Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education MITx

http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Mints-a-Valuable-New-Form/130410/
January 22, 2012
MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
By Kevin Carey
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things�radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations�more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together�free content and sophisticated online pedagogy��and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi�al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.

In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something�you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it.

The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputation to put its brand and credibility behind open-education resources and credentials to match. But most world-famous universities got that way through a process of exclusion. Their degrees are coveted and valuable precisely because they're expensive and hard to acquire. If an Ivy League university starts giving degrees away for free, why would everyone clamor to be admitted to an Ivy League university?

<end of excerpt>

I wonder if in the future, some bright youngsters will get certifications from MITx (or similar places), get good, intellectually challenging jobs based on these credentials, and not need to spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a B.A.

I wonder if we'll have professional course (or test) takers who obtain certification using other people's names. I'm not familiar with the project, but perhaps someone here can tell me, or point me to the explanation in regards to how MIT will confirm the identity of those they credential.

Just thinking about this from the perspective of law schools, the only reason that I went to Duke for law school was because of it's rank as a T14.

I basically paid for a title of nobility, for lack of a better phrase. Granted, it's a lesser title (and I'm still kind of ashamed since it isn't Harvard or Yale), but I knew I was buying a title and wasn't really trying to get an education.

There is a lot of guild structure built into the career tracks that lead to high income jobs, such as BigLaw (I personally actually avoided NYC and DC as places to work because I figured they would kill me - I've chosen sanity over income).

This will be useful for certain types of employment, but not some of the larger pipelines. My guess is that the larger impact will be felt at the community college and state school levels. Ultimately, employers will have to decide what it means.

People get into top law schools largely based on college GPA and LSAT scores. If the legal training at top law schools is not better than at other schools, why don't top law firms recruit at less prestigious law schools, filtering for students with high GPAs and LSAT scores?

Law firms hire on the basis of prestige, primarily. T3, then T6, then T14.

The rule for law schools is that the harder the school is to get into, the less you have to work in that school, the less you will get in terms of actual legal skill, and the better job you will get when you get out.

Legal training is more of a factor at less prestigious schools. In fact, you probably get people with more legal knowledge and training at schools below the T14.

My experience is in business programs, not law schools, but I have an undergraduate BBA from a tippy-top program, and an MBA from a program ranked in the top 25. The difference was HUGE between the two experiences, and it was all about the students and class discussions. Profs were stellar at both, but the lively and intelligent discussion at the tippy top school made it a MUCH more valuable experience than my time at the top 25 school. I assume the same applies to law achools.

I think that there may be some degree of inherent bias in the reporting of the experiences of people in the top schools and those in slightly lower-ranked ones. It may be that people who manage to get into the T3 or T6 or T14 schools are sufficiently bright that they don't experience the work as being all that difficult or rigorous, in contrast to students who are not quite as highly capable and are attending schools ranked just below them, who are having to work harder to produce work of comparable quality.

If your assertion about the nature and rigor of the education is spot-on, employers may have found that those bright law graduates from the top schools are perfectly capable of acquiring whatever technical legal knowledge is required for a particular case as the need arises, and may be hiring primarily on the basis of intelligence and the ability to look at situations from many different perspectives, one of the most critical talents in a lawyer.

It's an interesting question to consider.

The most critical talents for a lawyer, in the world of BigLaw (which is the prime $$$ area - where you can get into the 1%), is to build a $2,000,000 book of business so that you become a partner and don't get tossed out to the curb after 10 years. The clock starts ticking when you start working. You can have excellent technical skill, like one of my friends, and be stuck at age 40 because you simply can't attract business.

So, it's really salesmanship and marketing that's the issue, not technical skill. There is an oversupply of technical skill and an undersupply of work upon which to apply this skill. So, for areas such as law, an MITx program would simply depress salaries. Generally those of law professors, which would be a good thing if it could reduce student debt.

I would expect the MITx program to be excellent for something like bioinformatics, where I suspect there is an undersupply of skill rather than an oversupply.

I am definitely interested in this especially since my son will be wearing a brace for the next few years and it is difficult for him to take classes anywhere but online. I am hoping we will be able to get better internet speed soon because we can only watch videos sometimes--one of the many disadvantages of living in our small town.

My son is interested in so many things and free online classes are a good way for him to try things he is interested in without being stuck on one learning track.

My son is very interested in politics at the moment and is busy building his knowledge base of history, economics, political science, law and the constitution, and debate.

Here is an article on another online higher education venture. I am wary of the idea of students grading each others papers. It should be obvious that a history professor is better qualified to grade a history term paper than a student taking an introductory course.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/t...versity-partners-for-online-classes.html
Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals With 5 Top Universities
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
April 18, 2012

...

Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment.

Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that this would actually improve the learning experience.

