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72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit

92 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

ah- 14y ago
That chart is misleading. Since when is 28% less than one fourth of a circle?
- richardv 14y ago
  When Fox news present the data.... http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2012-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2...
cornelismith 14y ago
Personally I don't care about credit, I do it for the learning and opportunity to work together with people from all around the world. However, I do think there should be a possibility to earn credits or certificates as it is important for some.
surrealize 14y ago
72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit from their home institution. The headline makes it sound like they don't think MOOC students deserve any kind of credit, which is a much stronger statement.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  I agree with this. I was a bit indignant at first, but, when I realized what they meant, I thought it makes sense.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Copied from my comment on an earlier posting of the same story- From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science, and engineering." Which makes sense, those are subjects which are probably best suited to this kind of approach. I've taken a number of MOOCs, from EDx, Coursera, and Udacity. I'm an addict, always in at least one and plan to pretty much permanently keep doing them as long as it's possible to do so. The 6.002x from EDx was probably the most rigorous of the ones I've done, and I felt a solid sense of accomplishment when it was over. But I don't think I should be awarded MIT credit for it, mostly due to the limited substitutions for lab work. In fact, I don't think college credit would be appropriate for any of the classes I've done. However, the certificates for most of them do have meaning, and should be taken by employers as a sign that someone is likely to have some competency in the area. Yes, cheating is possible, so it's not automatic, but you should always be evaluating someone's actual skills that matter to you anyway. An A in a class on their college transcript also doesn't guarantee mastery in any way whatsoever. It's just an indicator that the person may have such.
- hipsters_unite 14y ago
  Exactly. I've done some from Udacity and not cheated (what would be the point in taking it otherwise?), but though they were hard enough and I felt a sense of accomplishment, I don't think I deserve actual credit. It's on my CV, but in the 'miscellaneous' section, not where my actual qualifications are - exactly where (I imagine) I'd put a class that I audited, US-style.
miloshadzic 14y ago
Even if you don't get "real" MIT credit, a certificate of completion from some of the courses is worth more than credit people get at some universities.
- hipsters_unite 14y ago
  I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly - but at least taking and completing the course shows a certain determination... maybe that's what needs acknowledging instead.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    > I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly In the technology sector, sure. Here we do not even concern ourselves with credentialing to begin with because the work we do is out in the open and easy to evaluate. Other industries, however, are not so lucky and struggle to sniff out the unqualified even with a strong credentialing system. I'm not sure an evaluation of determination helps them any more than what they have to go on today. People determined to get the job will always find some way to slip through the system without any real understanding of the underlying fundamentals. With that said, I think MOOCs open up a whole new way to find talent, which could make the entire idea of credentials a thing of the past.
    - hipsters_unite 14y ago
      Yeah, I guess in tech we're lucky enough to be able to say check somebody's GitHub and see if they actually can write code...
davidroberts 14y ago
I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams. But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its taught in a major university. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive introductory courses freshman take. How is it worse than 500 students taught by a grad student in a state university lecture hall? I think at least some of the opposition is by professors worried about protecting their jobs and not wanting to lose the comfortable path they have trod so many years. But they will likely have no choice. I'm not sure how it will end up, but academia can no more avoid the massive changes in our world brought on by the internet than bookstores or newspapers could. If higher education was a free market and not so massively subsidized, the changes would have already happened. Given a choice would anyone want to pay the $200,000 full price for a four year university degree in say something like English lit if it were coming out of their own pocket?
- deleted 14y ago
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- deleted 14y ago
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jskonhovd 14y ago
MOOCs have been a blessing to me. However, I understand that credits are not possible until they solve the issue of cheating. But lets not be naive and think cheating doesn't happen at plenty of standard university's around the world.
ddlatham 14y ago
72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher. They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low. The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they shouldn't be accompanied by credit.
- tomku 14y ago
  It's also worth noting that most current MOOCs were designed and implemented before there was any chance of getting college credit through their platform. Many of them chose to dilute their content in order to make it more approachable, and not to focus on delivering 1:1 parity with the in-person class.
- flogic 14y ago
  If I ever return to school, I'd certainly be willing to consider online courses in combination with testing at an approved location.
  - numbsafari 14y ago
    If I ever return to school, I'm going to want what I didn't get nearly enough of in my undergraduate degree: in-person access to professors. I don't want college credit for browsing the web and watching videos. I want coaching, feedback and interaction from people with deep knowledge in their field.
