This article (as Jonathan Rees points out) continues to raise (but not really address) questions I have about the pedagogy of MOOCs. I raised some of these questions in the Chronicle story on your poetry course and would still be very interested in your responses, given your experience so far:
Without consistent opportunities for evaluation and feedback, how can we know what kind of learning is actually going on? I see “peer to peer” evaluation being touted in the piece you link to here, but those of us in the humanities at least may find it difficult to believe that this will be terribly effective. It’s not that I don’t think interaction and feedback can be done online, but on the large scale of a MOOC, my imagination falters!
Rohan: I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief. For me, the model involves an uncompensated professor speaking to an undefined world of interested non-paying people. A comment function is great – my MOOC has one, and I respond to comments – but that’s as far as I’d go.
What’s the basis for your worry about “what kind of learning’s actually going on” in this model?
“I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief.”
Most of the people interviewed by Tamar Lewin evidently disagree, which is why I think your unqualified boosting of MOOCs is dangerous. You see them as a harmless distraction. They see them as important revenue sources for the future, and have completely bought into all this seismic-shift-reshaping-higher-education crap. Just because you don’t think monetizing MOOCs is practical doesn’t mean that they won’t go and do it anyway.
Alan: I know. I think lots of things that are monetized shouldn’t be. That’s no reason for me to stop doing them if they’re valuable. People are always suggesting we pay blood donors. If blood donors started to be paid, I’d still donate blood.
What I meant by that is that when we talk about someone “taking” a conventional course, we mean something more than that they buy the books or show up — there’s a reciprocal engagement and, eventually, some kind of evaluation, to find out if our teaching is being met by their learning — if, at the end of the course, they have acquired specific knowledge and skills and understanding of the course material. The rhetoric around MOOCs emphasizes that universities are “offering” and students are “taking” courses, but without that interaction and assessment we have little idea what they are in fact “taking” from them, if anything. Should we care? Perhaps not. It sounds like you see your MOOC just as a form of outreach, so the question of whether students are understanding the points in your lectures (or learning to interpret poetry themselves, or any of the other things you’d be checking for if you were teaching a conventional course) doesn’t matter to you in this context. But as Alan says, there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for MOOCs as a potential alternative to conventional pedagogy, in which case it really does matter that we are clear with ourselves and (more important) with our administrators about what we can and can’t do with courses scaled up this way. When is a “course” not a course? might be one way to ask the question: we can do outreach in plenty of ways that aren’t packaged as courses, after all.
Rohan: I haven’t followed everything everyone involved with MOOCs has said, but it’s not my sense that they think of these as an alternative to traditional pedagogy. Most universities seem to be describing them as indeed a form of outreach, democratization of knowledge, as well as a way of getting your university’s name out there (rather like opening a campus in a foreign country, etc.). MOOCs would, by acclamation or necessity or whatever you want to call it, always be a small specialization of any university, since they’d feature only your very best teachers, and only – among such people – teachers willing to teach without (for the moment at any rate) getting paid.
Yes, it’s clear that some universities are going to try to credentialize these courses (I have no idea whether credentialize is a word), which will involve some form of testing, etc. My belief is that any effort in this direction will be doomed because of cheating and an inability to do legitimate testing, etc., etc. Once it dooms itself, MOOCs will either disappear or will revert to what I think they should be – a form of social responsibility to which serious universities with acclaimed faculty should be attracted.
And the Coursera folks seem to think you don’t need to be among the “very best teachers”:
‘The online format also reduces the traditional lecture-hall need for professors to be spellbinding orators, Ng asserts. Being clear and logical is all that’s needed online, he says, adding: “If you’re able to sit down with your favorite niece or nephew and explain a subject to them, then you can record a class like this.”’ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/07/17/coursera-boom/)
You may be right that the effort to monetize and credentialize MOOCs is doomed, but it’s worrisome that universities led on by the kind of cheerleading seen in these articles may pour already scarce resources into trying to solve the problems you identify.
[…] the effect of their MOOCs on colleagues both at their own universities and elsewhere. For example, here’s Margaret Soltan of University Diaries fame writing in the comments of her own blog in a long […]
July 17th, 2012 at 1:54PM
This article (as Jonathan Rees points out) continues to raise (but not really address) questions I have about the pedagogy of MOOCs. I raised some of these questions in the Chronicle story on your poetry course and would still be very interested in your responses, given your experience so far:
http://chronicle.com/article/Sharing-a-Passion-for-Poetry/132133/
Without consistent opportunities for evaluation and feedback, how can we know what kind of learning is actually going on? I see “peer to peer” evaluation being touted in the piece you link to here, but those of us in the humanities at least may find it difficult to believe that this will be terribly effective. It’s not that I don’t think interaction and feedback can be done online, but on the large scale of a MOOC, my imagination falters!
