MOOC Resources

How Students Engage with a Remedial English Writing MOOC: A Case Study in
Learning Analytics with Big Data, ELI Brief, March 2015. Could a MOOC be
designed to serve remedial students without strong study skills and habits?
Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools for the Trade (CEW) was designed to create a
noncredit option for remedial students to help build their skills before they enter
college and thus reduce the remedial instruction needed.
What are MOOCs good for? Justin Pope, MIT Technology Review, December 2014.
Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they
would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways.
Better Understanding through Data: Completion, Motivation, and Learning in
Minnesota MOOCs June 2014.The project described in this paper sought to use
appropriate evaluation methods to address each of these titled challenges.
MOOCs Won't Replace Business Schools - They'll Diversify Them. HBR Blog
Network, Gayle Christensen, Brandon Alcorn and Ezekiel Emanuel, June 2014.
MOOCs run by the elite business schools do not appear to threaten existing
programs, but rather, they may be attracting students for whom traditional
business school offerings are out of reach.
Take a Crash Course in MOOCs, an ECAR infographic
Libraries in the Time of MOOCs, EDUCAUSE Review, November 2013. MOOCs give
librarians new opportunities to help shape the conversation about changes in
higher education and to guide administrators, faculty, and students through
these changes.
Copyright Challenges in a MOOC Environment, EDUCAUSE Brief, July 2013. This
brief explores the intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs
highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional
autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the
copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs,
university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher
education associations.
Retention and Intention in Massive Open Online Courses: In Depth, EDUCAUSE
Review, June 2013. This article argues that retention in MOOCs should be
considered carefully in the context of learner intent, especially given the varied
backgrounds and motivations of students who choose to enroll.
Learning and the MOOC, this is a list of MOOC related resources gathered by the
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.
Learning and the Massive Open Online Course: A Report on the ELI Focus
Session, ELI White Paper, May 2013. This report is a synthesis of the key ideas,
themes, and concepts that emerged. This report also includes links to supporting

focus session materials, recordings, and resources. It represents a harvesting of

the key elements that we, as a teaching and learning community, need to keep
in mind as we explore this new model of learning.
The MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation as part of a set of investments intended to explore the potential of
MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary credentials through more
personalized, more affordable pathways.
The Pedagogical Foundations of Massive Open Online Courses, First Monday, May
2013. The authors examine scholarly literature on the learning characteristics
used by MOOCs to see if they do improve learning outcomes.
The Pedagodgy of MOOCs, May 11, 2013. This Paul Stacy blog posting provides a
brief history of MOOCs, the early success in Canada and the author's own
pedagogical recommendations for MOOCs.
What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs, EDUCAUSE, December
2012. This brief discusses how MOOCs work, their value proposition, issues to
consider, and who the key players are in this arena.
Laptop U: Has the Future of College Moved Online? The New Yorker, May 20th,
2013. Nathan Heller explores various MOOCs and their possible future in higher
education.
The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education, EDUCAUSE Review Online
(January/February 2013), A turning point will occur in the higher education model
when a MOOC-based program of study leads to a degree from an accredited
institution a trend that has already begun to develop.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/533406/what-are-moocs-good-for/

http://cbcse.org/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/MOOCs_Expectations_and_Reality.pdf
http://edtechfrontier.com/2013/05/11/the-pedagogy-of-moocs/
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/mooc-model-challenging-traditionaleducation

The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education

Authors: James G. Mazoue Published: Monday, January 28, 2013 Collection:
Editors' Pick

Key Takeaways
A turning point will occur in the higher education model when a MOOC-based
program of study leads to a degree from an accredited institution a trend that
has already begun to develop.
Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is
therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance.
MOOCs represent a postindustrial model of teaching and learning that has the
potential to undermine and replace the business model of institutions that
depend on recruiting and retaining students for location-bound, proprietary forms
of campus-based learning.
MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources.
First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses.
Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and
experiential learning as partial credit toward a degree. The next disruptor will
likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree
from an accredited institution. With this new business model, students might still
have to pay to certify their credentials, but not for the process leading to their
acquisition. If free access to a degree-granting curriculum were to occur, the
business model of higher education would dramatically and irreversibly change.
As Nathan Harden ominously noted, "recent history shows us that the internet is
a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of
information."1

Colleges have a problem here: the way in which the core services of education
are rendered is changing, but the underlying business model is not. This
widening disconnect threatens not only the financial viability of traditional
campuses following the "Law of More,"2 but, more fundamentally, their rationale.