    - mogrim 14y ago
      But doing the gruntwork online, and focussing on quality interaction with professors? I can see real-time lecturing dying out: that's time that could be more profitably spent doing the coaching and feedback that as you point out has much greater value.
nhebb 14y ago
Original article - which is a much better read: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...
henrik_w 14y ago
A few points after reading the original article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: They spend a bit of time talking about how much work went into creating the courses. Of course it takes a lot of time, but you get the payback when you run it the second time, the third time etc. I'm surprised this was not mentioned. Also, they mentioned that Robert Sedgewick of Princeton didn't wanted to be beaten to the punch creating a MOOC algorithm course. But he already was. Tim Roughgarden of Stanford gave the first course as far as I know. I took both part 1 and part 2 of his course, and both were excellent (more here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course-part2/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...) Finally, Clay Shirky wrote a good piece on MOOCs a while a go: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the... One of the points he makes is that producing "live" lectures (as opposed to using MOOCs) at a university is a little like only assigning books that the professor giving the lecture has written. Of course you want the best book on the subject, regardless of who wrote it. The same goes for a lecture on the subject. His article is well worth reading.
decasteve 14y ago
"I think universities are completely obsolete. There’s very little that goes on at a university that can’t be done better otherwise. The biggest raison d’être for the present system is the security of the professor. Once you eliminate the obsolete structure and the emphasis on earning a living, people will go to the university because they want to use themselves and explore their wonderful capabilities. Humanity will carry on beautifully if you don’t mix them up with earning a living. We’ll make wonderful use of those buildings and all that equipment. They’ve been living on the idea of monopolizing the information, but now they see the time coming when the big idea will be to proliferate it and try to see that everybody gets to share it." -- Buckminster Fuller (1972)
victorh 14y ago
The appropriate course credit for online classes is to finish a project demonstrating publicly that you know the material. This option is available right now.
- kenthorvath 14y ago
  Completely agreed - plaigiarism is rampant because collaboration is so natural and doing work for its own sake does nothing to advance one's understanding of the material. All subjects, to the greatest extent possible, should be heavily based on collaborative projects that give back to society. Demonstrate your knowledge by contributing original research and ideas to Wikipedia. Contribute to an open source project on github using algorithms and methods you've learned in the classroom. Society should benefit from the education system, not just through run-of-the-mill degree programs, but from the fruits of the labors of its students. There is so much untapped potential.
  - victorh 14y ago
    Seriously, just imagine if a fraction of the students taking the massively popular ML class on Coursera had created a project on Github.
marknutter 14y ago
I had to laugh out loud when I read this headline. My guess is, most professors don't think most of their students deserve credit these days, thanks to grade inflation and consistently decreasing standards.
michaelochurch 14y ago
This isn't just bureaucratic self-protection. MOOCs really aren't ready for that yet. They're awesome, but much of the educational problem is social (tutoring and study groups, group projects, evaluation that can't be automated) and even though "social" is the buzzword of the 2010s, we as a technological society aren't good (at scale) at that stuff yet. I think that the next step of evolution is free coursework and flat social features (forums with voting, programmatic expert discovery) while the gold-stamped examinations, coursework reviews by PhD'd humans, and tutoring sessions from vetted experts will cost money. If you take the free version, you're matched by an ML algorithm with a volunteer tutor and 95% of the time, you'll get quality. The paid version sets up with a TA at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, and you pay $40 for a half-hour video session. MOOCs will get there. There's another way to look at this: 28% of professors do think MOOCs are ready for prime time. That's much higher than I would have thought.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  The social part is difficult. I did attend a Coursera Coursera and at the beginning I though, cool, so now I make a study group. They have a dedicated forum for that. So I said, look, here's my study group and I got more feedback than I thought, someone even nearly begging to get in. ;) Then I created a Google Group and posted it in the thread. Guess what: 3 people joined the Group, one was active. (So 2 in total including me.) Lesson for me: when suggesting a study group, have the Google Group link ready. That said, I think the social part is fine, we have social networks for that. Users just need to learn how to socialize online. This is becoming more important everyday even outside Coursera and friends.. Tutors would be cool, but IMHO they are not necessary for successful learning. I remember a dutch math professor saying basically: "I am unnecessary, you just need to ask the right questions." I.e. if you ask the right questions, you will find the next steps best case by yourself.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    Well, yes. Everything you learn in education was something someone came up with on their own without being educated first. The point of education is to facilitate that process.
mxfh 14y ago
Hey The Chronicle and techcrunch: even this ◕ is closer to the actual numbers than your plainly wrong pie chart[1]. 72% is less than 3/4. You show something about 77%. Please get some more editors. good luck i'm not alone: http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4 http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4 Yet it's kind of scary that for 4 days, of this being published on The Chronicle[2] with it's supposedly well educated audience nobody seems to have noticed it. Guess that shows that charts are even less relevant and precise to transport information than I imagined. [1] http://imgur.com/UtIm43c http://imgur.com/UtIm43c [2] http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...