The Coursera system also offers an online feature that allows students to get support from a global student community. Dr. Ng said an early test of the system found that questions were typically answered within 22 minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/e...eam-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html

Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses
By TAMAR LEWIN
New York Times
May 2, 2012
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but will carry no credit.

But Harvard and M.I.T. are not the only elite universities planning to offer a wide array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who made headlines last fall when 160,000 students signed up for his Artificial Intelligence course, has attracted more than 130,000 students to the six courses offered at his new company, Udacity.

The technology for online learning, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.

“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,” said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard, who will be in charge of the university’s involvement.

EdX, which is expected to offer its first five courses this fall, will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization in Cambridge, owned and governed equally by the two universities, each of which has committed $30 million to the project. The first president of edX will be Anant Agarwal, director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who has led the development of the MITx platform. At Harvard, Dr. Garber will direct the effort, with Michael D. Smith, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, working with faculty members to develop and deliver courses. Eventually, they said, other universities will join them in offering courses on the platform.

...

The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.



My comment -- sounds good overall, but I want a knowledgeable and committed human being grading the essays and term papers of my children, and I am willing to pay for that.

A similar article was posted in the Boston Globe today, but with a different angle on it:
http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrod...es-all/mvVGOfdCZqIhVLcVBVUVCJ/index.html

I know many will view this development as a threat or impacting their college degree and/or may not agree with me, but I say that it's only good for gifted, especially those who had lacked the money and the physical access/availability to MIT and Harvard, and that it's particularly good for the world at large. It's a big gain for parents who are homeschooling/unschooling their eg/pg kids and pressed for cash. It's a big gain for twice exceptional kid with print disabilities.

Billions of people around the globe are gaining access to the Internet and educational content online. From countries, such as Nepal, that are poorest and least networked in the world to the US, the impact is and will continue to be staggering. Billions of people who never had access or availability to a printed materials are acquiring knowledge and information with digital technology and free/open source materials. One Laptop Per Child is distributing hardware and software around the world. Governments around the world are also distributing hardware and software freely to children. Some, such as Turkey, are making wifi internet freely available and accessible as well.

Imagine billions of children worldwide using free software/open educational resources, and other creative commons content to learn and interact with their family, friends, neighbors, and the world. Imagine poor slum girls in Nepal who would otherwise be illiterate and enslaved or trafficked for money but can now take a course with MIT and Harvard online. Imagine if a future Taylor Wilson - a profoundly gifted kid who is working on nuclear fusion and now advising the Department of Homeland Security - being able to connect with MIT and Harvard professors, who may not otherwise be in a position to do so.
(http://www.worldrecordsacademy.org/...lor_Wilson_sets_world_record_112465.html).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/e...takes-online-education-to-new-level.html
Universities Reshaping Education on the Web
By TAMAR LEWIN
New York Times
July 17, 2012

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland.

And some of them will offer credit.

“This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”

Because of technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.

...

Very cool and so exciting! Thank you for posting this.

They talked about this on the radio this morning.. University of Illinois is participating but will not be offering college credit.

I took a compilers course @ coursera and loved it. I am enrolled in many more at coursera and udacity. I just enjoyed learning after years !

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303942404577534691028046050.html
Tapping Technology to Keep Lid on Tuition
by David Wessel
Wall Street Journal
July 19, 2012

...

In a carefully crafted, foundation-funded experiment that has received less attention than it deserves, Ithaka S+R, a higher-education think tank, enticed 605 undergraduates at six public-university campuses in New York and Maryland to agree to be assigned randomly to one of two courses. Half took a conventional introductory statistics course that met three hours a week. The other half took a computer-assisted course that met once a week and relied on an interactive, online statistics course developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Online Learning Initiative.

To compare outcomes, researchers had students take a standardized statistics test and a final exam that had some of the same questions.

The statistically sound result: Students in the online course did just as well as those who took the conventional course. No better, no worse.

"The most important single result of our study: It calls into question the position of the skeptic who says, 'I don't want to try this because it will hurt my students,' " says one of the study's architects, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Linda Cooper, a veteran stats professor at Maryland's Towson University who taught a computer-assisted course in the study, was among the skeptics. "I walked away with a much more positive outlook for online courses," she says, as long as they are well designed ("not all are," she notes) and include regular in-person sessions (as opposed to courses taught exclusively online).

She says most students came away with a "deeper understanding" than she had seen in conventional courses, although she found some less-motivated students expected her to cover everything during the one in-person class each week.

Surveys by the researchers found online students spent about 25% less time on the course—both in and out of the classroom and on and off the computer—than the others for the same test results. Online students tended to be less satisfied with the course, perhaps because the Carnegie-Mellon course lacks the entertainment of videogames while in-person professors leaven lectures with jokes and anecdotes.

At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, teacher Bonnie Kegan found one big advantage was the timely feedback the software gave by tracking students' answers to questions posed as they worked through each lesson. "You can drill down and see what questions they're missing," she says.

