Category: MOOCs

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.

More in the series of “the summer of MOOCs” articles and posts here:  Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, “Making It Count.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

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.”