jccalhoun 14y ago
I haven't taught a MOOC but I have "taught" a more traditional online course with 20-some students and I don't think it was really all that great. The reason I put "taught" in quotes is because it was a standardized course where all the sections taught at the state-wide community college had to be exactly the same so I was basically just a grader. I didn't have any opportunity to actually "teach" anything so when a student turned in an assignment that was totally wrong, there was no opportunity for me to intervene and give the student a chance to redo it or to give the student any substantial guidance. Moreover, because most students would wait until the last minute to do the work, they might turn in the next assignment before I had a chance to grade their previous assignment so they would not only do one assignment wrong but then the next one and the next one and I can't do anything about it. I feel for the person, so I'm not going to fail the student. So the student gets a C in the class, doesn't learn anything or even worse learns the wrong thing and my hands are basically tied.
Turing_Machine 14y ago
Since when is "MOOC" == "online course"? Oh, right. Techcrunch.
pmb 14y ago
What percentage of professors who teach offline courses think their students deserve credit?
droithomme 14y ago
Article has huge spin on it, claiming "This is not a good sign for online education". Phrasing of question is do they "deserve formal credit from your home institution." No of course not, the class is free and they are not enrolled in the school. If the free class gets full credit, the university falls apart. Also, giving real credit means you have to have money coming in, proctoring on site in their country for the tests, and id card checks. This will massively increase costs and completely eliminate the ability of people in most parts of the world from being able to take the class. One of the reasons for these classes is to open up western college style education to people throughout the world. Switching it to a pay model that validates identity just converts the whole thing into online extension courses, which they have already, and those certainly have never been MOOCs, enrollment numbers have been modest not in the 20,000-200,000 enrollment range per session (yes, with 10% passing but that means little, they still have huge numbers passing).
- MilesTeg 14y ago
  This. People confuse education with accreditation. Online courses (should) provide education very cheaply. I hope the US accreditation system gets fixed so that it is cheap too or not so important for employment.
EGreg 14y ago
Well, that's fine. If students want to receive credits, they must take some tests for accreditation. And these tests should probably be administered on site, so as to ensure the test-taker didn't cheat. I think that, over time, universities will move from teaching classes to being centers of accreditation, tutoring and socializing. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108
rikacomet 14y ago
well online courses by deemed universities is still in its infancy, so yeah it will take time before people will only take lessons from home.
calebgilbert 14y ago
Sensationalist headlines aside, I received my degree online from the University of Phoenix in 2004 and I had to worked freakin' hard for it. Way harder than I had to work when I attended a 4 year California State University brick-and-mortar college. So I can't help how others feel about my online degree, but I'm proud of it.
raviparikh 14y ago
Did anyone else notice that the pie chart wedges are sized incorrectly? The one labeled "28%" is clearly less than a quarter of the chart. Not really sure why they felt the need to try to make the numbers appear more skewed than they already are. Edit: Should note that it's not TC's fault, it's grabbed from the source article: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...
blablabla123 14y ago
Having studied at a university, I think Online Courses are not (yet) a replacement for university courses. They still need work. On Coursera for instance I noticed a lack of advanced and even intermediate courses. It seems almost all courses there are introductory. A paranoid person might say this goes well with professors being afraid of online courses. I say this is just not very elaborated yet. Anyway it's ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't get credit from online courses. Top universities all over the world give you credit for stuff you do at home, in particular when it comes to advanced courses. I'm not saying you should be able to do your whole Master or whatever from home -- it's definitely necessary to have tests where you physically attend -- but this survey result seems stupid. Maybe the question is just stupid. They asked about the status quo, not about online education in general.
kyllo 14y ago
At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and what is it really good for, anyway?" At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.
lostnet 14y ago
I have been taking MOOCs continuously since the Stanford ones started (and took some non-video online classes years back at my University) and I am rather concerned about the affect directly giving credit for MOOCs could have on them. If physical University classes were free and easy to join I do not think I would participate much, and I think the bad taste I get stems from the people who are there just for the credit. Similarly, I wonder about the quality of peer reviews in MOOCs where most people are there for an external incentive. Personally, I would rather see independent test centers replace the accreditation process for everyone, removing that pressure from the teaching system all around. Also, I would love to hear thoughts from an Actuary on how the independent test system affects their profession and their expectations when meeting a new colleague.
bluebaby 14y ago
The professors were asked about courses they designed to not be accredited. Of course they would respond that way. It says nothing about the future of online education.
jimmyjustice 14y ago
Maybe the professors don't deserve their paycheck... as outcomes reflect all parties involved!
tekniiq 14y ago
then why do they teach it?? bs

