issues of learners’ rights, it makes me wonder about how this might play out in more traditional higher education. Suppose I started teaching a course– even a small one, with 15 or 20 students– and after a few class sessions, I decided it just wasn’t going well and I was just going to stop. How would that go over? Well, I am guessing that once the students complained (and rightfully so), my department head would tell me to get my ass back in there and make it work, that I couldn’t just “walk away” from a course. Faculty have a lot of freedom, but I don’t think that extends to just not doing anything.

“That’s an unfair comparison, Steve. Coursera courses are free and they don’t offer any real credit.” True, but if Coursera wants to be taken seriously and to ever be anything other than a novelty act– and I think it’s clear that Coursera desperately wants to be taken seriously and wants to desperately make money selling its courses to paying customers (students and universities)– then they had better get a handle on these kinds of problems, and they better get a hold of them in a hurry.

 

Everything seems to be converging for me right now. In my online Computers and Writing class right now, we are all signed up and engaging in the MOOC “E-Learning and Digital Cultures,” which is a) sort of a meta-experience in it’s my online class taking a MOOC and talking about that MOOC in my online class, and b) is sort of like using a MOOC like a textbook. Meanwhile, in scholarship news, I am going to be giving a couple of talks about MOOCs in March and, at the CCCCs, I’m going to be doing a poster session about using iBooks Author to make a self-published version of an iPad book based my self-published textbook. Anything I can do to combine and overlap projects is a good thing.

I was thinking about this convergence the other day initially in response to a couple of Chronicle of Higher Education pieces.  First, there’s “The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook,” which more or less suggests that MOOCs might indeed be the replacements of “textbooks,” albeit unter a name like “courseware” or “learning experiences.” It kind of rehashes a number of things, including some of the same kinds of things I wrote about back here in October.  Second, there’s this article on free textbooks, “Pay Nothing? Easier Said Than Done.” If the question is “can you make money by giving away the content of textbooks, then the answer is clearly “no.” But it isn’t terribly difficult to give away textbooks online, though I agree completely with the sentiment here about getting them to count:

Some professors who write free textbooks “almost become celebrities in their own field” with books that are widely used, said Mr. Ernst, of the University of Minnesota. But writing open textbooks does not usually factor into tenure and promotion decisions, said John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the author of a widely used open textbook called Information Systems.

“By giving my text away, I had an enormous impact on the field,” he said. “But that isn’t going to move me from tenured associate professor to tenured full professor. If there’s no career incentive and no financial incentive, then it real­ly relies on faculty altruism.”

First, I certainly did not become some kind of “celebrity” in my field by posting my textbook online.  Second, it wasn’t so much “altruism” as much as it was “I have nothing to lose-ism” that drove me to post my textbook online. If a publisher wanted to publish and sell it, I’d probably take it down. But I do agree that an open textbook is not likely to figure much into the tenure and review process (even at EMU, where we count lots of different things) and that’s kind of a shame. If that were changed, I suspect a lot more people would publish open textbooks.

But let me circle back to my online class and the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. My grad students and I are all signed up and the idea is to participate there and to also participate as part of my class too, which means discussing it on the class web site and also blogging about it. So as much as anything else, I’m modeling for my students. Continue reading “Apparently, my projects for the next couple months are converging (teaching, textbooks, and more MOOCs)”

I was the respondent the other day at a MOOC webinar that was sponsored by Michigan State’s Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures. Eventually, I think they’re going to post the whole audio recording of the event on their site. It was a good event, although it was a little weird too. This is the first time I had done a webinar like this and it’s a sort of strange speaking experience in that I know there were about 100 or so people logged into it and listening, but my speaking part (which was true with everyone else, of course) was just me sitting in my office and talking at my computer with no visual cues from anyone else. So it’s hard for me to tell if others heard me and were nodding in agreement, frowning angrily, or looking at me like what I was saying was gibberish.

It was probably a combination of all of the above.

