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For-Credit MOOC: Best of Both Worlds at MIT?

Last fall, however, the university experimented by offering the MOOC version of a popular class for on-campus students, for credit, in an attempt to help students facing scheduling issues.

Why is it news that a school has finally decided to offer an online course with credits for 30 students? Perhaps MIT should now consider becoming accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission to learn how to offer these courses with well established best practices. DEAC has been accrediting distance education programs for decades.

The data we are collecting is unprecedented in education…. We see every mouse click and keystroke. We know if a user clicks one answer and then selects another, or fast-forwards through part of a video.”

Today, education is an anecdotal science, but I think we can turn education into a data-driven science, where you do what you know works.

Using data to transform the learning experience

We wanted to be scientific in our approach to this recommendation, so we split several courses into A/B versions with and without extra practice assessments to analyze learner progress and performance in both versions.

Excitingly, we found that when the workload per week matched learner expectations adding practice assessments not only increased participation and success on related graded assessments, but also led to greater overall persistence and progress.

imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.

In 15 Years From Now Half of US Universities May Be in Bankruptcy.

עכשיו את חורף המריבה שלנו – השמש לבית יורק הפך לקיץ

The way to really bust up the higher education cartel is move to a certification process versus a diploma process because a diploma process maintains that cartel within these institutions of higher education.

We’ve got the internet -- you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need disruptive technology for our higher education system.

would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done?

I'm here to support teachers, not replace them.

I would argue that there never was a viable vision for MOOCs in higher education in the first place. The big three MOOC providers’ trial-and-error efforts to find a viable business model are what led to their shifts in strategy and ultimately the departure of their founders for fields outside of education.

He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.

The Victorian MOOC

The Society to Encourage Studies at Home is a 19th century network of women who connect across the continent over the postal system. Women may be significantly disbarred from third level education, but they are not disbarred from organising, networking, connecting and educating. And this is what they do. They organise and educate one another. They organise departments, schools, libraries, curriculum, instruction and education. An institution. On a massive scale. They reach out to ten thousand students over twenty-four years. It is a massively open postal university.

And that pile of handwritten correspondence sitting on her bureau to and from instructors and students is what makes her an Edtech icon, and a genuine network engineer. A stack of paper rather than a stack of internet protocols connecting women to educational opportunity across the US.

Because of what it achieved, because of who achieved it, because of how they achieved it. Because it has been forgotten, and because the modern narratives of disruptive innovation only work if inconvenient truths are not inconveniently remembered.

All of these innovations created growth but had obvious limitations. They were inefficient, slow, and not interactive. They were not ideal ways to provide collaborative, customized education.

Afterwards, during one of the consultations about lists, rules, and circulars, a member said, 'The readers must make notes;' to which another answered, 'That is useless, for as soon as a fact is written down it is discharged from the memory and forgotten.' — 'Then let them make their notes from memory;' and this has proved to be one of the most efficient elements of our system.

For all its conservative underpinnings, Ticknor's pedagogy was quite radically rethought and might have graced any utopian society. It assumed the desire to learn, the willingness to teach, the self-paced learning, and the individual tailoring that most educators now understand to be the hallmarks of the very best pedagogical structure.

For the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, the postal service provided networking, educational and information dissemination opportunities denied to women previously. It disrupted power, it connected the geographically distributed and the educationally disenfranchised. It was (almost) ubiquitous. It was cheap. It was scaleable. It allowed individuals at the margins to sidestep authority, self-organise, network and effectively disseminate information rapidly, with a reliability, speed and low cost previously unimaginable across massive distance.

In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching

provided general course structure (registration, syllabus, etc), video lectures and slides, discussion forums, writing assignments, quizzes ... and a final exam

a variety of expository content (text, examples, images, and video clips) and a large number of interactive activities.

Just because students register to use OLI (החומרים האינטראקטיביים שהוכנו), does not guarantee that they do. And, similarly, just because students are in the MOOC does not mean they take advantage of the features it provides, such as watching the lecture videos.

Our results support the view that video lectures may add limited value for student learning and that providing more interactive activities will better enhance student learning outcomes.

Though specific activities vary from course to course, video-based lectures and student discussion forums typically form the core of the MOOC instructional experience. We call this the “lecture model”. The Open Learning Initiative (המיזם של האוניברסיטה של החוקרים), which has offered online learning environments since 2002, takes a different approach focusing on rich and interactive learn-by-doing activities, aligned with student-centered learning outcomes, and designed around science-based learner models. We call this the “learn-by-doing model.” Both models offer rich datasets, though with different focuses and capturing different kinds of learner interactions.

That practice is in response to feedback from the faculty, who were concerned that students would feel like the school was pulling a "bait and switch." "We didn't want our students to feel like we weren't giving them the real thing," she noted.

Having people who are really good at explaining ideas and putting the right graphics and videos around them can create a pretty darn good learning experience

New research out of MIT, Tsinghua University, and Harvard came to the conclusion that online learning…specifically MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) do work….or at least work as good as traditional teaching.

Online Learning is Just as Effective as Traditional Education

Pritchard said improvement levels increased across the board, explaining that, even if a student with a lower initial score ends the online course with what would be equivalent to a failing grade, "that person would nevertheless have made substantial gains in understanding."

Translation: Online learning outcomes are equal, or even better than, those produced in a traditional classroom.

The MOOC Where Everybody Learned

There was no evidence that cohorts with low initial ability learned less than the other cohorts

should allay concerns that less-well-prepared students cannot learn in MOOCs

But that’s not to say that the less-well-prepared students did well. Many of them scored significantly lower than did students with more schooling. Some would have earned failing grades.

The point is that even the students who got bad grades in the course came away knowing more than they did at the outset.