92 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

ah- 14y ago

That chart is misleading. Since when is 28% less than one fourth of a circle?

richardv 14y ago
When Fox news present the data.... http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2012-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2...

cornelismith 14y ago

Personally I don't care about credit, I do it for the learning and opportunity to work together with people from all around the world. However, I do think there should be a possibility to earn credits or certificates as it is important for some.

surrealize 14y ago

72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit from their home institution. The headline makes it sound like they don't think MOOC students deserve any kind of credit, which is a much stronger statement.

StavrosK 14y ago
I agree with this. I was a bit indignant at first, but, when I realized what they meant, I thought it makes sense.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

Copied from my comment on an earlier posting of the same story- From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science, and engineering." Which makes sense, those are subjects which are probably best suited to this kind of approach. I've taken a number of MOOCs, from EDx, Coursera, and Udacity. I'm an addict, always in at least one and plan to pretty much permanently keep doing them as long as it's possible to do so. The 6.002x from EDx was probably the most rigorous of the ones I've done, and I felt a solid sense of accomplishment when it was over. But I don't think I should be awarded MIT credit for it, mostly due to the limited substitutions for lab work. In fact, I don't think college credit would be appropriate for any of the classes I've done. However, the certificates for most of them do have meaning, and should be taken by employers as a sign that someone is likely to have some competency in the area. Yes, cheating is possible, so it's not automatic, but you should always be evaluating someone's actual skills that matter to you anyway. An A in a class on their college transcript also doesn't guarantee mastery in any way whatsoever. It's just an indicator that the person may have such.

hipsters_unite 14y ago
Exactly. I've done some from Udacity and not cheated (what would be the point in taking it otherwise?), but though they were hard enough and I felt a sense of accomplishment, I don't think I deserve actual credit. It's on my CV, but in the 'miscellaneous' section, not where my actual qualifications are - exactly where (I imagine) I'd put a class that I audited, US-style.

miloshadzic 14y ago

Even if you don't get "real" MIT credit, a certificate of completion from some of the courses is worth more than credit people get at some universities.