A number of converging trends pose a challenge to brick-and-mortar institutions:

the emergence of the learning sciences and their application to educational

practice,
the movement toward competency-based education, and
new business models that effectively combine instructional quality, lower cost,
and increased access through unlimited scalability (MOOCs).
A turning point will occur when a MOOC-based program of study leads to a
degree from an accredited institution. Indeed, we are already partially there:

students can now receive transfer credit toward a degree from an accredited
institution for learning not obtained at a college or university.

The End of Nuclear Institutions

There is compelling reason to think that unbundling institutional knowledge
provision and credentialing is not only gaining momentum but is inevitable.
Recent events confirm Peter Stokes's observation that the fusion of the core
elements of land-based education (faculty, curriculum, credentials) is no longer
inseparably tied to a single institution.3 The emergence of MOOCs as an
alternative to location-bound, proprietary forms of campus-based learning and
portals like edX, Coursera, and Udacity that host them undermine the individually
crafted course model that sustains the "college credit monopoly."4 The
acceptance of credit for MOOCs by accredited institutions, such as Colorado
State University's Global Campus,5 Antioch University,6 San Jose State
University,7 Georgia State University,8 and the recently announced
MOOC2Degree collaboration between dozens of public universities and Academic
Partnerships,9 the impetus from Gates Foundation grants to develop MOOCs for
"high enrollment, low-success" introductory courses,10 and the partnership
between the Saylor Foundation and Excelsior College and StraigherLine11 are all
opening up a path to credit for free and low-cost courses. A parallel movement
away from seat-time to competency-based learning at Western Governors
University, Southern New Hampshire University, and the University of Wisconsin
System further erodes the value proposition underlying the traditional model of
land-based education.

MOOCs, as currently designed, address two of the three challenges facing

postsecondary education: access and cost. MOOC-based degree programs would
not only democratize education, but their scalability would help end the
unsustainable trajectory of tuition. They are an effective remedy to the "cost
disease" plaguing higher education12 and a viable solution to the problem of
providing global access to educational credentials.

MOOCs: Quality Matters

Notwithstanding the importance of their role in reducing cost and expanding
access, the remaining unresolved issue facing the acceptance of MOOCs is
access to what? The major obstacle to their acceptance relates to the third
challenge: their quality. As some rightly point out, current course models can
aptly be described as "self-service learning and crowdsourced teaching."13
Although self-directed learning and peer mentoring have instructional benefits
when part of a well-designed curriculum, most MOOCs (especially in STEM areas)
are designed in a way that skews toward autodidacts and more advanced
learners. Novice learners needing instructional guidance are largely on their own

and no better off perhaps than those in a large gateway course delivered in a
lecture hall on campus. Although improving the quality of student learning is one
of the priorities of the major MOOC providers, most of their courses currently lack
a sophisticated learning architecture that effectively adapts to the individual
needs of each learner.

Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is

therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance. According
to the most recent Babson Research Group survey, institutional decision makers
have yet to be convinced of the value of MOOCs. Although not specifically
attributing their skepticism to the perceived quality of MOOCs, the report finds
that only 28 percent of chief academic officers believe that they are a
sustainable method for offering courses.14 What potential, then, do MOOCs have
not only to improve learning but to provide the best possible educational
experience? Contrary to what some may think, designing the best learning
environments does not entail their being taught by the best professors or
affiliated with elite universities. Instead of simply using scholarly reputation and
institutional prestige as quality standards, we should judge MOOCs by how well
they enable the conditions that optimize learning for each student.

