5 ms·

No kidding.. Personally, I think for MOOCs [1] to really take off you need to let people choose how they consume the course. Look at Netflix and House of Cards.

No kidding.. Personally, I think for MOOCs [1] to really take off you need to let people choose how they consume the course. Look at Netflix and House of Cards. People can choose the pace at which they consume. MOOCs are trying to use the class structure and convert it to the online world, not to mention the price structure ($7k for an online course?!? [2]). It is a major pain point, but this seems to be the norm, at least for any of the courses I have looked at. My personal use case is that I want to take a MOOC to learn a specific topic (after I've left school), so that I can use it in my real life, but you want to slow me way down (on some artificial schedule), and then charge me a crap load of money. Yeah, that's going to work great! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-tech-udacity-shock-higher-ed-with-7000-degree/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-tec...

dinkumthinkum 12y ago
Sure but Netflix is entertainment. I agree, you may get more users wanting to participate and "stick" with a module if you make the modules smaller and even more up to the user's leisure. By virtue of making things smaller, you make completing an individual unit "easier." I think if your goal is to have a higher "completion rate" per "unit of education" the sure that solves it. However, that is not an interesting metric in and of itself. That being said, I think MOOCs definitely have their place; I just don't think they displace traditional universities. More often than not, I think for very engaged students, they complement an existing traditional student's education. I think a big problem with the format offered by Coursera is really just this idea of "This course starts this time and ends at this time," which is, like as you say, trying to mimic traditional class structure for not much apparent reason. What if I did not know there was going to be a Cryptography class on April 10th (I made that up) but I really wanted to go through the course and solve all the problems and get a grade rather than being "penalized" for only finding out about it months later or even after the course completed? Again, though, I see MOOCs as additional education but not a replacement for traditional college education, and probably more beneficial for autodidact learners.
prezjordan 12y ago
Coursera has a few self-paced classes. I've signed up for a few, and I've never come close to completing one. On the other hand, I've completed a few courses with a strict time schedule. I think they've tested the self-paced idea out and found it just doesn't work as well under the circumstances.
- netcan 12y ago
  That's a good point and it touches on some of the intangibles that universities provide. OTOH, just emulating a university is probably not the best solution. Self pacing has a lot of advantages and it would be great if commitment devices worked on those too.
  - waitingkuo 12y ago
    I think both self-pacing and and scheduled courses have their own advantages. For a self-pacing course, it's more flexible to learn, but it might also be too flexible so that students cannot finish it. And the forums for those self-paced courses are just like a ghost town. On the other hands, a scheduled course with some due dates make all the students in the same rate of progress. It might have more interaction between students. It definitely helps if online students can have some interactions. Also, under the stress of the due dates, students might have more motivations to finish those assignments. I used to sign up many courses online (Coursera, Udacity, eDX, Code School, Treehouse, etc ... ) but finish few of them. I'm now trying to hold some small study groups (3-5 people) and see whether we have higher probabilities to finish those courses or not. In my experience, social power is unlimited. My second cents.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  I totally agree. To me, one of the advantages of these online classes is that they usually impose some kind of pace. It's something difficult to enforce when self-studying. Otherwise, I may as well read a book which I think is a better format than a video.
  - jghn 12y ago
vacri 12y ago
MOOCs are great for autodidacts who want to learn small lumps of information, and who generally already know how to educate themselves. They're not great for creating balanced professionals, or for non-autodidacts. Plenty of universities offer some flexibility in their courses anyway, so there already is some modularity. Some base subjects (if you're doing medicine, you need biochemistry, for example), and some electives.
netcan 12y ago
I think online "course" is a tricky self definition to start with. A more natural starting point is textbooks. IE MOOCs should aim to use technology to make textbooks 10X better. Textbooks can be used in the context of a university course or for self study. If they are good enough, they can enable new kinds of use cases. Imagine that there was an online resource for math that is perfect. Lectures, exercises, hints, spaced learning, badges, etc. Everything from high school level studies to the math classes required for Science and engineering Masters degrees. It's so good that not creating your course around it is just being wasteful. You might be able to add value to that by creating a disciplined environment where people study in the same room or are required to have assignment X completed by 16:00 daily. Maybe you can improve (I suspect you can) on the results of self learning by adding in person tutoring. At that point, a teacher might offer her own course. A 4-1 teacher to student ratio is much more affordable if you only need 5 hours per week. This is where the disruption comes from. So basically I think that "disrupting Universities" is a kind of awkward way of thinking about this. It means online learning are looking at universities and asking themselves how can I replace this, instead of trying to do textbooks 2.0.
- jonsen 12y ago
  Your perfect "textbook" must be structure free in som sense. The classical textbook imposes a given structure which may or may not suite the teachers ideas of course form. The flexible learning resource is the problem to be solved.
  - netcan 12y ago
    I suppose thats debatable. There's probably some use for both. A textbook can also be a syllabus and plan for a semester. IE, perhaps a textbook is divided into 15 chapters, each representing one week of work and exercises. Lectures, tutorials and such can be structured around that. In other cases the teacher already has a structure in mind and they are looking for materials to support it. Both cases exist. I suppose the ideal would be layered and modular so materials that can be snapped together like lego. But realistically, modular is a thing difficult to get right.

