
72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit - denzil_correa
http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/
======
ddlatham
_72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means
the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably
much (much) higher._

They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking
someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course
is low.

The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these
courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to
certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they
shouldn't be accompanied by credit.

~~~
larrys
"The issue is one of accountability, not quality."

The issue is also one of dilution of the institution granting the credit and
branding.

If someone is able to take an online course and receive credit they will then
be able to infer an affiliation with the institution that will dilute the
value of an existing degree from that institution.

This already of course can and does happen (just like locks don't prevent
everyone from breaking into your home or office) but opening up the floodgates
to people who will most certainly claim and fudge that they attended or are
somehow affiliated with top shelf universities is definitely an issue.

Case in point is what happened with the Wharton Evening School. Although the
link I provided certainly tells a different spin and story the real reason is
that it was trivial to get into the evening school (compared to Penn as a
regular undergraduate) and Penn had a bunch of those graduates running around
with BBA's as students who graduated from Wharton. (Which of course they did
but not of the same caliber as the regular graduates).

<http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n23/WhartonEve.html>

~~~
hackinthebochs
Doesn't surprise me at all. In the race for profit schools are diluting their
own brand. Around DC I constantly see advertisements for
Harvard/Georgetown/American University/etc Night/Online/Extended Learning
classes. There is a big land rush when it comes to "legitimate" online
learning institutions. But they are going to seriously dilute the value of
their brand in the process. I find it amazing that these schools aren't more
hesitant in offering these backdoor ways at getting a Harvard, etc "degree"
just for a few extra bucks.

------
waterlesscloud
Copied from my comment on an earlier posting of the same story-

From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a
quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve
credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke,
and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science,
and engineering." Which makes sense, those are subjects which are probably
best suited to this kind of approach.

I've taken a number of MOOCs, from EDx, Coursera, and Udacity. I'm an addict,
always in at least one and plan to pretty much permanently keep doing them as
long as it's possible to do so.

The 6.002x from EDx was probably the most rigorous of the ones I've done, and
I felt a solid sense of accomplishment when it was over. But I don't think I
should be awarded MIT credit for it, mostly due to the limited substitutions
for lab work.

In fact, I don't think college credit would be appropriate for any of the
classes I've done. However, the certificates for most of them do have meaning,
and should be taken by employers as a sign that someone is likely to have some
competency in the area.

Yes, cheating is possible, so it's not automatic, but you should always be
evaluating someone's actual skills that matter to you anyway. An A in a class
on their college transcript also doesn't guarantee mastery in any way
whatsoever. It's just an indicator that the person may have such.

~~~
hipsters_unite
Exactly. I've done some from Udacity and not cheated (what would be the point
in taking it otherwise?), but though they were hard enough and I felt a sense
of accomplishment, I don't think I deserve actual credit. It's on my CV, but
in the 'miscellaneous' section, not where my actual qualifications are -
exactly where (I imagine) I'd put a class that I audited, US-style.

------
surrealize
72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit
_from their home institution_.

The headline makes it sound like they don't think MOOC students deserve _any
kind_ of credit, which is a much stronger statement.

~~~
StavrosK
I agree with this. I was a bit indignant at first, but, when I realized what
they meant, I thought it makes sense.

------
droithomme
Article has huge spin on it, claiming "This is not a good sign for online
education".

Phrasing of question is do they "deserve formal credit from your home
institution." No of course not, the class is free and they are not enrolled in
the school. If the free class gets full credit, the university falls apart.