So how much can this really save? In a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Ithaka researchers estimated that—once the software investment is made—hybrid online courses could cost half what conventional classes do because fewer teachers are needed. That makes professors uneasy: Ms. Cooper, a full-time professor, says it's "definitely a worry." Ms. Kegan, an adjunct, taught twice as many students in the experiment but got twice the pay.

***************************************************

The report "Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials" is at http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-p...-universities-evidence-randomized-trials

The reason why tuition keeps going up is because of the massive federal government debt-origination spigot.

Which is the same reason that medical care keeps getting more expensive.

I am thrilled about these courses, but I don't view them as something to replace traditional courses. I heard an NPR interview with Coursera founder, Andrew Ng, who was asked if this would upset parents paying full-price for Stanford. I have one dd who just finished college and one who will graduate next year. I definitely value their education and don't regret the money spent. These courses, though, provide so much more - education to those around the world who can't afford it, distance learning for those in remote areas, and -best of all for our family- options for gifted students. Ds12 (against the rules, unfortunately, since you are supposed to be 13) just took two Computer Science courses, one through Udacity and one through Coursera. We're debating what course he'll do next. He really enjoyed them and learned a lot. What a great option for enrichment!

I keep trying to marshall my thoughts on this one-- but they are all over the map, honestly. What ALISON, MITx, Udacity, and Coursera are offering is not necessarily MOOC in the same sense of the word as the AI experiment last year at Stanford, or the juggernaut of DS106. "Massive" it may be, and "open" (well, at least in terms of enrollment), certainly, but not open-source or student-led. Nor is all of it 'college' coursework. Much of what ALISON has to offer is pretty basic computer skills training. Hardly "collegiate" in the way that most of us think of it.

NONE of the providers have any intention thus far of offering college credit (of any kind) for any of this free online content. I find that quite telling in and of itself. I think that one of the underlying problems here is a lack of validation/credibility. More on that in a moment. (I have a bit of an insider's view having had my DD enrolled in a major online-provider for elementary, middle, and now high school, and having been in on some of the 'ground floor' development for distance learning objectives 1996 through 2003).

More troubling to me personally is the seemingly sly or seductive commodification happening here, under the guise of the "open source" movement. Udacity and Coursera are both for-profit endeavors; neither has anything "open" about it; both have aggressively conventional copyright associated with ALL content. They've both refused to discuss their business plan. With anyone. I find that really troubling.

Pros:

access to pretty much anyone with a high-speed internet connection (which still, in case anyone is counting, leaves the majority of the developing world utterly out in the cold )

access to content which is different/higher level than anything available in remote locations (though again, see note above about high-speed internet)

access to low cost alternatives to enrichment (this seems like a VERY positive thing for EG/PG children and for adults, too, for that matter)

Cons:

see note above about lack of transparency re: business models-- what is fueling this, monetarily, once the venture capital runs out, hmmm?

what if this just leads to repetition for kids that do these courses in high school but... cannot get any kind of 'credit' for having done them??

Coursera has now teamed up with VUE (Pearson.... ahhhhhh, the stories that I could tell about Pearson and assessment...) in order to 'validate' mastery via end-of-course, ON-SITE testing at a 'validated' testing site, run by Pearson. For a modest fee, of course. Of course. This is currently the ONLY real way to 'certification' and even this is fraught with pragmatic problems. There already exist persons whose sole occupation is apparently to take exams for others. Why would this be any different? Answer-- it won't.

_________________________

While I love the idea of MOOC for some endeavors (ds106, anyone?? WOWSERS!), I simply do not think that it is valid to draw comparisons between grand experiments like DS106 or AI, with many MATURE participants all learning from one another and conducting an inquiry-led course with undefined objectives and therefore no particular goal-based outcomes (hey-- sounds JUST like a large graduate seminar course!)... to introductory content like the canned instruction offered by S. Khan or elsewhere... (Yeah, something tells me that there is a VERY good reason why introductory calculus isn't taught like "advanced topics" is).

I really have some irritation over the misappropriation of the term MOOC, for starters (because there is nothing "open" about what Udacity and Coursera are doing), and secondly, some angst over the idea that, with respect to foundational material;

a) 'canned' instruction-- of any caliber or from any institution-- is a good substitute for interactive, real-time instruction from even a moderately effective teacher-- for students of any ability...

or that

b) the 'organic/exploratory' approach is an appropriate means of teaching/learning the basics in any discipline. The MOOC is not a viable model for teaching basic skills.