hipsters_unite 14y ago
I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly - but at least taking and completing the course shows a certain determination... maybe that's what needs acknowledging instead.
- randomdata 14y ago
  > I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly In the technology sector, sure. Here we do not even concern ourselves with credentialing to begin with because the work we do is out in the open and easy to evaluate. Other industries, however, are not so lucky and struggle to sniff out the unqualified even with a strong credentialing system. I'm not sure an evaluation of determination helps them any more than what they have to go on today. People determined to get the job will always find some way to slip through the system without any real understanding of the underlying fundamentals. With that said, I think MOOCs open up a whole new way to find talent, which could make the entire idea of credentials a thing of the past.
  - hipsters_unite 14y ago
    Yeah, I guess in tech we're lucky enough to be able to say check somebody's GitHub and see if they actually can write code...

davidroberts 14y ago

I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams. But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its taught in a major university. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive introductory courses freshman take. How is it worse than 500 students taught by a grad student in a state university lecture hall? I think at least some of the opposition is by professors worried about protecting their jobs and not wanting to lose the comfortable path they have trod so many years. But they will likely have no choice. I'm not sure how it will end up, but academia can no more avoid the massive changes in our world brought on by the internet than bookstores or newspapers could. If higher education was a free market and not so massively subsidized, the changes would have already happened. Given a choice would anyone want to pay the $200,000 full price for a four year university degree in say something like English lit if it were coming out of their own pocket?

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jskonhovd 14y ago

MOOCs have been a blessing to me. However, I understand that credits are not possible until they solve the issue of cheating. But lets not be naive and think cheating doesn't happen at plenty of standard university's around the world.

ddlatham 14y ago

72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher. They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low. The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they shouldn't be accompanied by credit.

tomku 14y ago
It's also worth noting that most current MOOCs were designed and implemented before there was any chance of getting college credit through their platform. Many of them chose to dilute their content in order to make it more approachable, and not to focus on delivering 1:1 parity with the in-person class.
flogic 14y ago
If I ever return to school, I'd certainly be willing to consider online courses in combination with testing at an approved location.
- numbsafari 14y ago
  If I ever return to school, I'm going to want what I didn't get nearly enough of in my undergraduate degree: in-person access to professors. I don't want college credit for browsing the web and watching videos. I want coaching, feedback and interaction from people with deep knowledge in their field.
  - mogrim 14y ago
    But doing the gruntwork online, and focussing on quality interaction with professors? I can see real-time lecturing dying out: that's time that could be more profitably spent doing the coaching and feedback that as you point out has much greater value.

nhebb 14y ago

Original article - which is a much better read: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

henrik_w 14y ago

A few points after reading the original article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: They spend a bit of time talking about how much work went into creating the courses. Of course it takes a lot of time, but you get the payback when you run it the second time, the third time etc. I'm surprised this was not mentioned. Also, they mentioned that Robert Sedgewick of Princeton didn't wanted to be beaten to the punch creating a MOOC algorithm course. But he already was. Tim Roughgarden of Stanford gave the first course as far as I know. I took both part 1 and part 2 of his course, and both were excellent (more here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course-part2/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...) Finally, Clay Shirky wrote a good piece on MOOCs a while a go: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the... One of the points he makes is that producing "live" lectures (as opposed to using MOOCs) at a university is a little like only assigning books that the professor giving the lecture has written. Of course you want the best book on the subject, regardless of who wrote it. The same goes for a lecture on the subject. His article is well worth reading.

decasteve 14y ago

"I think universities are completely obsolete. There’s very little that goes on at a university that can’t be done better otherwise. The biggest raison d’être for the present system is the security of the professor. Once you eliminate the obsolete structure and the emphasis on earning a living, people will go to the university because they want to use themselves and explore their wonderful capabilities. Humanity will carry on beautifully if you don’t mix them up with earning a living. We’ll make wonderful use of those buildings and all that equipment. They’ve been living on the idea of monopolizing the information, but now they see the time coming when the big idea will be to proliferate it and try to see that everybody gets to share it." -- Buckminster Fuller (1972)

victorh 14y ago

The appropriate course credit for online classes is to finish a project demonstrating publicly that you know the material. This option is available right now.