dinkumthinkum 12y ago

Sure but Netflix is entertainment. I agree, you may get more users wanting to participate and "stick" with a module if you make the modules smaller and even more up to the user's leisure. By virtue of making things smaller, you make completing an individual unit "easier." I think if your goal is to have a higher "completion rate" per "unit of education" the sure that solves it. However, that is not an interesting metric in and of itself. That being said, I think MOOCs definitely have their place; I just don't think they displace traditional universities. More often than not, I think for very engaged students, they complement an existing traditional student's education. I think a big problem with the format offered by Coursera is really just this idea of "This course starts this time and ends at this time," which is, like as you say, trying to mimic traditional class structure for not much apparent reason. What if I did not know there was going to be a Cryptography class on April 10th (I made that up) but I really wanted to go through the course and solve all the problems and get a grade rather than being "penalized" for only finding out about it months later or even after the course completed? Again, though, I see MOOCs as additional education but not a replacement for traditional college education, and probably more beneficial for autodidact learners.

prezjordan 12y ago

Coursera has a few self-paced classes. I've signed up for a few, and I've never come close to completing one. On the other hand, I've completed a few courses with a strict time schedule. I think they've tested the self-paced idea out and found it just doesn't work as well under the circumstances.

netcan 12y ago
That's a good point and it touches on some of the intangibles that universities provide. OTOH, just emulating a university is probably not the best solution. Self pacing has a lot of advantages and it would be great if commitment devices worked on those too.
- waitingkuo 12y ago
  I think both self-pacing and and scheduled courses have their own advantages. For a self-pacing course, it's more flexible to learn, but it might also be too flexible so that students cannot finish it. And the forums for those self-paced courses are just like a ghost town. On the other hands, a scheduled course with some due dates make all the students in the same rate of progress. It might have more interaction between students. It definitely helps if online students can have some interactions. Also, under the stress of the due dates, students might have more motivations to finish those assignments. I used to sign up many courses online (Coursera, Udacity, eDX, Code School, Treehouse, etc ... ) but finish few of them. I'm now trying to hold some small study groups (3-5 people) and see whether we have higher probabilities to finish those courses or not. In my experience, social power is unlimited. My second cents.
yodsanklai 12y ago
I totally agree. To me, one of the advantages of these online classes is that they usually impose some kind of pace. It's something difficult to enforce when self-studying. Otherwise, I may as well read a book which I think is a better format than a video.
- jghn 12y ago

vacri 12y ago

MOOCs are great for autodidacts who want to learn small lumps of information, and who generally already know how to educate themselves. They're not great for creating balanced professionals, or for non-autodidacts. Plenty of universities offer some flexibility in their courses anyway, so there already is some modularity. Some base subjects (if you're doing medicine, you need biochemistry, for example), and some electives.

netcan 12y ago

I think online "course" is a tricky self definition to start with. A more natural starting point is textbooks. IE MOOCs should aim to use technology to make textbooks 10X better. Textbooks can be used in the context of a university course or for self study. If they are good enough, they can enable new kinds of use cases. Imagine that there was an online resource for math that is perfect. Lectures, exercises, hints, spaced learning, badges, etc. Everything from high school level studies to the math classes required for Science and engineering Masters degrees. It's so good that not creating your course around it is just being wasteful. You might be able to add value to that by creating a disciplined environment where people study in the same room or are required to have assignment X completed by 16:00 daily. Maybe you can improve (I suspect you can) on the results of self learning by adding in person tutoring. At that point, a teacher might offer her own course. A 4-1 teacher to student ratio is much more affordable if you only need 5 hours per week. This is where the disruption comes from. So basically I think that "disrupting Universities" is a kind of awkward way of thinking about this. It means online learning are looking at universities and asking themselves how can I replace this, instead of trying to do textbooks 2.0.

jonsen 12y ago
Your perfect "textbook" must be structure free in som sense. The classical textbook imposes a given structure which may or may not suite the teachers ideas of course form. The flexible learning resource is the problem to be solved.
- netcan 12y ago
  I suppose thats debatable. There's probably some use for both. A textbook can also be a syllabus and plan for a semester. IE, perhaps a textbook is divided into 15 chapters, each representing one week of work and exercises. Lectures, tutorials and such can be structured around that. In other cases the teacher already has a structure in mind and they are looking for materials to support it. Both cases exist. I suppose the ideal would be layered and modular so materials that can be snapped together like lego. But realistically, modular is a thing difficult to get right.