These two highly antithetical approaches (both profoundly incorrect, IMO), are both being termed "MOOC" and offered for free. They have little to do with one another and probably fairly little to do with good formal education to start with. Personal enrichment? Fine. Substitute for good instruction in the basics? Not-so-fine, and that is my problem with this; because that is what seems to be the subtext of all of the cheery press on the subject. Well, not 'all' since there are a fair number of ed bloggers and higher-ed consortiums/thinktanks that seem to be as wary as I feel. It's not just me, in other words. This just isn't a solution to higher ed's cost containment woes. But it's being touted that way, and I think that is deeply unfortunate, since it is ultimately leading to wholly unrealistic expectations that may doom the entire thing to be judged as a 'failure' on that basis.


I should add that I have been horrified that my child's online school has decided that 40 minutes of weekly math instruction is "sufficient" time with a live expert instructor. Yes-- you read that right. In courses through precalculus, no less. Oh, sure, there are canned "video tutorials," (about four minutes each day) and those are (supposedly) sufficient. The subtext is that if you can't get it from that, you're placed inappropriately, or that maybe you should spend time watching MORE canned instruction on youtube or Khan Academy. (HUH?? Maybe if you're lost on some smaller foundational point, a real teacher could ferret that out in a few minutes, whereas you could easily-- as a student, I mean-- spend weeks not knowing why you were going wrong, or where.) What school is this, you might rightly ask? Connections. Yes, the same Connections which was recently snapped up by Pearson. I have nothing but bad things to say about their supposed "expertise" in assessment, by the way. Mostly, it can be summed up with... "Wha??" or "I spent fourteen weeks learning this material, and THIS is what you wanted me to get out of that?? REALLY?" (In the case of the latter, think "What is the fourth word of the Bill of Rights?" Truly that bad. In the former, incomprehensible questions and/or technically incorrect answers or even multiple equally correct answers.) Lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy, which some of the assessment experts I've spoken to don't even seem to understand when I've expressed concern over this point. So yeah-- certification by Pearson? Puhhleeeeeeeez. My point in sharing that anecdote is to note the natural endpoint of this kind of thinking in action. Sure-- students should "own" their education. Sure. What this really amounts to is that teachers aren't going to actually be interactively teaching kids anymore. Oh well. Good for kids that are complete autodidacts, but honestly, that isn't even most GT kids.

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While we may elect to use MITx for enrichment, I have deep misgivings about Coursera and Udacity; this is not politically motivated. Frankly, I could care less about whether or not a company makes money by providing services, as long as they don't adopt cost-cutting that harms quality and/or price-gouging of students/families. Unfortunately, all of my experience (both as a parent and educator) suggests that is virtually inevitable. At least MITx/Edx is nonprofit, even if I don't see how the model is sustainable.

There is also no way that I'm going to encourage DD to take content that is likely to be duplicated in required college coursework. The reason is that she doesn't tolerate repetition very well.

For some creative, truly MOOC activities, though? Absolutely thrilled with the option (though I doubt that ALISON, Coursera, MITx, or Udacity are going to offer such inquiry-led courses anytime soon).

Wow, Howler, that's some rant :-) I share some of your concerns.

But I think some of your irritation is misplaced. The first O in MOOC stands for Open, not for Open-source, and one of *my* bugbears is people conflating anything open with open-source. (For example, there are many, many occasions when open *standards* are essential but open *source* is unachievable: it's hard work to convince people that their explaining why you can't have the latter doesn't let them off providing the former.) MOOCS are open in the sense that anyone can enroll, without needing to convince anyone that they satisfy the prerequisites, for example. Who said it was supposed to be open source? (As a potential content provider, I can tell you I'm not open sourcing my content, although I've delightedly contributed to many open source projects over the years. Different thing.)

Also, I heard yesterday that the University of Washington has joined up with Coursera to offer online degrees, so you're out of date there :-)

I definitely see what you mean; there's a lot of ambiguity in the term. Likewise, I'm someone that has done both open-access (meaning free to anyone that wants it) and open-source (meaning feel free to use what I've done in any way you like, attributed or not), and I agree that they aren't the same thing at all.

There is also a third category of "open" that means both, and yet more than the sum of those things, too. That is the collaborative open-source movement; I think this is probably the driving force behind AI/DS106 efforts. That can, in the right group of people, be an incredible force multiplier. I'd love to see more efforts to harness that particular ephemeral thing in order to effectively foster it and graft it into a learning community, which is what the open-source MOOC advocates are after, I think. Rhizomicity is the favorite buzzword there; the result is something like a specialised Wiki which develops organically over time as the learning community works together on it; tinkering, debating and fact-finding as they go. That already exists in myriad guises on the net, and most of it is informal. I wish that I could pin down the precise mixture of ingredients necessarily to turn on that particular magic, but it seems to rely on high levels of motivation, a shared objective (and that seems to be the sticky thing for a learning community), and willingness to tolerate dissent (sometimes aggressive). Size isn't a huge factor, in my experience. Less than a dozen super-users and a few dozen 'regulars' are enough. Message boards like this one often develop in this direction if they have a stable core membership of super-users and regulars over a period of years.