kenthorvath 14y ago
Completely agreed - plaigiarism is rampant because collaboration is so natural and doing work for its own sake does nothing to advance one's understanding of the material. All subjects, to the greatest extent possible, should be heavily based on collaborative projects that give back to society. Demonstrate your knowledge by contributing original research and ideas to Wikipedia. Contribute to an open source project on github using algorithms and methods you've learned in the classroom. Society should benefit from the education system, not just through run-of-the-mill degree programs, but from the fruits of the labors of its students. There is so much untapped potential.
- victorh 14y ago
  Seriously, just imagine if a fraction of the students taking the massively popular ML class on Coursera had created a project on Github.

marknutter 14y ago

I had to laugh out loud when I read this headline. My guess is, most professors don't think most of their students deserve credit these days, thanks to grade inflation and consistently decreasing standards.

michaelochurch 14y ago

This isn't just bureaucratic self-protection. MOOCs really aren't ready for that yet. They're awesome, but much of the educational problem is social (tutoring and study groups, group projects, evaluation that can't be automated) and even though "social" is the buzzword of the 2010s, we as a technological society aren't good (at scale) at that stuff yet. I think that the next step of evolution is free coursework and flat social features (forums with voting, programmatic expert discovery) while the gold-stamped examinations, coursework reviews by PhD'd humans, and tutoring sessions from vetted experts will cost money. If you take the free version, you're matched by an ML algorithm with a volunteer tutor and 95% of the time, you'll get quality. The paid version sets up with a TA at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, and you pay $40 for a half-hour video session. MOOCs will get there. There's another way to look at this: 28% of professors do think MOOCs are ready for prime time. That's much higher than I would have thought.

blablabla123 14y ago
The social part is difficult. I did attend a Coursera Coursera and at the beginning I though, cool, so now I make a study group. They have a dedicated forum for that. So I said, look, here's my study group and I got more feedback than I thought, someone even nearly begging to get in. ;) Then I created a Google Group and posted it in the thread. Guess what: 3 people joined the Group, one was active. (So 2 in total including me.) Lesson for me: when suggesting a study group, have the Google Group link ready. That said, I think the social part is fine, we have social networks for that. Users just need to learn how to socialize online. This is becoming more important everyday even outside Coursera and friends.. Tutors would be cool, but IMHO they are not necessary for successful learning. I remember a dutch math professor saying basically: "I am unnecessary, you just need to ask the right questions." I.e. if you ask the right questions, you will find the next steps best case by yourself.
- saraid216 14y ago
  Well, yes. Everything you learn in education was something someone came up with on their own without being educated first. The point of education is to facilitate that process.

mxfh 14y ago

Hey The Chronicle and techcrunch: even this ◕ is closer to the actual numbers than your plainly wrong pie chart[1]. 72% is less than 3/4. You show something about 77%. Please get some more editors. good luck i'm not alone: http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4 http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4 Yet it's kind of scary that for 4 days, of this being published on The Chronicle[2] with it's supposedly well educated audience nobody seems to have noticed it. Guess that shows that charts are even less relevant and precise to transport information than I imagined. [1] http://imgur.com/UtIm43c http://imgur.com/UtIm43c [2] http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

jccalhoun 14y ago

I haven't taught a MOOC but I have "taught" a more traditional online course with 20-some students and I don't think it was really all that great. The reason I put "taught" in quotes is because it was a standardized course where all the sections taught at the state-wide community college had to be exactly the same so I was basically just a grader. I didn't have any opportunity to actually "teach" anything so when a student turned in an assignment that was totally wrong, there was no opportunity for me to intervene and give the student a chance to redo it or to give the student any substantial guidance. Moreover, because most students would wait until the last minute to do the work, they might turn in the next assignment before I had a chance to grade their previous assignment so they would not only do one assignment wrong but then the next one and the next one and I can't do anything about it. I feel for the person, so I'm not going to fail the student. So the student gets a C in the class, doesn't learn anything or even worse learns the wrong thing and my hands are basically tied.

