

The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, and flexible - ilamont
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/future-of-mit-education-0804

======
incision
> _' The report also suggests that MIT consider offering different levels of
> certification through its online-learning ventures, MITx and edX, and
> recommends that the Institute redouble its commitment to access and
> affordability — possibly by increasing MIT’s undergraduate population, which
> has remained stable for decades despite increasing demand, or by providing
> flexibility to allow students to complete a traditional undergraduate degree
> in less than four years.'_

Personally, I'd hope to see 'differing levels of certification' expanded to
the point of offering credit courses for distance learning. Go ahead and
differentiate it further from the residential brand than MITx if necessary.

I've watched hours and hours of OCW, and completed several courses on MITx
with a handful more scheduled for the fall. As a rule, these courses are far
more challenging and just plain better than what I pay quite a bit to my state
University for.

I would jump at the opportunity to pay MIT many multiples more than the
pittance they charge for ID Verified courses on EdX in order to take MIT born
credit courses.

 _> 'The report recommends that MIT explore more modular approaches to
teaching — both online and on-campus. Data from the first 17 MITx and HarvardX
courses indicate that only about 5 percent of registrants earn a certificate
of completion. This and other edX data, the report says, suggest that
“students are focused more on learning certain elements of a class and less on
completing what has traditionally been considered a module or unit of
learning.”'_

I can't say I agree with drawing or even supporting that conclusion from the
poor completion rates. I think the overall completion rates are effectively
meaningless - signing up is trivial and instant.

I did some crunching of the older stats EdX released a while back and from my
foggy recollection even the tiniest measures of intent correlate with
dramatically higher completion.

More modular courses aren't going to help the 35% of people who sign up but
never even look at the courseware - it's already modular for all they know.

 _> 'These edX results are in keeping with surveys of MIT’s own faculty and
students: In a 2013 survey, 25 percent of MIT faculty, and 40 percent of MIT
students, indicated that some of the Institute’s course offerings might
benefit from being broken up into smaller modules.'_

 _> 'The unbundling of classes also reflects a larger trend in society — a
number of other media offerings have become available in modules, whether it
is a song from an album, an article from a newspaper, or a chapter from a
textbook.”'_

I can't say I agree with the idea of 'unbundling' courses much at all.

Personally, getting a 'holistic' understanding of the subject is precisely why
I'm pursuing a degree and why I chose to work through books or MOOC courses as
opposed browsing tutorials or StackOverflow posts as-needed.

I didn't always feel this way. I self taught myself into a career well above
my apparent station in life and felt supremely confident that I could go on
picking and choosing, learning whatever I needed to know next.

Eventually, I realized that the gaps in what I knew did just hold missing
facts or techniques, they constituted missing questions too. Things I didn't
even know to ask.

That's the value of a 'complete' course and education - the foundation and
supporting framework that ensures you can always keep building.

Interestingly, the median age of people taking courses on EdX is 23-30 and the
median age of on-campus students is surely below that. I didn't reach the
above epiphany until I was 28 or 29, well into a respectable tower of a
career.

It would not surprise me if the people who might think they want for $0.99
singles of education are following the same course.

~~~
ottonomy
I would wonder if they'd look at this and worry that there wouldn't be enough
interest:

A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers
[http://chronicle.com/article/A-Universitys-Offer-of-
Credit/1...](http://chronicle.com/article/A-Universitys-Offer-of-
Credit/140131/)

~~~
incision
_> 'A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers'_

At glance, most coverage of this is a bit misleading as it leaves out a few
key points.

* It's not offering CSU credit so much as transfer credits to be applied toward CSU. That's great if I am already attending or plan to attend a school in the CSU system, but it's roundabout at best and useless (in terms of credit) at worst if I'm not.

* You're required to complete a proctored test via Pearson after completing the MOOC for a certification in order to receive those credits - another complication.