Coursera is trying to build an infrastructure for in-person learning around its free online courses. Research has suggested that MOOC students who receive offline help earn higher scores on their assessments.

Several branches will provide users with weekly in-person class discussions with trained facilitators, in addition to internet and wi-fi access.

to connect the world to a great education

In all likelihood, companies like Coursera and Udacity — Harvard and MIT’s offering, edX, operates as a nonprofit — that started out as MOOC providers will eventually move away from certain qualities of the unfortunate acronym. “Massive” and “open” are not particularly conducive to viable or sustainable business models.

Beginning in March, HarvardX for Alumni will offer versions of seven Harvard MOOCs exclusively to graduates of the university. The courses will not be full-length MOOCs but “segments” that include some new material developed specially for graduates, according to Michael Rutter, a spokesman. Some professors might even travel to talk about the material at Harvard Clubs in different cities, Mr. Rutter said.

Expand access to education for everyone

Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Online Education Will Be the Next 'Bubble' To Pop, Not Traditional University Learning

When Tamny is saying that online education is the next bubble he is of course not talking about the sort of online education that any of us working in the field of designing, teaching, or supporting online courses would recognize.

Tamny is talking about MOOCs.

What is certain is that the online learning communities focus over the past decade has been on just the sort of learning that Tamny sees as most valuable. That is learning that is built around the intense exchange and development of ideas between faculty and students. Online courses are hot beds of good pedagogical practices. All of the online programs that I have worked on have been collaborations between learning designers and subject matter experts, developed on strong theoretical foundations of how people learn.

... more to the point, I've been ambivalently interested in MOOCs, with more than a healthy degree of scepticism that the current form will persist in the future. On the other hand, I am interested, vitally so, in all the ways we can learn from one another online. So I'm uncomfortable with the "MOOC Major Player" sobriquet but flattered that my efforts over the last decade on behalf of digital modes of interactive and collaborative learning are being recognized here.

אוניברסיטה.com || גם האקדמיה בישראל מצטרפת לגל הלימודים המקוון

בעוד האקדמיה הישראלית עושה את צעדיה הראשונים בתחום, ברחבי העולם – ובעיקר בארה"ב – כבר הפכו הקורסים המקוונים לשחקן מרכזי במגרש ההשכלה הגבוהה.

I have a simple proposal.

Any reporter writing about online and education and MOOCs should understand the difference between the two.

Any reporter writing about online education should talk to people who have been designing and teaching online courses for the past few years. Any reporter writing about the benefits or faults of online learning should have to enroll in a quality online degree program.

And anyone that is writing about the pros and cons of residential vs. online education should experience a blended course.

This means that the debate about mass pedagogy has two aspects. One is whether the lecture format itself relays good information and well-supported professorial interpretations – this seems to not be a problem. The other is based in the very old argument over whether lecture/presentation itself is good pedagogy.

If you are focused on individual learning and individual evaluation of that learning, either for self-improvement or to be assessed for a grade/credit/degree, then the interaction and assessment elements of xMOOCs can be disappointing. Individualized learners are self-directed enough to do the work and learn well on their own given the presentation, but their efforts at deeper exploration are adversely affected by lack of professorial contact, feedback and input.

If you are focused on crowd-sourced learning and self-actualization through communication with others, xMOOCs may be disappointing for similar reasons. Presentation quality may be high, but presentation is secondary to exploration – it is just a jumping off point. With formulated discussions and automated assessments focused on absorbing that presentation content, there is less opportunity to extend exploration.

It's easier to learn on paper.

I don’t suppose the fact that two of them are more than ten years old and six others predate the release of the first iPad makes any difference.

However, what strikes me about the ad are the assumptions the copywriters seem to have about what education is and should be.

Learning math is correctly performing 36 calculations by hand. College is largely about reading standard printed textbooks and highlighting the text. Research papers are forever.

Teaching is all about transmitting information.

For the first of three “vignettes” that she provides, we dwell on Raúl Coaguila, a Peruvian who won a Fulbright, we are told, thanks to his Coursera expertise. Because the fact is, Koller informs us, there is “not very much computer education to be had in Peru.” Only Coursera could give him this opportunity, dedicated as the company is to “people whose lives have been transformed by education that they would never otherwise have had.”

Because I’ve been to Lima (and Cuzco and Trujillo and Huamanga…) and pretty much all you see are endless adverts for computer courses at the multitude of local colleges and universities. Try for instance, the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas or the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería. Or even the venerable Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, which has been teaching computing for over seventy years. Heck, this October you could take part in the V Congreso Internacional de Computación y Telecomunicación, hosted at the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

What, did Koller think they live in mud huts down there?

I guess we all knew the MOOC bubble would burst sometime, but I'm saying it's happened this week - it just doesn't know it yet. The reason? Commercial MOOC providers have started making noises about becoming elearning courseware providers for standard education providers.

The initial open model isn't offering this any time soon, so a quicker route to pay back is to work with existing providers and students who are already paying. As people such as David Kernohan have been pointing out, the problem with MOOCs funded by VCs is that sooner (rather than later) they want their money back, and they'll make you shift your model to do that.

We now understand the endgame here. We now get the business model. The idea is not “send your students to us!”. The idea is to become yet another online vendor of services to higher ed.

No, I don't think so, but maybe they can now become what we always wanted them to be, focused on access and experimentation and not hype and commercialism.

Following the literature on student peer reviews, we have developed a process in which students are first trained using a grading rubric to grade other assessments. This has been shown to result in accurate feedback to other students, and also provide a valuable learning experience for the students doing the grading.

we draw on ideas from the literature on crowd-sourcing, which studies how one can take many ratings (of varying degrees of reliability) and combine them to obtain a highly accurate score.

Once you see this pattern - a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know - you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

... the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

MOOCs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.