And yes, my irritation is that I suspect that some of those touting how the MOOC will save the world are more-or-less using the ambiguity of the term "open" as an exploit to imply something that isn't meant. It feels like the term is being absconded with, in light of the early experiments with MOOC, which are nothing like the quiz-heavy, canned instructional offerings that are being given the name at this point. I'm not sure that MITx/Coursera/Udacity were really the originators of that misapplication, though-- I suspect it may have been overzealous media coverage that saw huge enrollments in both and decided that they must be the same animal. So you're right. I'm probably misplacing some of that angst. Udacity and Coursera have not stated that their objectives are identical to those of MITx or the free-range MOOC crowd.

To be clear, MITx intends (apparently) to make their offerings "open-enrollment" and "open-source" (at least as far as platform goes, if not content). The others have asserted standard copyright, as opposed to the open-source factions which rely upon creative-commons licensing.

As far as UW goes, it's not exactly clear (yet) whether UW's plans are for regular course credits or for certificate credit, as I understood this--

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018714077_coursera19m.html



That's essentially what the other institutions are envisioning, too. Pay-for-certificate and mastery-certs via proctored testing centers.


I very much like the idea of opening access. At the same time, though, I very much dislike the idea of no longer feeling obliged to teach content in a live and interactive environment. I guess at heart, my pedagogical orientation is so firmly Socratic that canned curriculum for an audience of millions just feels wrong to me. That's "training" not education.

I also dislike the idea of choosing one (and only one, by subtext) means of teaching "X" because that's how Professor Z at {prestigious institution} does things and most students there like that.

Plurality is a very good thing, I think. Content standards I'm all for. But that's just a "must-see" list on a tour that shouldn't have a mandated route, IMO.

I know that friends in higher ed have concerns about the nature of academic freedom in teaching over this whole thing. I don't blame them. Research may be much better at tier one institutions, but the teaching isn't. Not inherently. Sometimes the best teachers are actually found at smaller undergraduate institutions (which is a very good reason why those students tend to be so competitive in admissions to certain graduate programs). This movement makes very little sense unless one believes that to be untrue.

For most institutions, this is (my prediction here) going to amount to an acceleration of outsourcing to for-profit providers. Not too thrilled with that development, myself. If this worked, then why haven't Universities been loaning out copies of The Great Courses and then giving people certificates when they send them back? (Oh, nevermind; there is a part of me that thinks that maybe that'll be NEXT...)

I have pretty strong feelings about what higher education is-- and what it isn't (task training). I also have an extremely strong opinion that there is very high quality undergraduate education outside of the Ivies. This entire movement seems to be based on a completely antithetical foundation, and I think that may be what I'm viscerally objecting to. It strikes me as insufferably arrogant to think that only ONE person at Harvard (or anyhwere else) can/should be teaching everyone in the world... Western Civ (or anything else) because he's the best that they have to offer. I object because while Professor Harvard might be good and he might be well-read, that doesn't make him better as a teacher of introductory material than Professor Untenured at Missouri State. KWIM?


(I think that I did start my initial rant with the assertion that my feelings about this are quite scattered at this point. I'm definitely agitated over what it all means-- but for such a wide variety of reasons that I'm having trouble condensing them.)

A few more exploratory articles about this movement:

The New Public Ivies (Slate)-- some of the commentary is just as insightful as the op-ed.

What's the Matter with MOOC's? (op-ed from Chronicle of Higher Ed)

http://stevendkrause.com/ I really like Steve's commentary on this, though I don't completely agree with all of his opinions. His views have touched on a lot of the things that I've already been pondering as this unfolds... and I've considered some thing that I hadn't thought about in reading some of the more insightful comments posted at Steve's blog.

So hard to know.

I'm always just a touch wary of movements that put "anti-elitism" (or even just egalitarianism) front and center, or seem to offer something for nothing.

It makes me want to dig a little harder to find out what's behind the curtain. So far I haven't found anything that makes sense behind this one, and I find that quite worrying.

The only way that this makes any kind of real sense is with no assessment or expert guidance/feedback for participants, and there's no "there" there, if you see what I mean. No way is that going to be credit-bearing. Nobody is going to grant me a license to practice law just because I say that I should be able to, based upon my years of study, and they shouldn't, either. Now, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't study the law as a means to enrich my own life and that I might not even attain a level of understanding that rivals the pros.

Peer-grading, robo-grading, or multiple choice only assessments is where this is all headed, and Coursera has tipped their hand already-- both in statements made to the media and also in partnering with Pearson. That is not real "education" in my estimation. There's just no way to teach Composition without interaction. Oh, and another thing-- it's not really possible to teach introductory chemistry or linear algebra without it, either, in spite of what some reports have said in recent days.