Also, giving real credit means you have to have money coming in, proctoring on
site in their country for the tests, and id card checks. This will massively
increase costs and completely eliminate the ability of people in most parts of
the world from being able to take the class. One of the reasons for these
classes is to open up western college style education to people throughout the
world. Switching it to a pay model that validates identity just converts the
whole thing into online extension courses, which they have already, and those
certainly have never been MOOCs, enrollment numbers have been modest not in
the 20,000-200,000 enrollment range per session (yes, with 10% passing but
that means little, they still have huge numbers passing).

~~~
MilesTeg
This. People confuse education with accreditation. Online courses (should)
provide education very cheaply. I hope the US accreditation system gets fixed
so that it is cheap too or not so important for employment.

------
mxfh
Hey The Chronicle and techcrunch: even this ◕ is closer to the actual numbers
than your plainly wrong pie chart[1]. 72% is less than 3/4. You show something
about 77%. Please get some more editors.

good luck i'm not alone: <http://fyre.it/Los9xk.4>

Yet it's kind of scary that for 4 days, of this being published on The
Chronicle[2] with it's supposedly well educated audience nobody seems to have
noticed it. Guess that shows that charts are even less relevant and precise to
transport information than I imagined.

[1] <http://imgur.com/UtIm43c>

[2] [http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/...](http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/137905#id=overview)

------
henrik_w
A few points after reading the original article from The Chronicle of Higher
Education:

They spend a bit of time talking about how much work went into creating the
courses. Of course it takes a lot of time, but you get the payback when you
run it the second time, the third time etc. I'm surprised this was not
mentioned.

Also, they mentioned that Robert Sedgewick of Princeton didn't wanted to be
beaten to the punch creating a MOOC algorithm course. But he already was. Tim
Roughgarden of Stanford gave the first course as far as I know. I took both
part 1 and part 2 of his course, and both were excellent (more here:
[http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-
course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course-
part2/))

Finally, Clay Shirky wrote a good piece on MOOCs a while a go:
[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-
the...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/)
One of the points he makes is that producing "live" lectures (as opposed to
using MOOCs) at a university is a little like only assigning books that the
professor giving the lecture has written. Of course you want the best book on
the subject, regardless of who wrote it. The same goes for a lecture on the
subject. His article is well worth reading.

------
davidroberts
I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you
wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having
some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams.
But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its
taught in a major university.

I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive
introductory courses freshman take. How is it worse than 500 students taught
by a grad student in a state university lecture hall?

I think at least some of the opposition is by professors worried about
protecting their jobs and not wanting to lose the comfortable path they have
trod so many years. But they will likely have no choice. I'm not sure how it
will end up, but academia can no more avoid the massive changes in our world
brought on by the internet than bookstores or newspapers could. If higher
education was a free market and not so massively subsidized, the changes would
have already happened. Given a choice would anyone want to pay the $200,000
full price for a four year university degree in say something like English lit
if it were coming out of their own pocket?

------
ah-
That chart is misleading. Since when is 28% less than one fourth of a circle?

~~~
richardv
When Fox news present the data....

[http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-
data-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2012-11)

------
cornelismith
Personally I don't care about credit, I do it for the learning and opportunity
to work together with people from all around the world.

However, I do think there should be a possibility to earn credits or
certificates as it is important for some.

------
miloshadzic
Even if you don't get "real" MIT credit, a certificate of completion from some
of the courses is worth more than credit people get at some universities.

~~~
hipsters_unite
I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified
pretty quickly - but at least taking and completing the course shows a certain
determination... maybe that's what needs acknowledging instead.

~~~
randomdata
> I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified
> pretty quickly

In the technology sector, sure. Here we do not even concern ourselves with
credentialing to begin with because the work we do is out in the open and easy
to evaluate.

Other industries, however, are not so lucky and struggle to sniff out the
unqualified even with a strong credentialing system. I'm not sure an
evaluation of determination helps them any more than what they have to go on
today. People determined to get the job will always find some way to slip
through the system without any real understanding of the underlying
fundamentals.

