The accreditation issue can't be tackled until you build high-quality courses in traditional subjects. That's what many of these sites don't get. You need to look at what traditional university is offering THEN REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING BETTER. Physics 101 and chem 101 are still important and people need to learn these subjects. You can't just build a new "university" and then just have a bunch of buzz word named courses.
Until that happens, none of these MOOCs will obtain accreditation from any accreditation organization that is worthwhile. The quality offered by current MOOCs simply do not compare to what you learn from traditional university.
The problem with MOOC's is that there is no incentives to complete a single course at this time. There needs to a curriculum towards some kind of accredited certification that employers will notice
Why would you complete a MOOC "cover to cover" when they offer no accreditation? People just pick up what they need and move on. If they were offering a complete program and degrees, millions would complete them. MOOCs are amazing, but a simple VOD system can't replace the education system on it's own.
Give accreditation for MOOCs. Many are well designed (more so than community college and often regular college) and provide a far more social experience than showing up to class and not asking questions (which is the case 99% of the time).
A new form accreditation is really what's holding back a huge change in higher education. MOOCs right now, at most, can replace only traditional professional development classes. They're still not a drop-in replacement for college degrees.
That's because of accreditation. Bachelors degrees are valuable, in large part, because they're a common currency: employers know when they see a potential hire has bachelor's degree, he/she at least spent four years learning at a high level and fulfilled some level of competency in his/her chosen major.
Right now, there's no way for employers to make similar judgments about people who have obtained their education entirely online, so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé. In that case, you'd need to build up a portfolio of OSS projects, etc. Whereas a newly-minted bachelor's in CS will get your foot in the door somewhere, even without that extra work to back it up.
One approach to accreditation/evaluation are domain-specific exams, like the Boards in medicine or the Bar in law. But just passing an exam doesn't necessarily communicate the same thing as a degree, and thus doesn't really solve the problem. There are also, no doubt, disciplines not well suited to this form of accreditation. This approach (Alyxandria) seems more focused on accrediting courses (which solves the same problem) and does it by peer-reviewing those courses, which I think is a very interesting, credible, and scalable approach.
Right now, LinkedIn might be the closest competitor out there to this. They offer a form of peer-review for one's skills with their endorsement feature. Another company that was trying to tackle this problem is Accredible[1], but it seems they've now pivoted to include many more features than peer accreditation — perhaps at its expense.
It'll be really cool to see how this problem is solved in the long run. I think "accrediting" individuals, rather than institutions or classes that individuals can then take, will be the winning strategy, as education becomes increasingly unbundled. That is, if articles, YouTube videos, etc. are to be considered legitimate tools of learning in the future, as college classes are today, then accreditation of individuals will be the only sensible approach.
MOOCS are nice as a kind of podcast when they are on a n interesting subject. That being said I don't see them replacing academia until three big problems are solved.
The first is the value added problem, at the end of the day they aren't better than normal lectures and are actually a bit worse. It's funny that even the most innovate institutions have accomplished little more than putting lectures up online. Lectures are about on level with books when it comes to retention. A much better model would be adopting something more like code academy with a good balance of interactivity and theory.
The second and probably most important problem is the depth problem. You don't go to college to take general ed requirements. You go to take the high level sophisticated classes in your field. These classes are rarely delivered in the form of a lecture and often have extensive lab courses and student teacher interaction. I've yet to see a MOOC that can replace this effectively. Similarly, there is no good model for students to come in and pick up lab classes or lab materials. I'm sure there is a volunteer system that could do it, but it doesn't exist yet.
The final problem is of course credentialing. While many classes provide you with a certificate at the end the value of this is really up in the air. For most people, a certificate is unnecessary, the value is in the material, but if they plan to replace colleges they need to solve this problem.
I think MOOCs are the future. Just more like the 10 or 15 year future over the 5 to 10 year future.
Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn.
This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.
This might be heresy here on HN, but I think that there is more than accreditation paperwork at play here. I think it remains to be proven whether a MOOC actually does deliver an education that is on par with what you would get from attending a 4-year CS degree program at a college or university.
MOOCs are new and exciting, but they're also new and unproven. Accredited bachelor degrees are valued because they have a long history of delivering value. MOOCs do not.
MOOCs don't solve a problem. In my opinion, they only perpetuate that university is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in it. The fact is that university-style education (inactive lectures and wrote memorization) are not the answer for a large number of people. We need to get away from assigning one-off projects and instead focus on projects with long-term development potential.