I'm all for flipped classrooms. I like that very much, in fact. I'm also all for providing as many enrichment opportunities as possible for GT kids (obviously) and for lifelong learning for anyone that wants it. I'm more than a little alarmed by the notion that "video" is intended to replace... expert-written textbooks?? (Seriously-- this is a quote by someone in this MOOC-consortium push.) The rationale behind this statement? This person believes that people learn more from video than from "dry textbooks." Oh, well then. If you think it hard enough, I suppose that makes it true??

It bothers me that there isn't a coherent whole here when one looks at it carefully.

I'm that kind of person. It just bugs me. So I keep worrying at it, trying to ferret out an explanation. No question where DD gets this trait from, I guess.

Um.

Except for reading law under an attorney's supervision.

See California and Virginia for details.

Just work in a law office for a few years and take some exams, apparently.

http://admissions.calbar.ca.gov/Education/LegalEducation/LawOfficeorJudgesChamber.aspx

Whether someone has learned X should be measured by what they know and what they can do (outputs), not how they learned (inputs). I agree that a composition course should have some human interaction, but it need not be face-to-face. CTY offers online composition courses in which instructors make written comments on students' essays.

Some smart and motivated people have taught themselves introductory chemistry and linear algebra by reading on their own. Gifted homeschoolers often prepare for AP exams in this way. These exams have long-answer questions, not just multiple choice questions. The College Board has done studies showing that students who get high scores on AP exams do as well in the following college courses as students who earn high grades in introductory college courses.

We likely will pay our kids' way through a residential college, because we are well off. I do see value in having professors and classmates. But the cost of college has risen so much that many families are looking for cheaper alternatives.


I agree with you that textbooks written by knowledgeable authors are valuable, and I can learn faster from a book than a video. People who don't like to read should not be going to college.

You need to read more by libertarians . Occupational licensing is largely a scam by incumbents to keep out lower-priced competition. Someone who passes the bar exam should be able to practice law without going to law school. For much of American history, there was no such requirement. Abraham Lincoln did not go to law school. Forcing to people to pay for four years of college before three years of law school is doubly egregious. To put it bluntly, academics at undergraduate and professional schools have long benefited from a credentialing monopoly they have lobbied for. I want that monopoly broken and for students save time and money -- which means a lot of professors will be out of work. Online courses alone won't burst the higher education bubble. Deregulation of the labor market is also needed.

I agree with you!! (Red letter day on both our calendars, probably. ) FWIW, so does my 13yo DD.



I think that you nailed it there, though in another way, too. I think that my DH and I figured out what this is ultimately envisioned to be. Oh, sure-- right now there is a lot of buy-in from higher ed and a big kerfuffle over that.

Ultimately, I think that what Coursera, Udacity, and maybe ALISON (though more openly) are probably after is a huge marketshare on what they see as being the successor to the Bachelor's degree. This isn't about college at all. Well, other than as an 'alternative for the masses' but it isn't EVER going to be "college" the way higher education has existed for over a millenium.

JOB TRAINING. Made to order by client employers who pick and choose from a menu, pay a finder's fee, and wait for the field to train itself on it's own time and at no additional expense, then sit back and pick and choose from those certified trained persons.

This way, there isn't any "waste" in the system from the employers standpoint, and when looked at fairly crudely, there isn't any from the systematic standpoint, either. People who are motivated and do more certifications are going to be most appealing to employers, and they'll have exactly the training that those potential employers have 'ordered' in a candidate pool. When employers move on, the candidates return to the pool and do different training modules and the process can be iterative. Like a giant temporary labor pool that trains itself.

THAT makes sense to me. Yes, I have been called cynical. Why do you ask?

I might not like the subterfuge of dressing this up as "college for everyone" or what I see as a bait-and-switch approach (college credit? A degree program?? I hardly think so-- more like "continuing education"). But it makes sense. (Whew-- feel much better about this now and I'll sleep better for it!)

The MITx program is different, I think. That one has years and years of planning behind the execution, and the underpinnings of it have been different all along. That one IS about 'outreach' IMO.

______________________

Another thing that occurs to me is related to our earlier discussion about causation fallacies and things like forcing all kids into AP coursework, or preventing them from taking AP exams until 11th and 12th grade arbitrarily, etc. all based upon aggregate data. I suspect that these pushes toward autodidactism in students are based upon the observation that the MOST SUCCESSFUL students are autodidacts by the end of high school.
Ergo; (you all know where I'm going with this, right?) if we just remove all that pesky instructional support, you know-- making autodidactic the ONLY option... then VOILA! they'll all be like those success stories! Oooo, and it's so much cheaper to only have one teacher (er-- 'facilitator') per thousand or so students, too. BONUS-- we fixed the budget problem too, everybody!

I think that initiatives like Khan and our school's "students-should-OWN-their-learning-process-so-we-aren't-teaching-them-anymore" idée fixe are based in this backwards line of thinking. Truly.

