Monday, February 4, 2013
Coursera MOOC on online education epic fail
It sounds straight out from The Onion, but the Coursera MOOC titled "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Practices" had to be suddenly canceled due to...poor instructional design!!! You can't make this stuff up. I guess I should offer my deep thoughts on the issue, but I can't. I can 't stop laughing since I read it! Poetic justice?
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For the love of god... "Ironic" doesn't quite cover it, does it? You're right -- it really does read like something out of The Onion.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet the idiots from Stanford and Silicon Valley (who think that having money means they know something about education) will keep talking about the "revolution" of the MOOCs and what not.
ReplyDeleteI've never done a mooc, but I do listen to a fair amount of lectures on iTunes U and things like that. I usually listen to them while I fold laundry or do other chores. I look at these lectures as a way to learn something about stuff I've always wanted to know about but don't have time to read about because I'm so busy. So for personal enrichment, I'm glad that lectures are available online. But does it substitute for actually reading a book or actually taking a class? Hell no. And I would never expect it to. People who aren't in higher ed might think these sorts of lectures that are free and open to the public signal the death of higher ed as we know it. But those who want the experience of actual discourse will get wise to these moocs pretty quickly. There are uses for such things, as I said, but to me they are only good for entertainment and surface-level knowledge.
ReplyDeleteEventually moocs will have the status of correspondence courses at technical colleges or something like that. Right now they are new and shiny and haven't become proven failures. They will eventually, as the class you cite shows.
It’s interesting to hear your thoughts regarding moocs. I signed up for one in English Lit really since whilst I like reading novels I thought that I’d see what a university course in English literature might be like ((my PhD isn’t in Literature of any sort I should add here and I didn’t need to do a bird seed course in literature thank goodness.). I actually dropped English Lit as soon as I could in high school since whilst I love reading books but I don’t like technically dissecting a novel for the class since I discovered that it meant that I lost any interest in the story. I don’t think that it helped that my teachers weren’t inspiring which really says more about how teachers can kill the interest of their students in a topic. I ended up dropping out of the MOOC as the Prof Read from his lecture notes while sitting at a table with his RA. All of this was on camera. Why thought was that I didn’t need to have this experience since it was the same dry analysis…plus the ‘help section’ of the course couldn’t really articulate how I was supposed to learn how to analyze texts. It was just frustrating …so this combined with the fact that I’d have to do 8 hours of extra reading to just follow the course meant that I dropped out. I don’t have the time really to devote to something that drives me so nuts. Why read one’s notes when it possible to do more with so many technological tools? Why should this technology just serve to replicate the problems that I had experienced in the classroom environment? It was just pointless, frustrating experience and I was as frustrated as I’d been back in high school…only this time I wasn’t taking the course for credit! Thank goodness…so I’d agree with Fie upon this quiet life! that right now that they are just the latest new and shiny gizmos….
ReplyDelete@Fie: I agree with you regarding the value of the MOOCs. I would add that I know people who find them very useful: computer science students in Argentina. They tell me it gives them access to material that otherwise would be really hard/expensive to get. But a) we are talking computer sciences, not the humanities and b) for different reasons, I know those people very well, and they tend to be a bunch of highly educated, out of the box thinking, incredibly self motivated students. Not your average student, to say the least. What scares me is how many people that are influential and have power are buying acritically the hype that surrounds the MOOCs, and that some college have actually started experimenting with giving credit for completed MOOCs. Therefore, you are privatizing education even worse, and destroying content at the same time.
ReplyDelete@Anthea: I am not surprised at all but what you are saying. I toyed with the idea of joining one a couple of times, but I really don't have the time to do it, and from what I read, the model doesn't let you work at your own pace,
ReplyDeleteFor me, the whole MOOC stuff is even more ironic, because for the past ten years, I have been hearing so-called pedagogy experts rant against the evil of the lecture. While I try to keep lecturing at a minimum because of what I teach, and I will recognize that many
prof can't lecture to save their life, I do believe that there is a place for the traditional lecture and it can be eye opening to the right student. In college, I took a course as a freshman on World History. I will never forget the 2 and a half hour lecture linking Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau with the French Revolution. There were 500 hundred students in the auditorium, and questions were not allowed. Still, It open my mind in more ways than one. A
good lecture can help students make connections it
hadn't occur to him/her before.
But know, after ten years of fighting "pedagogues" and bring called old fashioned, I am being told that "we are moving from a professor- centric model to a student-centric model". What does this mean? Not even paying adjuncts to teach, and have students do peer grading. And the model? Good old fashioned lectures, by video!!! Give me a break!