Source: New York Times, 11/2/2012
The New York Times has called this “The Year of the MOOC.” That's a reasonable label, since there have been some stunning developments over the last year and a half.
MOOC stands for “Massive Online Open-Enrollment Course.” They are
Online courses that are free.
Dozens of them in many different fields.
Amazing, considering that the first one was offered just over a year ago. That was a Stanford course in artificial intelligence that enrolled more than 100,000 students.
University consortia formed in recent months.
Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and many other first-tier schools have leant their name and their faculty to the effort. Semester Online has announced small, online courses for credit from Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, UNC, Vanderbilt, Lake Forest, Washington Univ in St. Louis.
Many people dismiss MOOCs as irrelevant to what we do at small, liberal arts colleges like Macalester.
We do small classes, not massive lecture classes.
We emphasize one-on-one and small group interaction with a professor.
The MOOCs are also dismissed for structural reasons:
MOOCs are about technology, not humanities or social sciences.
That was the case for the first six months, but not now.
Although a MOOC may enroll 100,000 students, only about 10% actually finish.
The 10% completion rate is misleading. That number compares the number of people who express active interest in the MOOC to the number that complete. The appropriate comparison at Macalester might be the number who apply as it translates into the number who matriculate. That is also 10%. What's different is that the MOOC keeps track of all its applicants and alumni.
There is not an established credit model for MOOCs.
The credit model is emerging. There will certainly be something like an AP system in place within a year.
MOOCs are highly relevant to Macalester.
We will start seeing students coming to Mac with MOOC credit.
Students will want to round out their programs at Mac with MOOCs.
They may want to take specialized courses that don't fit into their schedules. They may want to reduce the cost of college. They may want to study vocationally oriented things.
Students will arrive at Mac with preconceptions about “I've already done that” just as they do with AP courses.
We're going to be facing a much more diverse set of preparations, since MOOCs allow students to move outside of the common high-school curriculum.
But the main thing about MOOCs is that …
I thought it would be good to talk about some of these opportunities.
Chad Topaz
Chad is currently developing an online calculus course for the ACM president's council. For several years, he's been exploring new modes for classroom interaction, perhaps summarized by the phrase “flipping the classroom.”
Dan Flath
Dan is a co-author of a national series of calculus textbooks. He's also the consumate liberal artist. He's one of several people who have been taking an online course this semester as part of a faculty discussion group.
Barron Koralesky
In addition to his duties facilitating the use of computer technology in teaching, Barron has considerable contact with other schools and is an astute observer of their organizational structure.
Brian Rosenberg
As chair of the ACM President's Council, Brian has been trying to help colleges engage the issue.
Adrienne Christiansen and Paul Overvoorde.
The Serie Center has sponsored several workshops that connect to online education and the “Write Well” video series that many faculty have contributed to.
David Bressoud
David may be surprised to see himself on this list. He has an important set of experiences, including developing one of the “Great Courses” lecture series. As president of the Mathematical Association of America, David has contact with a wide range of instutitions. In addition, he's been an important commentator on the effects of the AP system, which I will argue is a useful model to anticipate how the online future might play out.
The skeptics
I won't list them by name, but I'm hoping they will contribute to this conversation.
MOOCs are a particular approach to online education, but they are part of a long history. To keep things short, I'll just refer to the headline in the Star Tribune on the article about Chad's ACM course:
Still new to us, but not to others …
High schools, community colleges, distributed state universities, and companies have been using online modes for some years.
Example: The MAA offers professional development seminars online.
Example: There's been an online statistics education conference — ECOTS — and many, many “webinars”.
Example: This January will be the 4th year for me teaching an online statistical modeling course for professionals through Statistics.com
We will want to exploit our advantages and compensate for our deficiencies:
Deep engagement with teaching.
Interdisciplinarity: a better understanding of how disciplines connect to one another and what's worth teaching.
Articulate, intelligent, motivated students who teach each other.
A richer program for students and connections between colleagues at other, similar institutions.
Example: the Sunoikisis cooperative
Greater flexibility in scheduling, study away.
Better contact with alumni and other non-traditional students.
Opportunities for recruitment of students.
Outreach and increased diversity.
Allowing students to have a shorter, more continuous program of study.
A way to share our particular strengths
Example: Ethnographic interviewing
Distributed inter-institutional collaboration.
How will we manage the necessary give-and-take and ensure balance in the distribution of workload and the use of resources? Will we work bilaterally with pairs of faculty? Pairs of departments? Pairs of divisions?
How to encourage innovation without punishing the innovators.
Our workload accounting approach is about teaching courses, not developing new courses.
How will we distinguish the differing workloads of developing and teaching a course? Historically, the payback for developing a course was being able to teach it relatively easily after it is developed. With online materials, it's easy to imagine a course being handed over to an adjunct.
Encouraging collaboration.
Online courses are more complex than in-class courses. They will require a division of labor and a sharing of resources. We do not have formal mechanisms for doing this.
Funding innovation.
Historically, we provide very limited support for developing new courses or materials for teaching courses.
Keeping the College unified.
Conditions are diverging in departments. Without faculty growth, class size is being set by student demand rather than pedagogical principle. There will be pressure to replace high-enrollment courses with online versions and exploit the low marginal cost of additional students.
Intellectual property issues.
What happens when a Macalester faculty member offers an online course at another college? Is this analogous to a textbook or to a second job? What happens when online materials developed by one faculty member are used by another to replace their course?
Exploiting our Competitive Advantages
We should be very good at integrating our courses, in a way that online classes will not be able to. Can we do that with our present organizational structure?
Staying competitive. Students will be able to take introductory courses online.
Our courses might be better, but students won't be taking them.
- Example: AP Calculus and Statistics. 10 years ago, our introductory courses covered very similar content to the AP courses. We re-organized them completely to make them highly meaningful to students with AP credit while still accessible to students without an AP background.
- Our students will have even more diverse preparations.