It's sort of the opposite of hothousing. But that is literally the ONLY way that Coursera's operations can work with the enrollment numbers they envision relative to the staffing they suggest is adequate. The answer that they have for this is "quant-stuff, not to worry" or "peer evaluation." Well, that's great if you happen to have a peer that has the experience and insight that a professional in the subject area has... but what if your peers are... well, learning and at about the same level of competence as yourself? Apparently "the rubric" is intended to take care of such things. I'm skeptical.


But I sure appreciate a chance to hammer out my thoughts on this. Thanks for putting up with me. I'll be quiet now. Probably. LOL. It's really been bugging me, and I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. As a parent, I'm actually kinda thrilled at the enrichment opportunities.

The NYT has a column today "The Trouble With Online Education" by Mark Edmundson http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-education.html that expands on your thoughts:

...

But can online education ever be education of the very best sort?

It’s here that the notion of students teaching teachers is illuminating. As a friend and fellow professor said to me: “You don’t just teach students, you have to learn ’em too.” It took a minute — it sounded like he was channeling Huck Finn — but I figured it out.

With every class we teach, we need to learn who the people in front of us are. We need to know where they are intellectually, who they are as people and what we can do to help them grow. Teaching, even when you have a group of a hundred students on hand, is a matter of dialogue.

In the summer Shakespeare course I’m teaching now, I’m constantly working to figure out what my students are able to do and how they can develop. Can they grasp the contours of Shakespeare’s plots? If not, it’s worth adding a well-made film version of the next play to the syllabus. Is the language hard for them, line to line? Then we have to spend more time going over individual speeches word by word. Are they adept at understanding the plot and the language? Time to introduce them to the complexities of Shakespeare’s rendering of character.

...

QFT. (And I say that as someone who has one of those licenses intended to keep out the riff-raff.)

Here's the outcome of that first MIT online physics class:

Quote:


EdX officials say 154,000 students from more than 160 countries registered for MIT's first online course, "Circuits and Electronics," this past spring. Only about 7,100 students passed the course, but that's still a lot more than can fit in a lecture hall.

More than 120 universities have expressed interest in joining the consortium, said edX President Anant Agarwal, who heads MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/08/05/us/ap-us-elite-colleges-online.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ma.../features/_its_three_oclock_in039373.php
September/October 2012
The Siege of Academe
For years, Silicon Valley has failed to breach the walls of higher education with disruptive technology. But the tide of battle is changing. A report from the front lines.
By Kevin Carey

I think this is an interesting discussion of what technology is likely to make a difference in education.

http://www.american.com/archive/201...nionated-guide-to-educational-technology
Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology
By Arnold Kling
The American
Wednesday, September 12, 2012

This is a thing of beauty. It's the first time that I have seen a truly balanced write-up of the issues surrounding MOOC implementation.

New Yorker: Is College Education Moving Online?


This is really fascinating reading-- and as you spend the time, consider what "college education" actually means, particularly in the latter 2/3rd of this (IMO, well-written) article.

Peter Burgard is quoted in the article:


This is the concern. Or part of it. One criticism that I have as a physical scientist is the disquieting observation that ALL sciences are now being interpreted as being computer science, or at least amenable to the same pedagogy and goals. That is NOT true. Science is not engineering, and computer science is quite binary in outcomes which makes it far more like engineering than any of the other physical sciences. This is something that most of the people spearheading these MOOC efforts (and even the humanities faculty who are critical of them) simply do not seem to fully appreciate. Science education is just as inherently Socratic as the humanities are. An undergraduate course in synthetic organic chemistry or advanced optics has far more in common with a course in the fine arts than either does one in computer science. Similarly, mathematics. Those are process-driven learning experiences, not outcome-driven ones. They cannot be reduced to multiple-choice right/wrong assessment. No more than the nuanced understanding expressed in a stellar research paper for a philosophy course can be considered in that light. Who in their right mind would possibly make the claim that YouTube is a "performance art" lab class?

And yet, this IS what is being claimed by those driving the MOOC movement relentlessly. Frankly, this is about untapped MONEY, not education. It may benefit a segment of the population, all right-- and key among them are younger PG students, but I worry even there about the fact that those autodidacts are missing out on all that an authentic experiential, interactive learning experience can provide. Is Khan Academy really a substitute for all mathematics instruction? Really? If it doesn't work, why not? This is a pretty pressing question at the moment-- and I think, personally, that when you SCRIPT learning to this degree, you've constrained the students mentally to such a degree that all you can really do is rote learning, or solopsism in one's own echo chamber. I don't think that ultimately serves GT students well either. They are often the very students who MOST need higher-level unscripted, unexpected interactions. Removing those messy, unexpected things cheapens education and turns it into operant conditioning.



Also addressed in this write-up: data mining, inefficiency driving costs, and a developing two-tiered system.