Although critics may scoff at the simplistic design of most current MOOCs, it
would be shortsighted to dismiss them as hopelessly inferior to classroom-based
instruction. If there is one lesson from the history of disruptive innovation, it is
that we often wrongly assume that a product or practice that dominates a
current market defines enduring standards of optimal quality. It would be a
mistake, then, to think that the near-term shortcomings of MOOCs inhibit their
potential to improve in quality. MOOCs and other forms of open curricula will
transform how people learn only to the extent that they enable effective
learning. What, then, might a learning-optimized MOOC look like?

MOOCs as Precision-Built Courseware

We do not need to look far to find a model. Given the pioneering research of
Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues, we do not need to speculate about the
conditions that produce effective learning. Of three learning conditions
tutoring, mastery learning, and conventional classroom instruction the least
effective was classroom-based group instruction.15 The most effective was a
combination of one-to-one tutoring and mastery learning: Bloom estimated that
about 90 percent of students receiving tutoring and corrective feedback can
perform at two standard deviations above the average student taught by
conventional group instruction.16 Subsequent research by Van Lehn found that,
although the effect size Bloom claimed for human tutoring might be too high, it
supports the general conclusion that intelligent tutoring systems, unlike

conventional classrooms, have the potential to approximate Bloom's Two Sigma

effect by customizing feedback and targeted guidance to the individual learning
needs of each student.17 When embedded into digital content to provide
context-specific coaching and guidance, cognitive tutors and feedback loops can
incrementally guide each learner along a personal path toward progressively
greater understanding and mastery.18

As digital environments that personalize learning, MOOCs have the potential to

serve as "educational positioning systems" that precisely navigate students
through their curriculum along individual "pathways and routes to maximize
student success."19 Initial results indicate that courseware explicitly designed in
accordance with effective practices drawn from the learning sciences and
enhanced with learning analytics to function as educational positioning systems
can have a positive impact on student performance.20 MOOCs can be designed,
therefore, as precursors of course exemplars early prototypes of optimized
learning environments that continuously improve educational practice through
application of the learning sciences. In contrast to go-it-alone legacy practices
that combine batch-processed instruction with folk pedagogical approaches to
teaching, the design of MOOCs as course exemplars would systematically apply
researchbased principles and practices to create the conditions that best enable
each student to learn.21 Innovative MOOC design could therefore act as a
catalyst for transitioning from our current handcrafted model of teaching to
precision-based exemplars.

Fortunately, already completed foundational work can be adapted to build a

large-scale research infrastructure for supporting the development of MOOCs as
precision-built courseware. At the epicenter of applied research in the learning
sciences, Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative and the affiliated
Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center have led the efforts to transform education
into a science. Courseware development projects funded through the Community
College Open Learning Initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenge Grants,
and APLU/OLI Multi-institutional Cognitive Coursewares Design initiative use the
OLI's research-based methodology and data-driven design model to improve
learning systematically through a cyclic process of iterative feedback. Although
designing courseware that functions as learning exemplars is not the primary
goal of the OLI, MOOCs could be designed using its data-driven model to develop
courseware that massively individualizes learning. OLI-designed MOOCs,
therefore, offer an opportunity to replace intuitive approaches to teaching with
practices that enable more effective and efficient forms of learning.

A New Business Model

The emergence of a new educational model based on MOOCs fits the

evolutionary pattern of Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. Christensen
and Wessel identified a business model's "extendable core" as the basis of its
performance advantage.22 If MOOCs turn out to be more than just a fad, it will
be because their extendable core confers a competitive advantage that enables
them to attract new customers and extend their customer base.23 The
extendable core of precision-built MOOCs would consist of their ability to scale
learning-optimized courseware. Their principal advantage would not simply
consist, then, in their being more convenient or cheaper or "good enough," but in
their being more effective in producing better learning.