Anyway, a brief run-down of how I thought it went (based on my notes and memories):

• First up was Rebecca Burnett at Georgia Tech.  The course they’re developing will emphasize a multimodal approach to writing, it isn’t going to replace the face-to-face course, and they’re hoping to attract students who are “self-starters, self-motivated,” creative, risk takers, etc. She raised some concerns though about Coursera and the like– and actually, a colleague of Burnett’s wrote about those concerns a few days before this in this piece from The Chronicle.
• Next was Denise Comer at Duke. It sounds like they are also thinking of an ESL “angle” to the class, but what I thought was interesting in her talk was what I guess I would describe as some of the worries and concerns she has about all of this at this point. She talked about how the experience seems a sort of “unflipping” of the classroom because of the focus on recording videos. And she also talked about how the process of recording these videos for Coursera made her and her colleagues unusually self-conscious about how they appeared to their students. She mentioned one colleague who brought a bunch of ties to the recording because he didn’t want to appear to be wearing the same outfit for the whole class.
• Then Scott DeWitt and Kay Halasek from Ohio State. They discussed the OSU being a very collaborative effort involving tons of folks there, and they pointed out it’s important to be involved in these things early because if we aren’t at the table, then who else will be? (Which, btw, is an excellent point: even folks who think this MOOC thing is a completely bullshit folly best pay attention to it.) They again talked about self-motivation and an opportunity for researching student writers, and they also talked a lot about what they hope to see and study regarding peer review.
• Then Julie Lindquist from MSU talked. She covered similar ground at this point, but she too emphasized the experimental/investigatory nature of this project, the emphasis on learning (I have in my notes “shifting the gaze to learning,” which I like) and again an interest in MOOCs as a research site.
• Then I came in and looking over the twitter feed on it, I guess I was fine, but I had a bit of a feeling of being a little too much of a “Debbie Downer” on the whole thing. I mean, here are these folks who have spent a lot of time and effort developing these projects and they’re obviously optimistic and hopeful about the chances of success, and I come in there and ask a lot of pointed and difficult questions. Anyway, I first pointed out this isn’t really new (think “classes by mail” in the late 19th century not to mention online classes for the last 20 or so years) and a lot of the questions that David Noble asked in his Digital Diploma Mills book are still relevant here: who is making money off of this, how will this benefit students and how do we know it will, and how does this impact academic labor? I asked about the dropout rate because if the Coursera dropout rate as it is right now is 90%, how are these courses going to reconcile that? And I also asked about how folks are going to address the problem of scaling because content scales much better than teaching?

And then it kind of went from there.  Jeff Grabill, the moderator and organizer of this, asked questions of the first five based on what folks had said and what was coming in via the Twitter feed. He didn’t come back to me, which makes sense I guess since I was the respondent and not the one “brining it” as it were with an actual MOOC project. There were a couple of other things I would have liked to have asked along the way though.

For one thing, there seemed to be some question among this group about the claim/argument that teaching doesn’t scale well– I am not sure who, but I think someone said something along the lines of “how do we know that?”  

Well, I think the assumption that teaching scales poorly (or at least it doesn’t scale for all teaching and it certainly doesn’t scale as easily as content) is based on hundreds of years of practice. Just look at how we teach at universities now: there are some classes (notably ones where success is assessed by machine graded tests) we hold in lecture halls, and others (like first year writing, but also like speech, fine art, music, laboratory experiment classes, etc.) we hold in smaller groups. Introductory writing is not taught in lecture halls, and when those experiments have been tried before, they’ve failed.

Furthermore, there is a limit for even large lecture hall classes: I think you’d be hard pressed to find a lecture class at any university in this country that has over 1,000 students, but this is not for a lack of space to hold those lectures. Most big universities have at least one auditorium or sports facility or something that could accomodate that many people in a class a couple times a week. I think universities don’t have lecture hall classes above about 500 (and more typically they are around 200) because we’ve known for a long time now that even in a class where it’s all about a “sage on a stage” professor spitting out content for students to feed on so they can later regurgitate that processed content on to a scantron sheet, even in that setting there are logistical limits.

Another question I wish someone had asked: where’s the “remedial” or developmental piece to these courses? Because I thought that the whole point of this Gates Foundation grant was to develop those kinds of courses, and the kinds of courses that these folks were all sketching out didn’t quite seem like that to me. Instead, it seemed like everyone was talking about developing learning experiences for self-motivated students– which is great, but that isn’t the profile of your typical student in a developmental writing class.