It's a great read.

For at least some science courses, I disagree. If you ace the final exam in quantum mechanics, I don't think it matters much if your undertanding was gained Socratically or by reading and re-reading your QM textbook(s) and doing lots of problems.

Playing devil's advocate here...

I'm finding it interesting that while there are many on this forum who don't like the idea of online degrees because there is little or no interaction which takes away an important aspect of higher education, at the same time I've read through numerous threads that want to reduce college entrance to purely test scores. If a strong portion of the value of education includes direct interaction, should not part of entrance to higher education be demonstrating one's ability to interact effectively?

It matters a great deal, actually, because one can't ask a textbook a question that it didn't anticipate and get an answer from it that reflects all of the knowledge, expertise, and experience of the presumably erudite author.

You can ask those things of living humans in a teaching/learning environment, however, and get answers. Whether they are good answers or not is not the point (yes, it's important that they be good but not for this particular reason).

Ergo, creative problem-solving, being more than rehashing what you've seen/encountered previously, requires a more thoughtful educational process in order to truly educate.

The other reason why this is important is that the diversity of thought that a master in any field is exposed to when teaching... is truly FUEL for innovation and lifelong learning and exploration for the instructor, too. Even people at Caltech and MIT are learning about new ways to see things when students ASK QUESTIONS.


Ergo, creative problem-solving, being more than rehashing what you've seen/encountered previously, requires a more thoughtful educational process in order to truly educate.


If it were all just about ability to read and absorb it from a book, then nobody would still be TEACHING mathematics or classical mechanics in the first place.

There is also a huge difference between regurgitation and understanding sufficiently to tackle novel problems set before one. Eidectic memory is not mastery. Knowing the PROCESS of working a particular infinite-potential well problem is one thing, but the problem is understanding it well enough to model novelty-- and to recognize when the model is valid, when it isn't, and when it MIGHT be and might not be.

I realize that it seems like science is all right/wrong and very binary, but that is not the case. Textbooks, video clips and canned instructional modules do not capture "yeah, but... what if... what about... what happens if..." questions, and good, engaged students ask those things as they explore.

I think that the push toward MOOC has asked fundamentally wrong questions. It has assumed that the process of learning is inherently autodidactic, and is about absorbing a body of facts and being able to generate "the" answer to questions that one person (or a group of them) has decided are "important" about that body of knowledge.

It has then asked "are there things that cannot be done using this tool?"

Instead, I'd argue (and have, I realize) that the better question is to look at the tool and say "it teaches bodies of information and facts very well. Which fields of study can this be used in?"

There are ways to use this idea in a flipped classroom. But assuming that it can REPLACE classrooms (or interactive learning environments) is simply wrong.

Books didn't manage that, by and large, and neither can MOOC's. The danger is in thinking that they can, because there is a more nuanced difference here-- competence versus mastery.

Yes, and honestly, I don't think that anyone who is suggesting that there is something very very very wrong with the system is actually intending to imply anything that is inconsistent with that notion.

MORE personalized is probably better there. Honestly-- a heavily groomed but merely average student is pretty easily differentiated from an HG one in about ten minutes time by someone who sees a lot of high school students.

Just let them talk a while and ask leading questions. LOL. The one sounds like a parrot or someone reading from a teleprompter, and the other like a real person.

I can certainly see the benefits of either system. Not everyone who can attend classes in person, yet access TO the class online and doing the mechanical portions of the class still has strong value. I could see different degree designations as a possibility, just as I'd like to see varying High School diplomas that better reflect the accomplishments or areas of focus of the student.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324807704579087840126695698.html
Job Market Embraces Massive Online Courses:
Seeking Better-Trained Workers, AT&T, Google and Other Firms Help Design and Even Fund Web-Based College Classes
By DOUGLAS BELKIN and CAROLINE PORTER
Wall Street Journal
September 26, 2013

Great idea. Instead of recruiting people and then having to train then, insist that they train at their expense to your specification!

I worked at a company where they had a good training program for options traders -- and made them sign a 3-year non-compete before starting the program. There can be advantages to being trained at your own expense.

I live in NZ so my experience won't match I guess but;

1st year university (we don't have college) - 300 people in the lecture hall, good lecturers give informative, clear lectures that anticipate questions. Other lecturers do not have good enough English to do more than recite. If they are asked questions they repeat what they have said and often have to go back a page in their script if they are interrupted.

Unless you already have a well paid job and qualifications and skills the employer doesn't want to lose paying for training is pretty much up to the employee.

Amen!

But unlike the authors of most of the gushing articles championing MOOCs as a game changer in the sense of reducing tuitions fees I just do not see anything close to equivalency between physically being on a campus and being there virtually via a MOOC. Nor, apparently, does this guy who now attends MIT in person:-

Mongolian guy aces MIT virtual class now at MIT