Pearson has a published a very useful report on “Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States.” The accompanying infographic is shared below. The complete report is available at:
http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012
(and yes, they do talk about MOOCs in the report)
Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States
The Coursera MOOC I was taking (Fundamentals of Online Education) was recently cancelled. The reasons behind this (and the way in which the course was cancelled) have been instructive. I believe that this particular moment will feature heavily in future analysis of the MOOC movement.
On the 2nd February, I received this short email message from the instructor:
We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.
Then I received this email update the next day:
Dear FOE students,
We were inspired to see the number of people who expressed an interest in seeing the class resume. There were some choices made in the initial design of the class that didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped. We are working to address these issues, and are reopening the discussion forums so that we can get feedback on how the class can be improved when it relaunches.
Thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with a great learning experience in the next version.
The FOE Course Staff
Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application Course Team
I don’t believe either of those emails were honest. The messages did not accept the three major problems that this particular course had:
The first issue was inexcusable, particularly given the subject matter of the course. One of the fundamental tenets of good online course design is to have everything built before a course goes live. This does not preclude alterations and improvements (where justified) as a course is being taught, but this particular course still had “insert text here” content in the “About” pages. Going forward, Coursera needs to institute processes that ensure a course is ready before it launches.
The second issue was interesting on several levels. The stated reason for assigning groups for students in the course was:
to make the discussions more manageable and to allow you to form networks with people in your own field and even with others not in your field. The idea was to create a world wide network of people who can help each other and to start building a world wide online learning community that will provide support and help.
However, MOOCs exhibit a significant attrition rate. In the first Coursera course I took these statistics were shared:
To my mind, group membership would be significantly reduced by the end of the course (unless being part of the group successfully induced the majority of students to complete the course). I did not see this particular group model working. The instructor’s point about MOOC discussion being unmanageable is correct, and this is something that needs to be fixed, but the group method she implemented was not a viable solution.
Additionally, the methods in which students added themselves to groups were flawed. Initially this was through Google Docs, which does not scale to thousands of students (and resulted in records being deleted either inadvertently or to cause trouble). The later method was via discussion boards, in a way that was both inefficient and confusing. In neither option was there a way for students or Coursera to plan the composition of a group based upon any criteria (i.e. mixed skill-set, learning style, location, primary language, etc.). Hopefully the instructional designers and developers at Coursera will look for a method in which the course technology can automatically assign groups in an intelligent fashion. This would be an opportunity to run some very interesting and productive research.
Lastly, I did not see any indication of Quality Assurance being run in this course. If there had been a process in place that that reviewed the course before launch, then this would have caught that fact that the course was still under construction, and this should have also highlighted problems with the groups model. This is a major issue for Coursera to address. Oversight needs to be in place to demonstrate that a MOOC offers a superlative educational experience to students. The publishing industry relies on editors, proof-readers, legal review, designers, and peer assessment to ensure that what reaches the reader is a quality product. A MOOC should be have the same level of oversight as a good publishing house.
UPDATE: Interesting commentary from Slate on the “course meltdown.” Worth searching on Twitter for #foemooc
I started my most recent MOOC today. This was another offering from Coursera, and focused on an area that fits into my work life very well. The course (Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application) had a slightly rocky start, students were meant to add themselves to groups of 21 via a Google spreadsheet, but this resulted in inadvertent deletion of groups and a crashed server. The discussion boards were later used for students to add themselves to groups. I am in “Start LL” (I think).
I began the week by penning a quick introductory post, and then searched via a couple of keywords to see if there was anyone else in the course from work or Chicago. The introductory discussions are where I think Coursera could make a few improvements – it would be nice to apply a global profile more successfully for each subsequent course, and to create a groups/friends options which would allow for students to find contacts in each new course.
My next step was to complete two learning styles questionnaires:
According to the VARK Questionnaire, I have a mild Read/Write learning preference:
Which suggests that I follow these strategies to study more effectively.
The results for the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire (ILS) were as follows:
Learning Style Results
This suggests that I have largely moderate preferences for these learning styles:
Both these questionnaires were useful and interesting, and I think I will use them in the classes I teach. The course also provided a link to the “Are You Ready For An Online Class” page at Georgia Tech. It might be worthwhile coming up with a similar page more focussed on being in MOOC….
The course designers provided a background survey, which I completed. A couple of questions stood out for me:
Which one of the following component(s) do you think is important in an online course?
Somewhat tellingly, assessment of learning was not a stated option.
If a 24 hour, 7 day a week help center staffed by qualified teaching assistants were available for this course, would you use it if you needed help?
I assume that this option would more more fully lead to a business model for Coursera.
Week 1
Each Coursera course has exhibited a different personality, and the navigation for this course is very functional (but a tad ugly). The “Week 1” tab provides a table of the various requirements, due dates, and time for completion. This was a nice touch, although the introductory videos indicate that the course is fluid and subject to change.
Moving forward, I will be careful to temper my notes here and prevent the posting of anything that could be considered plagiarism or breaking the academic standards of Coursera.