With that said, I think MOOCs open up a whole new way to find talent, which
could make the entire idea of credentials a thing of the past.

~~~
hipsters_unite
Yeah, I guess in tech we're lucky enough to be able to say check somebody's
GitHub and see if they actually can write code...

------
nhebb
Original article - which is a much better read:

[http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/...](http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/137905/#id=overview)

------
pmb
What percentage of professors who teach offline courses think their students
deserve credit?

------
jskonhovd
MOOCs have been a blessing to me. However, I understand that credits are not
possible until they solve the issue of cheating. But lets not be naive and
think cheating doesn't happen at plenty of standard university's around the
world.

------
decasteve
"I think universities are completely obsolete. There’s very little that goes
on at a university that can’t be done better otherwise. The biggest raison
d’être for the present system is the security of the professor. Once you
eliminate the obsolete structure and the emphasis on earning a living, people
will go to the university because they want to use themselves and explore
their wonderful capabilities. Humanity will carry on beautifully if you don’t
mix them up with earning a living. We’ll make wonderful use of those buildings
and all that equipment. They’ve been living on the idea of monopolizing the
information, but now they see the time coming when the big idea will be to
proliferate it and try to see that everybody gets to share it." \--
Buckminster Fuller (1972)

------
marknutter
I had to laugh out loud when I read this headline. My guess is, most
professors don't think most of their students deserve credit these days,
thanks to grade inflation and consistently decreasing standards.

------
raviparikh
Did anyone else notice that the pie chart wedges are sized incorrectly? The
one labeled "28%" is clearly less than a quarter of the chart. Not really sure
why they felt the need to try to make the numbers appear more skewed than they
already are.

Edit: Should note that it's not TC's fault, it's grabbed from the source
article: [http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/...](http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-
MOOC/137905/#id=overview)

------
jccalhoun
I haven't taught a MOOC but I have "taught" a more traditional online course
with 20-some students and I don't think it was really all that great. The
reason I put "taught" in quotes is because it was a standardized course where
all the sections taught at the state-wide community college had to be exactly
the same so I was basically just a grader. I didn't have any opportunity to
actually "teach" anything so when a student turned in an assignment that was
totally wrong, there was no opportunity for me to intervene and give the
student a chance to redo it or to give the student any substantial guidance.

Moreover, because most students would wait until the last minute to do the
work, they might turn in the next assignment before I had a chance to grade
their previous assignment so they would not only do one assignment wrong but
then the next one and the next one and I can't do anything about it. I feel
for the person, so I'm not going to fail the student. So the student gets a C
in the class, doesn't learn anything or even worse learns the wrong thing and
my hands are basically tied.

------
blablabla123
Having studied at a university, I think Online Courses are not (yet) a
replacement for university courses. They still need work. On Coursera for
instance I noticed a lack of advanced and even intermediate courses. It seems
almost all courses there are introductory. A paranoid person might say this
goes well with professors being afraid of online courses. I say this is just
not very elaborated yet.

Anyway it's ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't get credit from online
courses. Top universities all over the world give you credit for stuff you do
at home, in particular when it comes to advanced courses.

I'm not saying you should be able to do your whole Master or whatever from
home -- it's definitely necessary to have tests where you physically attend --
but this survey result seems stupid. Maybe the question is just stupid. They
asked about the status quo, not about online education in general.

------
lostnet
I have been taking MOOCs continuously since the Stanford ones started (and
took some non-video online classes years back at my University) and I am
rather concerned about the affect directly giving credit for MOOCs could have
on them.

If physical University classes were free and easy to join I do not think I
would participate much, and I think the bad taste I get stems from the people
who are there just for the credit. Similarly, I wonder about the quality of
peer reviews in MOOCs where most people are there for an external incentive.

Personally, I would rather see independent test centers replace the
accreditation process for everyone, removing that pressure from the teaching
system all around.

Also, I would love to hear thoughts from an Actuary on how the independent
test system affects their profession and their expectations when meeting a new
colleague.

------
kyllo
At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and
what is it really good for, anyway?"

At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for
credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that
way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not
interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on
the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and
pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how
databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own
home.

------
victorh
The appropriate course credit for online classes is to finish a project
demonstrating publicly that you know the material. This option is available
right now.