Five characteristics in particular define the extendable core of precision

education:

Its research-based methodology produces learning-optimized course

architectures.
It is maximally effective because it individualizes learning.
It is efficient because it is competency based.
It is scalable.
It is cost-effective.
If precision education were adopted as the design standard for MOOCs, it would
improve the quality of learning for students across all socioeconomic levels and
demographic areas. It would affect not only students seeking convenient and
affordable options but also students enrolling in the "full-service" sector of the
educational market dominated by traditional land-based institutions. In closing
the quality differential between MOOC-based curricula and locally crafted
instruction, precision-built courseware would gradually eliminate the distinction
between "high-end" and "low-end" education. There would only be one kind of
learning optimized for each individual. Effectively designed and organized into
a coherent curriculum, MOOCs would have the potential to usher in an entirely
new business model of higher education.

The Illusion of Safety from Disruption

In their defense, legacy institutions might counter that Harden's point about the
destabilizing effect of the Internet is largely irrelevant because they offer
students more than just information. As Christensen pointed out, brick-andmortar institutions have advantages that are not easily duplicated online: they
provide an on-campus experience that offers students (who can afford it) myriad
socialization and networking opportunities.24 According to conventional thinking,

college campuses, unlike online networks, serve as career and relationship

incubators. But are even these advantages safe from disruption?

MOOCs are beginning to compete with one of the key elements of the extendable
core of location-based education: they are challenging the proposition that inperson, on-campus networking confers a decided advantage for those seeking to
parlay their degrees into jobs. Recently the major for-profit MOOC providers,
Coursera and Udacity, disclosed that mining and brokering talent for business
clients are primary drivers behind their business model.25 Coursera's Career
Services, for example, proposes to use MOOCs to identify and channel talent to
high-tech businesses. By taking advantage of MOOC-enabled recruitment
opportunities, talented individuals need not wait to earn a degree before
successfully marketing their credentials. If MOOCs can be used to create a
system that rewards demonstrable competency, then they will further undermine
the value of campus-based networking. When used to connect talent directly to
prospective employers, MOOCs can circumvent one of the few remaining
rationales for seeking a traditional college experience.

Note that, in the "recruitment services" model, MOOCs do not create talent
they identify it and broker its acquisition. Rather than create intellectual capital,
they serve primarily as a means of certifying its possession. Even if MOOCs were
used solely as a recruitment tool, however, the rationale for preferring a
precision-built model of learning that develops the competencies being
measured would still hold. In fact, the for-profit model of MOOCs depends on and
presupposes the existence of an optimally designed process that develops the
competencies they evaluate. Precision education therefore underlies the
rationale for MOOCs as both academic exemplars and as a litmus test for
identifying those who possess relevant job-related competencies. Whether the
motivation for adopting a MOOC is for-profit or nonprofit, the success of either
model depends on a design strategy that optimizes learning.

A Postindustrial Model of Teaching and Learning

Precision-built MOOCs challenge the assumption that students need to come to a
campus to interact with resident faculty in order to acquire the knowledge and
skills necessary for credentialing. They therefore have the potential to undermine
the dominant role that campus-based educational institutions have had as
exclusive providers of knowledge and credentials. As competition with MOOCs
increases, they will face the following dilemma: Should they compete with
MOOC-based curricula head-to-head, or should they begin to assimilate MOOCs
into their traditional, residency-based curriculum? On one hand, for those
institutions without the cachet of being highly selective, participation in the forprofit MOOC model is problematic: acting as a talent broker for employers would

likely siphon away talented, potential degree-seeking students. It would be great

for employers and for students who are qualified to transition into good jobs, but
not so great for institutions that depend on cultivating and retaining residential
talent. On the other hand, elite private and flagship public universities with
established brands might choose to offer MOOCs on the basis that they would
not pose a threat to their residential operations. But precision-built MOOCs will
eventually compromise even their residential academic model as well. Students
who would still prefer, for nonacademic reasons, to pay a tuition premium for a
campus experience would likely be at a competitive disadvantage if their
curriculum were locally crafted instead of learning optimized. On the strength of
their extendable core, therefore, MOOCs represent a postindustrial model of
teaching and learning that has the potential to undermine and replace the
business model of all institutions that depend on recruiting and retaining
students for on-campus studies.

