At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and what is it really good for, anyway?"
At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.
> I've realized there's no difference between MOOC and self-studying a textbook if the MOOCs don't provide credit.
MOOC is curated - it is much easier to learn via a MOOC than self study. THe credit/certs is only to "prove" to someone else who don't care about your actual person that you have the said skills. credit/certs are a poor proxy for skill and competency imho.
I don't see why this is surprising; MOOCs, for the most part, by design don't have the kind of accountability mechanism that make them suitable for formal credit, and which are required for entities accrediting higher education institutions (including ones that do have credit-granting online programs.)
The push to incorporate credit options involves a variety of solutions that add those kind of accountability mechanisms on top of (or, provide separate assessments in addition to) MOOCs, and evaluating support for credit for those kind of programs isn't something you can reasonably do by asking anyone (MOOC instructors or not) whether existing pure-MOOC students deserve credit.
And, anyway, knowledge is useful without certification.
I really don't get why there are so many people that come out negatively against MOOCs.
A traditional college education probably is better than MOOCs, but the economics of MOOCs are so good that it just doesn't matter. It is literally like saying a $50,000+ product with 100% of "maximum benefit" is a worthwhile deal compared to a product that costs $0 and gets you, say, 70% of the benefit.
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.
This seems to leave out a large contributing factor, cost.
Many, many of the MOOCs I’ve ever done were free or a nominal cost ($5-20).
When you’re attending a class at a university or even a local community college you’ve put in a lot of initial work to just get into the class (applying, transcripts, student portal straight out of 1977 that makes MSDOS look pretty) compounded that at minimum you’re paying $300 for a 3 credit class before any book fees.
There’s tremendous more skin in the game for those classes than a MOOC so it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
MOOCs are solution for highly motivated students who are generally able to get accepted by traditional universities, ace classes and graduate with little to no debt. They are not the solution for sub-par students who go to for-profit universities, could not get a job afterward and could not repay loans.
I consider myself reasonably motivated, graduated with almost perfect GPA and I still struggle to complete MOOCs. It's just too difficult to force yourself to study without outside pressure and peer support.
MOOCs make explicit something that has always been implicit for me about education. In the absence of the herd, the authority figure, the degree, the deadlines with teeth and all the other motivational tricks to get me to learn the content, we're just left with the content itself.
Is it great content? Does it inspire my curiosity? Is it memorable? Does it teach me things I can apply? Does it add layers of needless complexity? Is it an exercise in abstract curriculum box-ticking? Is it an ideology in wrapping paper?
I think the gap between 100% and the actual MOOC completion rate also represents the gap between our ideal of education was and what it actually is. Without all the academic window dressing, most people just learn the parts they want. The pedagogs doth protest too much, methinks.
Somebody could make money from me by offering an accredited, for-credit course that mostly tests my understanding of a subject gained from reading I have already done. What I dislike intensely about MOOCs is that I still have to watch lectures (they are often mandatory, and are especially likely to be mandatory if you are taking the course for actual accredited credit). I can read much faster than anyone can talk. Prerecorded video lectures on MOOCs can be played back at double speed, but they are still linear-access rather than random-access that the way a well indexed book is. So I think there is still a market for online courses, but with the testing being more online and more decoupled from the instruction as such.
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).
Going to college is only nominally about acquiring knowledge. In reality it’s about acquiring a credential. All of the gatekeeping involved in admissions and examinations is to protect the value of the credential. The reason MOOC certificates are largely worthless as a credential is because there are NO safeguards against cheating.
Oh, I agree that MOOCs are a boon to people who could not otherwise attend college. But for those who can attend college, there is a lot of value that is hard to get from a MOOC, and I'm not talking about prestige or networking or credentialism.
Heck, I watch online course material while I do my exercising.
On the positive side, the benefits are substantial. 1. Democratized access to the world's top educators, 2. Low cost distribution of education.
On the negative side, the MOOCs are kind of the large classroom problem taken to the extreme. It's generally agreed that a classroom with more students per teacher is not as good as a lower student/teacher ratio.
But to critique my own negativity, the people working on MOOCs are smart and motivated. It's a bit naive to think that the current MOOC is as good as they will ever get. Clearly, these are early stage products that have substantial evolution and improvement in their future.
The one area in open education that needs to improve is around content licensing. If you look at most open educational content, the licenses are restricted open source (GPL like) and note unrestricted open source (MIT/BSD/Apache like). I fail to understand how making the content unrestricted would not benefit everyone.
MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the start has not and will not work, it's just too big of a problem.
There are two large problems with MOOCs right now that are documented in the article but not well enough supported IMO: 1) There are no transferrable credits to colleges and 2) They are free.
And the two problems go unsurprisingly hand in hand, and they both have to be solved simultaneously if MOOCs are going to work. The ideal scenario would be that each course costs somewhere around $150 and courses can be transferred WITH credits to as many accredited institutions as possible. Why? Well firstly, once you pay for something, the average persons's conscious will naturally have that commitment in the back of their minds and will not want the investment to be a sunk cost. Furthermore, if credits are offered, college kids will be able to take a variety of courses in fields that they may want to try out and the more institutions that allow credits from MOOCs, the more students will feel comfortable taking these courses. It will be a great outlet for students to use in a variety of ways. The SJSU example is extremely poor as the sample is way too limited and as mentioned in the article, the bulk of students who signed up for courses were in limited situations.
My experience with MOOC's: They're still expensive, over-priced education.
I've taken many online courses, and I've always felt as if I could have just researched things on my own and bought a book or two. I have yet to take an online course that I felt was worth my money. All of them consisted of: Buy these books, read this material, answer these questions. Well I can do that on my own for free thank you.
Agreed. I notice that many MOOCs have this academic mentality that something must be complete and a certificate earned. I could really give a damn about a certificate. Gaining the knowledge I need is all I care about. Udacity really makes me mad when they remove courses that I paid for if I don't do every little exercise (even the ones that are so horribly designed and have little learning value in them).
Well MOOCs may not appeal to everyone but they are extremely useful to anyone who wants to learn about certain advanced topics on their own. It will not disrupt college education, since its not the courses or content that matters but the credentials.
Why did you decide that MOOCs should be held to the same standard as libraries or bookstores?
MOOCs are marketed as courses, and sometimes as an alternative form of higher education. Furthermore, I doubt the people who go to the trouble of designing curricula for MOOCs expect students to drop out partway through. Comparing MOOCs to college courses seems like a better match to the image the MOOC companies themselves have promoted. And if we make that comparison, completion definitely matters.
Before i tell you my opinion, I want you to know that I spend most of my day learning (still student) and when I'm not in university, I am learning from MOOCS, and to take this a bit further, I have done more than 100 MOOCs on all the three platforms Coursera Edx Udacity, each of these has its own PROs and CONs, learning in itself is awesome, it has made me in more knowledgeable more than most my peers, but one thing to note, is that while the content might be amazing, the certificates or whatever you get from it are mostly not recognized and doesn't really have value in the industry, what I can suggest you to do, is to use your knowledge from these courses to build cool projects that can show future employers how skilled you are and your mastery to that specific domain, That's my experience, I wish you good luck learning.
At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.
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