Turing_Machine 14y ago

Since when is "MOOC" == "online course"? Oh, right. Techcrunch.

pmb 14y ago

What percentage of professors who teach offline courses think their students deserve credit?

droithomme 14y ago

Article has huge spin on it, claiming "This is not a good sign for online education". Phrasing of question is do they "deserve formal credit from your home institution." No of course not, the class is free and they are not enrolled in the school. If the free class gets full credit, the university falls apart. Also, giving real credit means you have to have money coming in, proctoring on site in their country for the tests, and id card checks. This will massively increase costs and completely eliminate the ability of people in most parts of the world from being able to take the class. One of the reasons for these classes is to open up western college style education to people throughout the world. Switching it to a pay model that validates identity just converts the whole thing into online extension courses, which they have already, and those certainly have never been MOOCs, enrollment numbers have been modest not in the 20,000-200,000 enrollment range per session (yes, with 10% passing but that means little, they still have huge numbers passing).

MilesTeg 14y ago
This. People confuse education with accreditation. Online courses (should) provide education very cheaply. I hope the US accreditation system gets fixed so that it is cheap too or not so important for employment.

EGreg 14y ago

Well, that's fine. If students want to receive credits, they must take some tests for accreditation. And these tests should probably be administered on site, so as to ensure the test-taker didn't cheat. I think that, over time, universities will move from teaching classes to being centers of accreditation, tutoring and socializing. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108

rikacomet 14y ago

well online courses by deemed universities is still in its infancy, so yeah it will take time before people will only take lessons from home.

calebgilbert 14y ago

Sensationalist headlines aside, I received my degree online from the University of Phoenix in 2004 and I had to worked freakin' hard for it. Way harder than I had to work when I attended a 4 year California State University brick-and-mortar college. So I can't help how others feel about my online degree, but I'm proud of it.

raviparikh 14y ago

Did anyone else notice that the pie chart wedges are sized incorrectly? The one labeled "28%" is clearly less than a quarter of the chart. Not really sure why they felt the need to try to make the numbers appear more skewed than they already are. Edit: Should note that it's not TC's fault, it's grabbed from the source article: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/#id=overview http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...

blablabla123 14y ago

Having studied at a university, I think Online Courses are not (yet) a replacement for university courses. They still need work. On Coursera for instance I noticed a lack of advanced and even intermediate courses. It seems almost all courses there are introductory. A paranoid person might say this goes well with professors being afraid of online courses. I say this is just not very elaborated yet. Anyway it's ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't get credit from online courses. Top universities all over the world give you credit for stuff you do at home, in particular when it comes to advanced courses. I'm not saying you should be able to do your whole Master or whatever from home -- it's definitely necessary to have tests where you physically attend -- but this survey result seems stupid. Maybe the question is just stupid. They asked about the status quo, not about online education in general.

kyllo 14y ago

At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and what is it really good for, anyway?" At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.

lostnet 14y ago

I have been taking MOOCs continuously since the Stanford ones started (and took some non-video online classes years back at my University) and I am rather concerned about the affect directly giving credit for MOOCs could have on them. If physical University classes were free and easy to join I do not think I would participate much, and I think the bad taste I get stems from the people who are there just for the credit. Similarly, I wonder about the quality of peer reviews in MOOCs where most people are there for an external incentive. Personally, I would rather see independent test centers replace the accreditation process for everyone, removing that pressure from the teaching system all around. Also, I would love to hear thoughts from an Actuary on how the independent test system affects their profession and their expectations when meeting a new colleague.

bluebaby 14y ago

The professors were asked about courses they designed to not be accredited. Of course they would respond that way. It says nothing about the future of online education.

jimmyjustice 14y ago

Maybe the professors don't deserve their paycheck... as outcomes reflect all parties involved!

tekniiq 14y ago

then why do they teach it?? bs