~~~
kenthorvath
Completely agreed - plaigiarism is rampant because collaboration is so natural
and doing work for its own sake does nothing to advance one's understanding of
the material.

All subjects, to the greatest extent possible, should be heavily based on
collaborative projects that give back to society. Demonstrate your knowledge
by contributing original research and ideas to Wikipedia. Contribute to an
open source project on github using algorithms and methods you've learned in
the classroom.

Society should benefit from the education system, not just through run-of-the-
mill degree programs, but from the fruits of the labors of its students.

There is so much untapped potential.

~~~
victorh
Seriously, just imagine if a fraction of the students taking the massively
popular ML class on Coursera had created a project on Github.

------
EGreg
Well, that's fine. If students want to receive credits, they must take some
tests for accreditation. And these tests should probably be administered on
site, so as to ensure the test-taker didn't cheat. I think that, over time,
universities will move from teaching classes to being centers of
accreditation, tutoring and socializing.

<http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108>

------
calebgilbert
Sensationalist headlines aside, I received my degree online from the
University of Phoenix in 2004 and I had to worked freakin' hard for it. Way
harder than I had to work when I attended a 4 year California State University
brick-and-mortar college.

So I can't help how others feel about my online degree, but I'm proud of it.

------
bluebaby
The professors were asked about courses they designed to not be accredited. Of
course they would respond that way. It says nothing about the future of online
education.

------
Turing_Machine
Since when is "MOOC" == "online course"?

Oh, right. Techcrunch.

------
jimmyjustice
Maybe the professors don't deserve their paycheck... as outcomes reflect all
parties involved!

------
rikacomet
well online courses by deemed universities is still in its infancy, so yeah it
will take time before people will only take lessons from home.

------
tekniiq
then why do they teach it?? bs

------
michaelochurch
This isn't just bureaucratic self-protection. MOOCs really aren't ready for
that yet. They're awesome, but much of the educational problem is _social_
(tutoring and study groups, group projects, evaluation that can't be
automated) and even though "social" is the buzzword of the 2010s, we as a
technological society aren't good (at scale) at that stuff yet.

I think that the next step of evolution is free coursework and flat social
features (forums with voting, programmatic expert discovery) while the gold-
stamped examinations, coursework reviews by PhD'd humans, and tutoring
sessions from vetted experts will cost money. If you take the free version,
you're matched by an ML algorithm with a volunteer tutor and 95% of the time,
you'll get quality. The paid version sets up with a TA at 8:00 pm on Tuesday,
and you pay $40 for a half-hour video session.

MOOCs will get there. There's another way to look at this: 28% of professors
_do_ think MOOCs are ready for prime time. That's much higher than I would
have thought.

~~~
blablabla123
The social part is difficult. I did attend a Coursera Coursera and at the
beginning I though, cool, so now I make a study group. They have a dedicated
forum for that. So I said, look, here's my study group and I got more feedback
than I thought, someone even nearly begging to get in. ;)

Then I created a Google Group and posted it in the thread. Guess what: 3
people joined the Group, one was active. (So 2 in total including me.) Lesson
for me: when suggesting a study group, have the Google Group link ready.

That said, I think the social part is fine, we have social networks for that.
Users just need to learn how to socialize online. This is becoming more
important everyday even outside Coursera and friends..

Tutors would be cool, but IMHO they are not necessary for successful learning.
I remember a dutch math professor saying basically: "I am unnecessary, you
just need to ask the right questions." I.e. if you ask the right questions,
you will find the next steps best case by yourself.

~~~
saraid216
Well, yes. _Everything_ you learn in education was something someone came up
with on their own without being educated first. The point of education is to
facilitate that process.

~~~
blablabla123
I think the point of structured education (school, university) is to guide you
through a topic. When you learn completely autonomously, you can end up with
knowledge that is not as relevant as you wished. University courses provide a
collection of stuff you can learn.

