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Has anyone taken any of the U of Mizzou online high school science courses? Or any courses from the U of M? Feedback, opinions?

Thanks!

polarbear

Thanks Portia!

My son has done the Conceptual Physics course. Bottom line: You get what you pay for (Mizzou is inexpensive), and I'm not impressed.

Students are basically left on their own in that course (also in a humanities course he took). There is zero teaching and the only feedback is on lab reports (it's minimal, but to be fair, it's at least real feedback). The lab kit you have to buy isn't complete, and we ended up having to root around for or buy some oddball things like wooden and metal balls of a certain size. Some of the data they provide for doing analysis is bad. Two labs in different parts of the course deal with constant acceleration and use the same data. It shows that the object accelerates, then slows down, then has extra acceleration to catch up to where the math predicts it would be (happens more than once). In lab activity #1, the object is supposedly rolling down an incline. In activity #2, it's falling due to gravity. I wrote to the course author about the problems and he replied:

"I wrote course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it.

The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted mathematically."

In other words, PFO. As a scientist, I know that data isn't perfect. Like everyone else, I also know that falling objects don't suddenly slow down while falling through the air.


The tests are all multiple choice because there's no interaction with a human. I used to get pretty frustrated with some of the questions DS showed me. IMO, they split hairs and used tricky wording as a way of compensating for not having human interactions. Example: "When an apple falls to earth from a tree, what force is acting on it?" The correct answer was "gravity from every object in the universe." My son couldn't decide between this answer and "gravity from the earth." He knew that the earth wasn't the only massive object exerting a gravitational force on the apple, but he also knew that the effects of everything but the earth were negligible in making the apple fall.

If I hadn't been able to help him through that course, he would have ended up with a C or a D instead of an A.

Personally, I wouldn't let my son take another Mizzou course if I wasn't prepared to spend a lot of time teaching him.

Our experience is more minimal than Val's-- we opted NOT to take a class from them when it became clear that there was:

a) not a lot of feedback from instructors,
b) not a lot of offline activity/content,
c) not a "real" lab experience associated.

This is a structural problem with a great many online science offerings, however. The problem is that an online model is often being driven by costs which promote a too-high student-teacher ratio to allow for a lot of teaching and feedback.

Secondly, the assessments:

bear in mind that students will be TAKING assessments with no way to "raise their hand" or walk up to the instructor and ask about funky questions. Assessments are multiple choice, and often very, very clearly not written by true subject experts, because they cherry-pick bizarre non-central information for questions (focusing on wording, not meaning, if you kwim), and failing to understand that at a top-level of understanding, two answers are equivalent, and that if you go to a level of understanding that makes them differentiable, you then make ALL of the selections technically incorrect.

"Lab" experiences are about 90% simulations. While that has its place, I don't consider those to be LABS so much as 'demonstrations' which are interactive. Nice to present theory, but not good to leave students imagining that things never leave you scratching your head and wondering what went wrong... which doesn't even get into the problems that Val noted.

As noted, not unique to Mizzou. We noted the same problems with Oklahoma's online offerings, and with many other a la carte providers of secondary coursework.

Local hybrid courses are usually my preference over all-online ones. My DD took AP Physics B all-online, and even with a VERY skilled and devoted teacher, it was rough. Would have been nearly impossible without help from a couple of physical scientist parents.