MOOCs are free and open to the public. Anyone can register. All you need is an internet connection and (as I discovered) an incredible amount of self-discipline. They use a combination of different tools for content delivery, practice work and formal testing. At first glance, the videos, podcasts, articles, quizzes, presentations, assignments, essays, as well as the chance to learn and interact with people from all over the world, is thrilling. Then the mask begins to slip and the headache of forums, material and dues, starts to kick in.
MOOCs are making some academics nervous. If they take off, will traditional campuses survive? Will we still need departments of specialists when one person can design a course that can be reused many times, far into the future? Is this the beginning of the end or the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of education? My journey into MOOCs offers some food for thought.
My first two courses were both given by Stanford, via Venture Lab. Both came with weekly assignments and group work. If there is nothing more stressful than group work with team members you don't know and who disappear suddenly, leaving you alone and with their workload, what’s even worse is that all the assignments are assessed by fellow students. The horror. A flood of comments written by people who either didn't know how to read or who couldn't be bothered to think. Disheartening, to say the least.
My next MOOCs were very different. Both were organised by Coursera, the social entrepreneurship company partnered with 33 of the world’s best universities. One of my courses, given by Duke University, had no peer review and no torturous group assignments. Just multiple choice exercises and quizzes. Joy! Still, since there were no weekly assignments, the temptation to slack off was difficult to resist. The phrase "in one ear, out the other" best describes my learning experience. The other, given by the University of Edinburgh, only had one end-of-course peer-reviewed assignment. It recommended interacting with classmates on Google+, Twitter and in the class forums but after an initial flurry of activity, the motivation disappeared, mostly because it was both overwhelming and cumbersome to interact in this way. MOOC class sizes can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of students. Given the sheer number of students on this one, each wanting to comment, my brain threatened to melt down. I managed to complete the course by retreating into a little bubble of isolation.
My biggest catastrophe though, was the MOOC on MOOC organised by Canvas.net. An odd creature with no clear direction or organisation, it was like a headless octopus. Simply understanding what had to be done was a struggle given the lack of structure. Figuring out which thrashing leg was which was nearly impossible. I couldn't survive the chaos and admitted defeat. Clearly, I wasn’t alone. Currently, MOOCs ‘boast’ a dropout rate of 85 per cent.
The credibility of MOOCs is a major issue. “Some online courses may draw on material from courses taught on campus but they are not equivalent to on-campus courses,” my Stanford MOOC cautioned. “It does not confer a Stanford University grade, course credit or degree and it does not verify the identity of the student”
So, were those aforementioned professors panicking for no reason? I do think that one day, massive online courses will prove useful to lifelong learners in rural areas or in the Developing World but to seriously challenge actual universities, they will need to overcome genuine issues of credibility, assessment, course structure and quality, the lack of a student-teacher relationship and the underlying financial model. Is the MOOC just a fad? Could traditional universities die out? It’s far too early to say but the online course’s enormous popularity suggests there’s an appetite for a viable alternative to the university. The game, most definitely, is on.
