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"the MOOC is an iteration on the textbook." Spot on, and this is what politicians and administrators don't understand. How many kids learned calculus out of a t

by kaitai 12y ago

"the MOOC is an iteration on the textbook." Spot on, and this is what politicians and administrators don't understand. How many kids learned calculus out of a textbook alone? Not that many. But it's cheap. MOOCs don't want to try, because the multiple-choice mode is cheap. That's the major appeal of MOOCs: cheap. A few alternatives: SPOCs (small private), with discussion weekly and weekly face-to-face meetings between profs and students. I know some folks who ran one; it was effective yet very time-consuming. Programs like NetMath at University of Illinois: self-paced, hires real people to correct & provide feedback on written student work. Online coaching services like CoachingActuaries have adaptive exams and diagnostics, which is at least a step up from the static multiple choice. None of these is free.

Tenhundfeld 12y ago
Adaptive exams can be a huge win. I know they can be hard/time-consuming to do really well, but it's fairly easy to make static multiple choice a little more dynamic. For example, imagine an end-of-section quiz with 5 multiple choice questions with 4 answers each. The static way is each student sees the same 5 questions with the same 4 answers to choose from. Instead, you could have a bank of 100 questions, in buckets of 20 covering the same material. So, each student sees one question from each bucket, drawn randomly. And then each question could have 10 answers, with 4 randomly displayed for any given instance of the question, sometimes with multiple right answers, sometimes none, etc. This would require more work, but effort spent on assessment should scale with the number of students, just not linearly. (Right?) The goal is not to make cheating impossible. The goal is to make cheating hard enough that it's easier to just learn the material and answer the question. Furthermore, once you have that bank of 100 questions, you can start running analytics on it to see which variations are harder or easier for students to understand, which topics might need a better explanation in the teaching section, etc. You could eventually be able to generate adaptive exams from this data. Sal Khan of the Khan Academy talks about all these things. I recommend his book: The One World Schoolhouse. (http://www.amazon.com/The-One-World-Schoolhouse-Reimagined/dp/1455508381 http://www.amazon.com/The-One-World-Schoolhouse-Reimagined/d...)
- munin 12y ago
  my problem with this is that it's still MC and short answer. the lifeless creatures from another dimension at ETS have been iterating on adaptive tests with the GRE for a long time, and yet, it's still the GRE...

by kaitai 12y ago

Tenhundfeld 12y ago

Adaptive exams can be a huge win. I know they can be hard/time-consuming to do really well, but it's fairly easy to make static multiple choice a little more dynamic. For example, imagine an end-of-section quiz with 5 multiple choice questions with 4 answers each. The static way is each student sees the same 5 questions with the same 4 answers to choose from. Instead, you could have a bank of 100 questions, in buckets of 20 covering the same material. So, each student sees one question from each bucket, drawn randomly. And then each question could have 10 answers, with 4 randomly displayed for any given instance of the question, sometimes with multiple right answers, sometimes none, etc. This would require more work, but effort spent on assessment should scale with the number of students, just not linearly. (Right?) The goal is not to make cheating impossible. The goal is to make cheating hard enough that it's easier to just learn the material and answer the question. Furthermore, once you have that bank of 100 questions, you can start running analytics on it to see which variations are harder or easier for students to understand, which topics might need a better explanation in the teaching section, etc. You could eventually be able to generate adaptive exams from this data. Sal Khan of the Khan Academy talks about all these things. I recommend his book: The One World Schoolhouse. (http://www.amazon.com/The-One-World-Schoolhouse-Reimagined/dp/1455508381 http://www.amazon.com/The-One-World-Schoolhouse-Reimagined/d...)

munin 12y ago
my problem with this is that it's still MC and short answer. the lifeless creatures from another dimension at ETS have been iterating on adaptive tests with the GRE for a long time, and yet, it's still the GRE...