July 17th, 2012 at 2:13PM
Rohan: I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief. For me, the model involves an uncompensated professor speaking to an undefined world of interested non-paying people. A comment function is great – my MOOC has one, and I respond to comments – but that’s as far as I’d go.
What’s the basis for your worry about “what kind of learning’s actually going on” in this model?
July 18th, 2012 at 6:28AM
“I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief.”
Most of the people interviewed by Tamar Lewin evidently disagree, which is why I think your unqualified boosting of MOOCs is dangerous. You see them as a harmless distraction. They see them as important revenue sources for the future, and have completely bought into all this seismic-shift-reshaping-higher-education crap. Just because you don’t think monetizing MOOCs is practical doesn’t mean that they won’t go and do it anyway.
July 18th, 2012 at 6:38AM
Alan: I know. I think lots of things that are monetized shouldn’t be. That’s no reason for me to stop doing them if they’re valuable. People are always suggesting we pay blood donors. If blood donors started to be paid, I’d still donate blood.
July 18th, 2012 at 7:53AM
What I meant by that is that when we talk about someone “taking” a conventional course, we mean something more than that they buy the books or show up — there’s a reciprocal engagement and, eventually, some kind of evaluation, to find out if our teaching is being met by their learning — if, at the end of the course, they have acquired specific knowledge and skills and understanding of the course material. The rhetoric around MOOCs emphasizes that universities are “offering” and students are “taking” courses, but without that interaction and assessment we have little idea what they are in fact “taking” from them, if anything. Should we care? Perhaps not. It sounds like you see your MOOC just as a form of outreach, so the question of whether students are understanding the points in your lectures (or learning to interpret poetry themselves, or any of the other things you’d be checking for if you were teaching a conventional course) doesn’t matter to you in this context. But as Alan says, there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for MOOCs as a potential alternative to conventional pedagogy, in which case it really does matter that we are clear with ourselves and (more important) with our administrators about what we can and can’t do with courses scaled up this way. When is a “course” not a course? might be one way to ask the question: we can do outreach in plenty of ways that aren’t packaged as courses, after all.
July 18th, 2012 at 8:34AM
Rohan: I haven’t followed everything everyone involved with MOOCs has said, but it’s not my sense that they think of these as an alternative to traditional pedagogy. Most universities seem to be describing them as indeed a form of outreach, democratization of knowledge, as well as a way of getting your university’s name out there (rather like opening a campus in a foreign country, etc.). MOOCs would, by acclamation or necessity or whatever you want to call it, always be a small specialization of any university, since they’d feature only your very best teachers, and only – among such people – teachers willing to teach without (for the moment at any rate) getting paid.
Yes, it’s clear that some universities are going to try to credentialize these courses (I have no idea whether credentialize is a word), which will involve some form of testing, etc. My belief is that any effort in this direction will be doomed because of cheating and an inability to do legitimate testing, etc., etc. Once it dooms itself, MOOCs will either disappear or will revert to what I think they should be – a form of social responsibility to which serious universities with acclaimed faculty should be attracted.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:03AM
UD, your own MOOC host Udemy seems convinced of the opposite.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:11AM
And the Coursera folks seem to think you don’t need to be among the “very best teachers”:
‘The online format also reduces the traditional lecture-hall need for professors to be spellbinding orators, Ng asserts. Being clear and logical is all that’s needed online, he says, adding: “If you’re able to sit down with your favorite niece or nephew and explain a subject to them, then you can record a class like this.”’ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/07/17/coursera-boom/)
You may be right that the effort to monetize and credentialize MOOCs is doomed, but it’s worrisome that universities led on by the kind of cheerleading seen in these articles may pour already scarce resources into trying to solve the problems you identify.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:38AM
Rohan, Alan: Here’s a good statement of my position on MOOCs:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/going-public-the-uva-way/33623
That Udemy – like various universities – wants to monetize some of its MOOCs is none of my business.
July 19th, 2012 at 1:04AM
[…] the effect of their MOOCs on colleagues both at their own universities and elsewhere. For example, here’s Margaret Soltan of University Diaries fame writing in the comments of her own blog in a long […]