Notes
Nathan Harden, "The End of the University as We Know It," The American Interest
(January/February 2013).
Jeff Denneen and Tom Dretler, "The Financially Sustainable University," Bain &
Company, 2012, pp. 34.
Peter Stokes, "What Online Learning Can Teach Us about Higher Education," in
Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation, Ben Wildavsky, Andrew
P. Kelly, and Kevin Carey, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011).
Kevin Carey, "Into the Future with MOOCs," Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 3, 2012.
Katherine Mangan, "A First for Udacity: a U.S. University Will Accept Transfer
Credit for One of Its Courses," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 6, 2012.
Nick DeSantis, "Antioch U. Will Offer MOOCs for Credit Through Coursera,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, October 29, 2012.
Jeffrey R. Young, "California State U. Will Experiment with Offering Credit for
MOOCs," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 2013.
Jake New, "Georgia State U. to Grant Course Credit for MOOCs," Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 22, 2013.
Tamar Lewin, "Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit," New
York Times, January 23, 2013.
Katherine Mangan, "Gates Foundation Offers Grants for MOOCs in Introductory
Classes," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2012.
Paul Fain, "Majoring in Free Content," Inside Higher Ed, August 15, 2012.

Candace Thille and Joel Smith, "Learning Unbound: Disrupting the Baumol/Bowen
Effect in Higher Education," Forum for the Future of Higher Education, 2009.
Jeffrey R. Young, "Campuses Look to Digital Tools for Savings, and Reinvention,"
Almanac of Higher Education 2012, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2012.
I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online
Education in the United States, Babson Survey Research Group, January 2013, p.
10.
Benjamin Bloom, "The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group
Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring," Educational Researcher, vol. 13,
no. 6 (1984).
Benjamin Bloom, "Learning for Mastery," Evaluation Comment, vol. 1, no. 2
(1968), p. 1.
Kurt Van Lehn, "The Relative Effectiveness of Human Tutoring, Intelligent Tutoring
Systems, and Other Tutoring Systems," Educational Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 4
(2011).
Marsha Lovett, Oded Meyer, Candace Thille, "The Open Learning Initiative:
Measuring the Effectiveness of the OLI Statistics Course in Accelerating Student
Learning," Journal of Interactive Media in Education, (May 2008), pp. 116; and
Kurt Van Lehn et al., "The Andes Physics Tutoring System: Lessons Learned,"
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, vol. 15, no. 3 (2005).
Linda Baer and John Campbell, "From Metrics to Analytics, Reporting to Action:
Analytics' Role in Changing the Learning Environment," in Game Changers:
Education and Information Technologies, Diana G. Oblinger, ed. (Boulder, CO:
EDUCAUSE, 2012), p. 63.
Karen L. Evans, David Yaron, and Gaea Leinhardt, "Learning stoichiometry: A
comparison of text and multimedia formats," Chemistry Education Research and
Practice, vol. 9 (2008); Lovett et al., "The Open Learning Initiative"; Christian D.
Schunn and Mellisa M. Patchan, "An Evaluation of Accelerated Learning in the
CMU Open Learning Initiative Course 'Logic & Proofs,'" Technical Report by
Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 2009.
James G. Mazou, "The Deconstructed Campus," Journal of Computing in Higher
Education, vol. 24, no. 2 (2012), pp. 7495.
Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen, "Surviving Disruption," Harvard
Business Review, vol. 90, no. 12 (2012), p. 58.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 59.
Jeffrey R. Young, "Providers of Free MOOCs Now Charge Employers for Access to
Student Data," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2012.

 2013 James G. Mazou. The text of this EDUCAUSE Review Online article is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
license.

