The Rage For MOOCs

An anonymous reader writes "Ever since Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig signed up 160,000 people for their online artificial intelligence course last year, educators and entrepreneurs have been going ga-ga for 'MOOCs' — massive open online courses. A new article in Technology Review, The Crisis in Higher Education, gives a balanced overview of the pluses and minuses of MOOCs as well as some of the technical challenges they face in areas like machine learning and cheating detection. The author, Nicholas Carr, draws an interesting parallel with the 'correspondence course mania' of the 1920s, when people rushed to sign up to take courses by mail. 'Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation's colleges and universities combined.' That craze fizzled when investigations revealed that the quality of the teaching was poor and dropout rates astronomical. 'Is it different this time?' asks Carr. 'Has technology at last advanced to the point where the revolutionary promise of distance learning can be fulfilled?'"

Not about technology

[betterunixthanunix]

The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.

The article

[Puls4r]

It's a faulty assumption that lack of technology caused high dropout rates in during the correspondence craze of the 20's. The real issue is that a low entry cost coupled with a lack of requiring people to attend a physical room or building means that walking away doesn't involve any walking. You simply don't watch anymore. It's as easy as changing the channel on the TV. Essentially you're commoditizing education. Without a requiring a large investment of cash, all but the most serious students students feel no remorse about walking away.

It's not about education, it's about credentials

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just wanna learn, all you need is a good textbook, and some patience.
Or you could watch a video or read some shit on the internet, or whatever.
Learning isn't really that hard to come by.

If, on the other hand, you want to have evidence showing that you do, in fact, know the material, then it gets much trickier.
It's particularly tricky to automate, since it's intrinsically an arms race between students and testers.

The usual approach for automating decision problems is heuristic + blacklist + whitelist.

We can't really whitelist anyone, since generating a whitelist is, itself, the whole point. Your college diploma is the whitelist entry.
We can blacklist people, but only if they get caught, and it doesn't work all that well if they can just retake the course at no extra cost.
We can't use heuristics because with so much at stake, the students are highly motivated to cheat, and will exploit any weakness they can find.
The heuristic will quickly be broken and the whole thing goes to shit.

So basically, we go nothing that works here.

The traditional solution is tests taken in a controlled environment, under supervision of paid humans, with harsh punishments for cheating.
So far, I've yet to see any alternative to that, regardless of computers or the internet.
There is no breakthrough in sight.

Re:The article

[Gription]

Exactly!

Who cares if you have a huge dropout rate? You'll still have a completion rate that is way more then any conventional class and even the dropouts will have learned something.

The education system has built a big blind process that isn't about learning. It is about the process. If you happen to learn at the rate that the info is fed to you and if the process intersects with your learning style then you are great. If you learn faster or slower or in a different fashion then the accepted process you are screwed.

Re:Not about technology

[supercrisp]

I have to offer a mixed response to this claim that teaching must be developed into a science, so I'll comment, even though I came to this discussion to dispose of mod points. Some teaching of pedagogy is influenced by real, hard science. There are courses and teachers who are teaching pedagogy with cognitive psychology, outcomes evidence based on sufficiently large numbers of sample to be relevant, and that sort of thing. However, the _impression_ I get is that a lot of people in education departments are not basing their work on any real science. For example, there are still lots of education people talking about multiple intelligences, when there is no real evidence for it. Basically, it seems that ideology drives education pedagogy. There's a lot of marxist-lite thinking that is in actuality a sort of watered-down Romanticism. One good example of this is the belief that encouraging expressive fluency in writing will produce students who can write analytical arguments. The thinking still seems to be based on ideas like universal grammar, that we have a "language instinct" that will flourish if we nurture it and blossom into a set of skills that are actually conventional rather than innate. And, of course, there are more right-wing tinged methodologies too. My favorite example of ideologies determining pedagogical practice is the war between whole language (left) and phonics (right). Both camps are wrong because neither will accept that there's something in the other side's method, as well as because neither side is paying much attention to any actual science on the topic (the discourse seems to be more driven by marketing than anything else). That said, there was a day when a lot of science was behind universal grammar-type educational practices.... It's easy to cook your results, without even knowing it. And certainly a lot of education research is barely research, relying as it does on very small sample sizes. And, frankly, there's generally not that much funding for the good research because so much of the funding comes with the expected outcome more or less built in.

Re:The article

[Quirkz]

There's also the level of student interest to consider. For some classes, I don't have much interest in doing the homework and "completing" the course. As far as the instructor is concerned, I may be a dropout or a failure, but I can still be getting what I want out of the course -- the lectures, the readings, online discussion -- without completing the components (homework and exams) that a traditional student is required to. I'd never throw away good money on a physical college course that I just wanted to play with, but with a free course I have the freedom to sample what I want without having to fulfill all the requirements of a traditional course.

One of the online courses I've signed up for (a personal finance class) seems to REALLY get this point. The instructor specifically calls out the different segments of the course and suggests that some students may only be interested in certain topics, and that's perfectly fine with him if they only participate in the parts they want. From the standpoint of a traditional class, it's a "failure" if you only show up for a third of the lectures and only do a third of the homework, but it strikes me as a perfectly acceptable approach with a free online class.

As more people catch on to that kind of approach, we're going to need other kinds of metrics for determining if students had a satisfying experience from a class, based on things other than a simple "did they pass?"