http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/udacity-experiment-at-san-jose-state-suspended.html
Some flava:
"By spring, everyone had to start contending with reality. It turns out
that San Jose State students were failing Udacity courses at a rate
of 56 to 76 percent, according to the San Jose Mercury News.". . .
"Finally, we also discovered that, outside of SJSU, students were completing MOOCs at a rate of only 7.5% on average. With the inconvenient facts piling up, San Jose State suspended the Udacity experiment yesterday."
The experiment at SJSU dealt with intro-level and remedial courses, so that's one factor, but those are exactly the sorts of courses and students who need the most care in the learning process and exactly the types who should not be left waving in the wind.
A few things:
ReplyDelete1) The success and failure of an online course relies entirely on the energy and individual attention of instructors to students.
2) small online courses can work because of this individual attention: we can read what each student says in response to our discussion question in a way that face to face discussions cannot. There is simply not the time to listen to 20 students give their answers. Online, there IS time to read each of their answers. And respond in a caring, personalized way.
3) Heck, I can even balance 170 students in online courses and still give each of those students more individualized attention than a single 100-person face to face class. Reading is fasting that speaking; I can review their work and ask them secondary questions much more quickly than making everyone wait in a physical classroom while I go person-to-person to see what they need from my course.
4) MOOCs are crap. Not only do they kinda sound like a racist slur, they are a confusing version of passing around a book. There is no individual attention with 500-10,000 classmates. There is no grading or reaction. No one is learning. Isolated and alone, the students begin to give up. We might as well send them to YouTube and call it a degree.
Online teaching has tremendous potential. BUT until people realize that its strength is human interaction and flexibility, online teaching will be seen as a lesser alternative: something automated, something alone, something to do when you have no fucks left to give. In this way, through MOOCs, online teaching will be a disaster.
We can harness the online potential if we treat it as emailing a friend: that personal interaction is what will help students thrive, the shy ones and the talkative ones.
Using MOOCS as a way to save money will only spell doom for those who see the internet as a replacement for the t/t professor.
Good! Burn, baby, burn.
ReplyDeleteOF course they're not working out well. Most people don't have the discipline or self-motivation to get through something like an online course without the pressure of deadlines, exams, etc. If they could, books would have put universities out of business. I'd like to know how many people that buy, say, Teach Yourself Basque, finish it.
ReplyDeleteOF course they're not working out well. Most people don't have the discipline or self-motivation to get through something like an online course without the pressure of deadlines, exams, etc. If they could, books would have put universities out of business. I'd like to know how many people that buy, say, Teach Yourself Basque, finish it.
ReplyDeleteOh, all of *US* know that, but it's nice that this attempt is such a crash and burn that admin might notice, or at least there's some concrete data to point at. As long as completion/success/retention rates stay paramount, this might slow down the admin MOOCOW stampede.
ReplyDeleteI have a good friend who is always very "technology is the revolution!" on Facebook. Can't wait to see her reply when I post this.
ReplyDeleteSnort. Chuckle. Guffaw. Haw, haw. Giggle. Ahhhhhhhh.
ReplyDeletePoint 4 is the key. MOOCS are an attempt to replace a book. That may or may not work. But the book is not the course.
ReplyDelete