Category: Technology

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.

Quizzes
Total quiz submissions 3503
# Unique users submitted (quiz ) 1671

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:

• Just this morning from The Chronicle of Higher Education comes “What You Need to Know About MOOCs,” which is both a summary and a timeline of a lot of/most of the articles they’ve had about MOOC and MOOC-related stuff all the way back to 2008.
• 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.

Continue reading “More MOOC than you can MOOC at! (or, World Music Week 4 and Some Thoughts on Peer Review)”

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.

Here’s the part of the contract that talks specifically about making money; there are eight ideas listed so far:

• 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.