By Justin Pope on December 15, 2014

WHAT ARE MOOC GOOD FOR
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these
massive open online courses stood poised to overturn the century-old model of
higher education. Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier
teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few
hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the
Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there
appeared to be a solution to the problem of scaling up higher education: if it
were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be
rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the
existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun,
cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10
institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.

Then came the backlash. A high-profile experiment to use MOOCs at San Jose
State University foundered. Faculty there and at other institutions rushing to
incorporate MOOCs began pushing back, rejecting the notion that online courses
could replace the nuanced work of professors in classrooms. The tiny completion
rates for most MOOCs drew increasing attention. Thrun himself became
disillusioned, and he lowered Udacitys ambitions from educating the masses to
providing corporate training.

But all the while, a great age of experimentation has been developing. Although
some on-campus trials have gone nowhere, others have shown modest success
(including a later iteration at San Jose State). In 2013, Georgia Tech announced a
first-of-its-kind all-MOOC masters program in computer science that, at $6,600,
would cost just a fraction as much as its on-campus counterpart. About 1,400
students have enrolled. Its not clear how well such programs can be replicated
in other fields, or whether the job market will reward graduates with this
particular Georgia Tech degree. But the program offers evidence that MOOCs can
expand access and reduce costs in some corners of higher education.

Meanwhile, options for online courses continue to multiply, especially for curious
people who arent necessarily seeking a credential. For-profit Coursera and edX,
the nonprofit consortium led by Harvard and MIT, are up to nearly 13 million
users and more than 1,200 courses between them. Khan Academy, which began
as a series of YouTube videos, is making online instruction a more widely used
tool in classrooms around the world.

THINGS REVIEWED

Learning in an Introductory Physics MOOC: All Cohorts Learn Equally, Including

an On-Campus Class
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING
SEPTEMBER 2014

Online master's program in computer science

GEORGIA TECH, UDACITY, AND AT&T

All this activity is beginning to generate interesting data about what MOOCs
actually do. In September, MIT physicist David Pritchard and other researchers
published a study of Mechanics ReView, an online course he teaches that is
based on an on-campus course of the same name. The authors found that the
MOOC was generally effective at communicating difficult materialNewtonian
mechanicseven to students who werent MIT caliber. In fact, the students who
started the online course knowing the least about physics showed the same
relative improvement on tests as much stronger students. They may have
started with an F and finished with an F, Pritchard says, but they rose with the
whole class.

Pritchard still questions the effects MOOCs will have; for one thing, he doesnt
see how they can have a sustainable business model on their own. But that
doesnt mean MOOCs are merely another overhyped technology. Ideas about
what they offer, and whom they might help, are evolving as rapidly as the
MOOCs themselves.

Valuable snippets

One thing worth reconsidering is MOOCs famously high dropout rates. A widely
cited figure is that 90 percent of students dont finish their courses; a study at
Penn determined that the number was 96 percent.

Pritchard, for one, calls the focus on initial registrants misguided. Most who sign
up for a class arent serious students; theyre window shoppers who face no cost
barrier to trying a lecture or two. Half of the people in the Penn study dropped
out before the first class. Of 17,000 who signed up for Pritchards MOOC, only
about 10 percent made it as far as the second assignment. But more than half of
those earned a certificate of completion.

Were nearing the point where its a superior educational experience, as far as
the lectures are concerned, to engage with them online, says a Harvard
professor. If thats true, traditional universities will have to show that most of the
other things they offer on campus cant be replaced by technology.

For some people, especially adults in search of continuing education, even

dropping out of a MOOC may well be a kind of victoryover an old model of
credit-hours and semester-long courses that makes no sense for them. If they

want to see whether theyd be interested in a topic, or just want snippets of

material, why should they pay for, and sit through, an entire 12-week syllabus?

For all the hype, MOOCs are really just contentthe latest iteration of the
textbook. And just like a book on a library shelf, they can be useful to a curious
passerby thumbing through a few pagesor they can be the centerpiece to a
well-taught course. On their own, MOOCs are hardly more likely than textbooks
to re-create a quality college education in all its dimensions.

