4 ms·
This is spot on. In fact (having TAed a 400-student intro course once) I'm not even sure if assessment scales properly in the larger brick and mortar classes.
by benbreen 12y ago
This is spot on. In fact (having TAed a 400-student intro course once) I'm not even sure if assessment scales properly in the larger brick and mortar classes. The professor was using an iClicker for pseudo-pop quizzes at the beginning of class but I noticed that a lot of students would simply give the same answers as their friends next to them. Likewise for the short essay questions in the final and midterm, they had created a massive Google Docs database combining lecture notes which (while on some level showing admirable initiative) also resulted in a number of identical (and, indeed, identically-wrong) answers. I've never taught a MOOC but it seems to me that this sort of hive-mind tendency would be magnified.
- madcaptenor 12y agoI think the hive-mind tendency would be mitigated by the fact that in a typical MOOC the students don't know each other, so that sort of coordination is difficult.
- munin 12y ago> I'm not even sure if assessment scales properly in the larger brick and mortar classes you're right, it totally doesn't. the system lives with it because the huge intro/survey classes deal with such a superficial level of information that you can measure it with MC/short answer. upper level classes deal with it by increasing the staff/student ratio, either by lowering the number of students or increasing the number of staff. so the MOOC classes where the answers can't be graded by programs, MC or short answer, become this hybrid of advanced material with intro level assessments. I don't think this is to the students benefit. I also think that the MOOC process overall has been corrupted by the same force that corrupted universities, so I don't see the system as providing a more pro-student alternative anytime soon. I don't know what would.