Posts
That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with “nukes” seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education.1.
[snip]
The MOOC skeptics have a variety of qualms, but especially about what is lost in the retreat of face-to-face teaching — a point eloquently made by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, in an article in the current New Republic, “MOOCs of Hazard.”
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.
His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.
“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.
The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”
But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.
Mr. Cusumano’s concerns grow out of his study of the software and media industries in the face of price pressure from free, open-source software and digital distribution over the Internet. Two-thirds of the public companies in the software industry disappeared between 1998 and 2006, as companies failed or were acquired. In the media world, Mr. Cusumano contends that newspaper and magazine companies — including The New York Times Company — made a strategic mistake by giving away their publications free on the Web....
Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep. The damage would occur, he writes in the article, “if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry — zero — which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo.”
Beware of the High Cost of ‘Free’ Online Courses
New York Times | MARCH 25, 2013, 5:04 PM
"Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education."
Really?
We have disruption now?
As far as I can tell, "creative disruption" is occurring when a new business is actually winning. MOOCs aren't a business, and they aren't winning, not at the moment.
And I don't recall distance learning being a disrupter back in the 1990s.
As far as I can tell, the only reason we're even talking about MOOCs is that we are 5 years into a depressed economy, and "free" is sounding like an awfully good idea right about now.
But as for disruption....I fear that the kind of disruption people seem to have in mind when they use the word already happened in the 1990s, and MOOCs are the least of it. Lots more administrators, lots fewer full-time professors, and now MOOCs. Swap in videos of Harvard professors, swap out the adjuncts. More for me!
I suppose you could characterize the bureaucratization of colleges and universities as creative disruption that benefits the administrators, but that's not what Clayton Christensen had in mind when he developed the concept.
2.
"Mr. Cusumano’s concerns grow out of his study of the software and media industries in the face of price pressure from free, open-source software and digital distribution over the Internet....Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep."
Right, but.
People like music and news; people listen to music and read news instead of getting down to work.
College courses, on the other hand, are work. A college course is the activity you listen to music and read news to avoid. MOOCs are going to be hard to give away, not easy.
For most of the MOOC discussions I come across, executive function is the Great Unsaid. That, and the fact that Free is not a business model.
7 comments:
Seems to me we are swimming in great software companies producing great products--especially with the explosion of smart-phone apps and cloud-based programs; so, how exactly were individuals harmed by the fallout?
Besides, the crash between 1998 and 2006 was more a case of inflated and worthless internet companies, with no product, with no revenue stream, and without reality-based business plans, but with lots of wild-eyed investors looking the next big thing, than it was a crash and burn of established companies. The number of software companies that disappeared during that time period had more to do with the price of tulips in Holland in the 17th Century than it does with the effect of MOOCs on universities today.
"Seems to me we are swimming in great software companies producing great products--especially with the explosion of smart-phone apps and cloud-based programs; so, how exactly were individuals harmed by the fallout?"
I did not get the sense that the author was worried that MOOCs would harm the users. The author is concerned that MOOCs may be a mistake for the colleges supplying content to them.
His analogy with the print newspapers giving their product away for free followed by a cratering of print newspaper sales is more "on point" than his software companies during Dot-Com 1.0.
Having said that, I don't think Harvard/MIT/Stanford are at risk. The mid-tier liberal arts colleges that charge a lot will be the first to get harmed if this MOOC thing pans out.
Harvard/MIT/Stanford are offering a valuable credential, as well as an education for $$/year. The mid-tier liberal arts colleges don't have the valuable credential, and I can imagine a lot of folks deciding that a much cheaper education using a MOOC is a better deal.
But ... most folks aren't disciplined enough for MOOCs to work. "The Great Courses" from "The Teaching Company" have existed for 20+ years and folks are still going off to college ...
-Mark Roulo
I have now completed two MOOCs, both taught by associate/assistant professors in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. I am currently taking two others, one taught by a professor of Mathematics at EPFL in Switzerland and one taught by a professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech.
Done properly, these are WORK. For the two JHU courses, I was putting in 5-10 hours a week per class, and some people put in much more than that. But I ended up learning stuff that I am using at my job, right at this very moment, and without these courses, I probably wouldn't have learned quite as much in the same amount of time.
Factors I attribute to this are (a) the discussion forums and (b) the existence of deadlines and points penalties for missing them.
A woman named Katy Jordan is doing a project related to the completion rate of MOOCs:
http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/synthesising-mooc-completion-rates/
Or you can look at her interactive graph here:
http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
The statistics for the course that I just finished last week are as follows (from the professor's course wrap-up message):
“There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments.”
MOOCs aren't for everyone. There were more than a few people who posted on the discussion forums that "I didn't know we had a quiz this week" or "I didn't know I would lose 20% for not doing a self-evaluation". Yes, MOOCs take discipline and executive function. But so does life.
I think the people who think that MOOCs will replace traditional in-person college courses are looking at it the wrong way. Most of the people in the MOOCs that I've taken already have college degrees. They are that self-selected group known as "life-long learners" and are taking the courses to better themselves, to get a leg up on work, or just to learn something new and interesting.
Argh, I forgot to include a link to a podcast of the professors from my first two courses discussing the second prof's course: http://youtu.be/qO2xUvogyJE
I am also currently taking two MOOCs. I am in the middle of Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class from Standford (not the Coursera version) and Udacity's Introduction to Computer Science.
Here's my impression:
1) These courses are not 'free'. You have to have your own set up at home and adapt if your equipment doesn't match what the class is using.
2) There is not a lot of help. If you don't understand something, you are pretty much limited to the forums and the wiki. The other students can be just as clueless as you are.
3) There are still technical problems. In the Udacity course, certain types of quizzes cause my computer to freeze. I have to jury rig around it by clicking on something else in the course and going back. Other students are having the exact same problem, according to the forums but there doesn't see to be a way to get Udacity to fix it.
4) Technical problems part 2: I teach online for Devry and Ashford. If the course has technical problems, you have massive help systems that have the technical know how to restore it.
5) Techical problems part 3: If Hurricaine Sandy hits and your internet goes out, you can call your university online instructor and ask her to extend deadlines.
6) Like GoogleMaster, I already have my degrees. I am taking these classes to further/learn new skills. I'm not sure if anyone can put enough free classes together to earn a degree. Who would grant it? Accredidation of higher learning institutions plays in here, I think.
That's my 6 cents.
I have done two MOOCs. They are a way to learn advanced material if you already have a lot of background and are a disciplined learner (and have a lot of time). Quite frankly, though, they are only a minor step above simply reading a textbook. The advantage is that there is a schedule, so you are less likely to put off doing an assignment. The two courses that I took featured pleasant profs kind of gabbing into the camera, with a bit of the technical material - but the real learning was in the difficult assignments, and you were really on your own. In both course, the assignments were not particularly tied to the video lectures. You really had to figure everything out for yourself, and identify readings that might help on your own. You could ask in the forum, but people there were mainly confused.
I also noticed that most of the people who were active and actually completing things (as indicated by their posts in the forum) had advanced degrees and were learning the material for their job or research.
I think MOOCs are going to put a lot of adult education out of business, especially those overpriced training companies that are commonly used in industry. I don't see the MOOC format succeeding for traditional 18 year olds, who typically need a more high touch approach. I *do* think that traditional students can succeed in regular online course, but those are a different animal from MOOCs.
Post a Comment