Justifying tuition

When Harvard and MIT announced the creation of edX, they said a major goal
was to jump-start innovative teaching to their own students. That got little
attention, at least beyond Cambridge, but there are signs it is happening. Many
of the technologies central to MOOCs, built around interactivity and assessment,
can be useful tools for students on campus, says MITs director of digital
learning, Sanjay Sarma. MIT students cant get credit for taking even MITproduced MOOCs, but they still use MOOC tools in their courses. Two-thirds have
taken a traditional course that uses the edX software platform.

Down Massachusetts Avenue, Harvard computer scientist David Malan says his
campus has also seen a marked uptick in conversations about reinventing
teaching. Malans Introduction to Computer Science course captures many of
these currents. The on-campus version is Harvards most popular, with around
800 students. The MOOC version has about 350,000 registrants from around the
world, ranging from preteens to 80-year-olds. Both versions use sophisticated,
overlapping learning resources, from lecture videos to assessments. Their
academic standards are the same.

Malan began videotaping lectures in 1999, but he says the tools of the MOOC
bring a new dimension to his teaching. For example, lectures that typically take
an entire class period can be broken up online into shorter, more focused units,
allowing students to spend as much time on each segment as they need.

The paying Harvard students decide for themselves whether to attend the
lectures or just catch them online. I would like to think theres a nontrivial
psychological upside to the shared experience, he says, but its up to them.
Instead of necessarily having all 800 students attend each lecture, I would
rather have 400 students who want to be there, he adds. Besides, were

nearing the point where its a superior educational experience, as far as the
lectures are concerned, to engage with them online.

If thats true, its a terrifying but useful prod for traditional universities. At MIT,
the edX experiment has been a huge stimulus, says Pritchard. Across higher
education, its making everybody sit up and answer the following question:
How can I justify charging students $45,000 a year to attend large lectures when
they can find better exemplars on the Internet?

For all the focus on the role of MOOCs in higher education, they might have a
significant role to play in high schools and below. Nearly 28 percent of enrollees
in one group of online classes were current or former teachers.

In Malans course at Harvard (where tuition, fees, room, and board actually run
$58,607 this year), part of the answer is that even if the academic standard is
identical, the full experience is not. The Harvard students get course sections
and recitations with just a few students, a 90-minute weekly recap of the
material, and office hours four nights a week (the class essentially takes over a
dining hall). The on-campus course is almost cinematic in its production scale,
with a staff of 100. To assist orders of magnitude more students in the MOOC,
five staff members wade into discussion forums, along with student and alumni volunteers.

And of course, students not just at Harvard but at hundreds of other universities
get much more than that. They get a credential that is necessary for many types
of employment, plus access to alumni networks and mentorship. Thats why
MOOCs shouldnt necessarily threaten colleges: if established institutions make
judicious use of learning technology where it demonstrably helps students, they
gain credibility to insist that most of what else they offer on campus is a
qualitatively different experienceone that technology cant replace.

Teaching teachers

Education researchers are still just beginning to mine all the data that MOOCs
generate about how students respond to the material. Researchers like Pritchard
can track every step of every student through a MOOC; he says that for him to
study his traditional students that way, theyd have to carry a head-cam 24-7.
Eventually, such data should yield insights about the best ways to present,
sequence, and assess particular subjects. Kevin Carey, who has researched

MOOCs as director of education policy at the New America Foundation, points out
that todays MOOCs havent even begun to make serious use of artificial
intelligence to personalize courses according to each students strengths and
weaknesses (a surprise considering that pioneers like Thrun and Courseras
Daphne Koller came from AI backgrounds).

Yet while MOOCs huge enrollments are fantastic for running educational
experiments, it makes them hard to teach. Pritchards MOOC represents a much
wider range of abilities than his on-campus class at MIT. Its like were trying to
teach from second grade up to seventh, he says. His new project is an
Advanced Placement physics course for high school students. By narrowing the
target audiencehigh school students who believe theyre ready to take AP
physics are likely to start within a fairly tight band of knowledgehe thinks he
can teach more effectively than would be possible in a more diverse MOOC.