And while we probably wouldn’t have had time to talk about it anyway, it would have been nice to have heard a little more specifics about the curriculum. Perhaps that’s premature– all of these folks are talking about courses going online in a few months not now– but I would have liked to have heard more about what sort of innovations being considered for fostering peer review and self-assessment. Software like Eli might be one piece to the puzzle, but I would have liked to have heard some more specifics on that.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next in all this.

Two mostly unrelated readings and thoughts about MOOCs this morning.  First, via the book of face, comes from Gregory Ferenstein at TechCrunch, “How California’s Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It.” Here’s how it opens:

Today, the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced a pilot for $150 lower-division online courses at one of its campuses — a move that spells the end of higher education as we know it. Lower-division courses are the financial backbone of many part-time faculty and departments (especially the humanities). As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college–the expansive campuses and large lecture halls–will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online.

Certainly alarming and dramatic, but is this true? Hard to say since we’re talking about a pilot program, but I have my doubts, mainly because Ferenstein (who is a TechCrunch staff writer and not someone who appears to know a whole lot about how education works) makes some interesting and problematic claims along the way.

He starts by pointing out that San Jose State University provost Ellen N. Junn says that 50% of entering students are ill-prepared in high school and thus don’t meet the “basic requirements” for classes like math and English (writing). That may very well be true, but  that sure seems like a problem with secondary schools and not universities. Anyway, because of the poor graduation rate (48%) and expenses and such, the governor and everyone else in California are desperate to try something– thus a MOOC experiment. And really this part of things makes sense to me. Given the problems, why not try a bold experiment?

But then I think Ferenstein’s argument gets a little more mooshy.

First, there’s this:

A review of research by the Department of Education in 2009 found that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

What that meta-study found was that online classes were either slightly better or about the same, but the best results came from “hybrid” course formats. Further, different teaching techniques worked better than others and what did not appear to help people learn were the things that are common in these MOOCs: a lot of video lectures and quizzes. And beyond that, two of the reasons for the results that come out of this study are that students spend more time engaged in the course and students self-select (and are thus more motivated) in online courses.

Then there’s this:

More recently, a pilot of MIT and Harvard’s joint online educational initiative, EdX, found that blending SJSU classes with world-class online lectures reduced the number of students who received a C or lower by 31%.

That link to the New York Times article suggests that this isn’t quite the results of that study. What really seems to be the case is the EdX course was used in one of the SJSU courses more or less as a textbook and that was more effective. That makes a fair amount of sense.

And that leads to this:

In other words, computers can–and have–successfully replaced teachers.

That link is to a stoopid CNN article that says nothing, and the logic overall here is along the lines of “therefore, Ray Charles is God.”

I’m not trying to suggest there is nothing to what Ferensten is claiming; it’s just that there’s a lot that has to fall into place for this to be the beginning of the end. For starters, this pilot program has to succeed, and I for one am extremely skeptical about the chances of a MOOC being a good solution for remedial learners. Second, even if this does work (and that’s a big if to me), I think what it signals is more of a redistribution of the labor forces: that is, part-timers will be working more for the Udacities of the world and less for universities, which could have both bad and good impacts. And third, the rest of the world (university accrediting agencies, employers, parents, students themselves, etc.) have to buy into all of this for this shift to happen.

So worry, but the sky isn’t falling quite yet.

And then there’s “eLearning and Digital Cultures,” which is a post about the MOOC of the same name that starts a week from today. It’s a post by an education tech specialist named David Hopkins who is one of 36,000 students signed up for the course. Ten of those thousands includes me and my students in English 516 this semester.  516 is an online graduate course about teaching with technology, and I’ve build into the course taking this MOOC for the next five weeks. It promises to be very meta: students in an online course take a MOOC about online learning as part of the requirements for that first online course.

We’ll see how it turns out, but I like to think this is the real possibilities of MOOCs. As a substitute for a “real” course, MOOCs seem like a bad idea, which is why I don’t think the sort of thing being tried in California (and lots of other places) is going to work, even thought that might seem like the most obvious uses of MOOC. I think instead MOOCs will prove to be useful for something we haven’t really anticipated yet, and/or they will be useful as textbooks and as online gathering spaces that tie into smaller classes.  That’s one of the reasons I want my students and I to give this MOOC a try as a space where we can share with others around the world our thoughts on “eLearning and Digital Cultures.”