The Massive Online Open-Enrollment Course... not many years ago it was being touted as the pedagogical revolution that would break higher education wide open, knocking down the traditional classroom walls. A leader in the MOOC movement is "edX". Its CEO, Anant Agarwal, was interviewed recently by a Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter. Five years and 11 million students after its founding, the non-profit hopes to be sustainable by 2020.
In my experience --- and I "taught" a couple of MOOCs a few years ago (although mine amounted only to Minor Online Open-Enrollment Courses --- Mini-MOOCs) --- two kinds of students are attracted. The first are the dilettantes, i.e., folks with a casual interest in your topic, who sign up and participate to widely varied degrees from 'hardly at all' to 'across the finish line.' Instructors may or may not award a certificate, which may or may not have any value to the student.
The other market is students who can translate the MOOC experience into credit hours toward a degree at a legit college or university. This is where the future lies, if there is a future for MOOCs.
As potential for-credit offerings, MOOCs might be viewed as a sub-set of online learning more broadly. I have quite a bit more experience with that, having taught online courses for a couple of years now for a Philadelphia law school. I confess that even after two years, I still struggle with the pedagogical and technological challenges of online learning. Last fall I taught Human Resource Management and received the best student reviews of my long teaching career. Asked "what does the professor need to improve?" answers included:
"You can't improve upon perfection."
"The class was great, no improvements needed."
"Nothing, loved him."
No, I'm not making those up. Then, this spring, I taught ADR for the second time. I tried using video to improve the interactive nature of the experience, which after all included units on negotiation and mediation. Whether due to the technology or the students' lack of sophistication, the video components performed very poorly. And I had one student --- who didn't seem to think he needed to provide more than two or three sentences for any discussion or exam question ("Hey, this is graduate school") --- tell me I was the worst online prof ever. I put most of that right back on him. But, like any good and responsible teacher, I'm left wondering how I might have brought him around. I've had duds like this --- who are in the class only to get a grade and ultimately a credential --- in my face-to-face classrooms, where I could deal with them one-on-one and gage their body language and expressions. Lacking that opportunity online, it's much more difficult, if not impossible, to engage this kind of intellectually bankrupt student.
In last week's post, I made the point that a liberal education is important not only because it teaches students how to think, write, analyze and adjust to life's fast-paced changes. I contended that it also teaches them how to live meaningful lives... even if they find themselves professionally redundant some day, despite those skill sets. In my view, only an extended on-campus (preferably residential, aka, traditional) college experience can do that.
Let me close, then, by saying, I see two types of college students in our future. The first will be those who use MOOCs, AP credits, and life experiences to help them cobble together a credential and a career. They hopefully will achieve gainful employment. They will not in my opinion achieve an "education."
To become an "educated" human being still requires the much-maligned traditional college experience. Providing that without putting a mortgage on the student's diploma is a major challenge for us "traditional" college teachers and administrators.
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