Indeed, for all the focus on the role of MOOCs in higher education, they might
have a significant role to play in high schools and below. Teachers are already a
big audience (a study of 11 MOOCs offered by MIT last spring found that nearly
28 percent of enrollees were former or active teachers). This is particularly
promising because teachers pass what they learn on to their own students: when
they make use of edX and other resources in their classrooms, they multiply the
effect. As Coursera moves explicitly into teacher training, its classes could have
as much impact by reaching a few hundred teachers as they would with
thousands of other students.

MOOCs alone cant meet the oversized expectations of early boosters like Thrun
who themselves echoed would-be reformers over the decades who looked to
radio, television, and the mail to democratize learning (see The Crisis in Higher
Education). For better or worse, traditional methods of higher education showed
remarkable persistence as those models emerged. Yes, this time might be
different. But if MOOCs do prove revolutionary, it will be because educational
institutions have finally figured out how to use them.

Justin Pope, a former higher-education reporter for the Associated Press, is chief
of staff at Longwood University in Virginia

Kursus Terbuka atas Talian Secara Besar-Besaran - Massive Open Online Course
(MOOC)
Apakah yang dimaksudkan dengan MOOC?

Kursus Terbuka atas Talian Secara Besar-Besaran (MOOC) adalah kursus dalam
talian bertujuan untuk penyertaan interaktif besar-besaran dan akses terbuka
melalui laman web. Selain bahan-bahan kursus tradisional seperti video, bacaan,
dan set masalah, MOOC juga menyediakan forum pengguna interaktif yang
membantu membina masyarakat untuk pelajar dan tenaga pengajar.
The MOOC telah diperkenalkan pada tahun 2008 semasa yang dipanggil
"Connectivism dan Pengetahuan perantara" yang telah dibentangkan kepada 25
tuisyen pelajar yang membayar dalam Pendidikan Lanjutan di University of
Manitoba sebagai tambahan kepada 2,300 pelajar-pelajar lain dari orang awam
yang mengambil kelas dalam talian percuma percuma.

Adakah MOOC untuk Anda?

Walaupun pembelajaran yang berlaku pada skala yang lebih besar,

tanggungjawab tersebut terletak kepada pelajar. Tidak ada tekanan untuk
menghadiri forum-forum, menyertai, berhubung dengan guru pengajaran dan
menghulurkan pandangan dan sebagainya. Konsep yang ingin diterap dalam
kursus ini menuntut anda untuk banyak membaca dan juga berinteraksi tetapi ini
tidak wajib (kebanyakan masa). MOOC adalah untuk orang-orang yang mencari
ilmu tambahan dengan mengisi masa lapang mereka.
Ini bukan untuk pelajar pasif kerana ia melibatkan penciptaan kandungan aktif,
yang kadang-kadang boleh menjadi huru-hara. Sebagai peserta, anda perlu
berupaya untuk mengawal diri dan situasi pembelajaran anda.
MOOC boleh digunakan untuk penjelasan konsep asas dan pemahaman
manakala semua kursus-kursus ini adalah percuma, seseorang itu untuk hanya
perlu melaburkan masa untuk mendapatkan yang terbaik. Akhirnya, anda
membuat keputusan jika anda berjaya atau tidak.

Masa depan MOOC.

Konsep ini semakin popular dengan lebih dan lebih banyak peluang untuk pelajar
untuk belajar. Walaupun terdapat perdebatan besar berlaku sama ada konsep ini
memang terbuka atau tidak tetapi dalam MOOC pendapat saya menyediakan
satu konsep teknologi yang kukuh yang perlu dimanfaatkan lebih, membolehkan
ia menjadi lebih tersusun ke arah pembelajaran. Dengan adanya kursus asas
rawak tidak akan membuahkan hasil dalam jangka masa panjang.
http://mrfakrul.blogspot.my/2013/05/massive-open-online-course-mooc.html