As a college instructor, this excites and worries me. Obviously, major courses being offered online can reduce the number of students coming through our door. Conversely, most of the core requirement courses have become so 'cookie cutter' that it feels more like departments just need a body to teach them.
While this can free up the course load of an instructor more to their interests, this also reduces the dept's budget (since they don't need more people to help teach Computers 101, a core requirement for every field). Personally, the Udacity/Georgia or EdX/MIT partnership are the best solutions to this: finding a way to make MOOC's work for traditional colleges.
Heck, restructure it close to certification tests. You pay X to have access to the study materials AND set a testing date. On that day, you test; pass or fail (with the option of a retake for an additional fee). Now, it is on the student's schedule, but the traditional school's still can turn a profit by removing course size and time limitations.
Why not give them accreditation? Clearly completing them is an accomplishment.
There are other reasons to 'drop out'. I like to save courses on coursera because I can't do them during the imposed timeframe. Sometimes I don't really need the full course and only bits and pieces. Maybe I just want to check it out and the opportunity cost was very low.
Don't solve problems when there aren't any. The biggest one is accreditation. I was trapped in college far longer than I would have been if MOOCs were accredited courses.
Most MOOCs from what I've seen are so basic to even take seriously. For example if you are learning some course called physics 101 which claims to be equivalent to college level. The real physics 101 in the classroom will be comprehensive in the sense that you learn all the material over 16 weeks by studying 15 or so textbook chapters - the whole subject in detail. The MOOC on the other hand will only cover the first 3 chapters or cover all 15 chapters but only the absolute basics of each chapter. The worse part is people take these courses and think they have a physics 101 understanding of the subject when in reality they only have pre-physics 101 introductory knowledge. It becomes really obvious what their knowledge level is.
I like the idea of MOOCs but there is a very serious quality issue with them at the moment, even the MOOCs from big name universities are a joke.
That'd probably depend on the industry. But even if they didn't, the way to solve that would be by increasing the reputation of MOOC certifications, not by doing away with them entirely.
The big problem with projects like this is the quality is pretty much lacking. Most of those MOOCs to begin with are no way intended to replace the equivalent college class. Most of them are watered down introductions to the courses. At a baseline for me to take any MOOC seriously then I want to see a high-quality textbook (or equivalent) for the course. If that doesn't exist then my opinion is the course is likely to be of low-quality. I'm sorry but replacing a textbook with a series of online blog articles or tutorials is simply not a sufficient replacement.
I agree. However, there's not a good way to compare apples to apples like there is with a university education. Maybe that's the next step: having these MOOCs come up with some competing standards...
Is how to effectively teach an online course the problem to focus on?
It's interesting to note that if MOOCs turn out to be a dud, yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs, then it's proof that people pay for a college degree, not for education. In other words, prestige seems to be the issue, not education.
Yes and no. Many of the MOOCs provided by the likes of MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc, are not watered down. For lesser known providers the quality of content is less certain.
I think a standard in terms of grading would be a huge win.
What solutions though? Students, especially kids, still need some kick in the butt to actually do the work required to learn. I don't see MOOCs ever accomplishing that unless someone somehow finds a way to make an addictive and legitimately educational computer game that students are REQUIRED to play. Or some medication that helps students focus and absorb information without ruining their brains. I agree MOOCs can deliver superior quality education, but it will be a long time before they are motiviating in their own rights. And a lot of motivation in school comes from being near peers and having human connection with teachers and other supervisors. MOOCs fail that requirement almost by definition.
I didn't say they work well. But they definitely work. And you can take an existing crappy partial solution like video lectures, and add support structures until you have something that in aggregate works as well as a university course. Plain vanilla MOOCs work well for a small minority, about 10% now, when no one cares at all about them. If you can't quadruple that by actually trying I'd be very surprised.
I think Coursera, OpenCourseware, etc, get things backwards.
Well, they did what they can. It's very hard to invent a new institution with a trusted reputation, almost by definition.
Also, the dissemination of knowledge is the part that scales the most. Evaluation is tough and expensive, especially if you are trying even modestly to prevent cheating.
Someone could go to a MOOC to learn the stuff, then get the assessment from UWisconsin.
Until that happens, none of these MOOCs will obtain accreditation from any accreditation organization that is worthwhile. The quality offered by current MOOCs simply do not compare to what you learn from traditional university.
reply