* I wondered why I don't recall hearing about this - CSU announced this option in September 2012, through Udacity. Udacity was only a bit over a year old at that point while EdX and Coursera were still in their infancy, 4 and 5 months respectively. There's much greater awareness of MOOCs today and moving forward.

It's purely anecdotal, but my estimation is that a majority of serious (make
an effort to complete and pass the course) MITx students would have interest
in a credit option.

~~~
j_s
Thanks for pointing out the requirement for the Pearson certification - I
didn't see that mentioned in the article at all!

Also, an interesting point about not hearing about it. It doesn't seem like
it's in the best interest of the school - the article mentions that 'The
council has not yet advertised its services directly to MOOC students'.

~~~
incision
_> 'The council has not yet advertised its services directly to MOOC
students'._

Thank you for pointing this out.

While I'm all about Hanlon's Razor some of this just feels so shady.

In the case of the CSU offering there no direct advertisement, but a slew of
articles pointing out that no one signed up.

Looking a bit further I found that my own local University system where I'm
registered as a CS major started offering roughly the same deal last fall [1].

There was no announcement and even now I can't find a single thing about the
specifics on either site. This is while there's an ongoing study by the Gates
foundation on the effectiveness of this sort of program.

Could it be that these institutions want to give the impression that no one
wants the $100 MOOC alternatives to their $800-1500 courses?

1: [http://technical.ly/baltimore/2013/09/05/umuc-to-offer-
credi...](http://technical.ly/baltimore/2013/09/05/umuc-to-offer-credit-for-
six-massive-open-online-courses/)

------
ottonomy
The idea of breaking down courses is really interesting to me, because I think
a "course" is a great way to organize content in a field. Let an expert guide
you through a series of perspectives. But completing them often takes more
dedication than most busy people can muster.

By breaking courses down to a more granular level of components, there is a
huge chance to recognize people for the pieces they are able to complete and
let them string those together in new ways that the traditional course
designers hadn't thought of. But there are huge challenges around figuring out
how different modules could be fit together into new ways. For instance, the
Open Educational Resource repositories have had really slow adoption because
of it, even though they have in total a ton of great educational content (and
quantities of chaff).

I wrote a little bit more about this today, and how digital badges could help
a provider like edX crowdsource good organization of many distributed modules.
[http://remediatingassessment.blogspot.com/2014/08/mit-
report...](http://remediatingassessment.blogspot.com/2014/08/mit-report-
questions-fitness-of-course-metaphor.html)

I think it's really all about switching to a different metaphor for organizing
content and examining the entailments of that metaphor to make sure their
internal logic leads you to the values you want to promote.

------
minimaxir
> _The report recommends that MIT explore more modular approaches to teaching
> — both online and on-campus. Data from the first 17 MITx and HarvardX
> courses indicate that only about 5 percent of registrants earn a certificate
> of completion._

I am suspicious of this claim because I recently did an analysis of this data:
[http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/online-class-
charts/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/online-class-charts/)

The average amount of students who complete classes that they've registered
for is about 3.4%, much lower than they indicate:
[http://minimaxir.com/img/online-class-charts/class-
attendanc...](http://minimaxir.com/img/online-class-charts/class-
attendance.png)

~~~
dm2
I'm one of those people who registers for several online classes but never
finish them, or many times never participate at all.

It would be helpful if they offered a "degree" of some kind for completing
groups of classes. Mixing it with the concept of gamification like Khan
Academy does might also help with participation.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
There's at least one MOOC offering "nanodegrees" for completing a series of
classes, but charging $150 a month to participate is a bit on the high side
for something that most employers won't care about. There's a bit of a divide
between the benefit of education in general and whether that education will
have a meaningful impact on your financial bottom line in the long run.

~~~
damian2000
EdX offers the "x-series" \-
[https://www.edx.org/xseries](https://www.edx.org/xseries) \- and Coursera
offers "specialisations" \-
[https://www.coursera.org/specializations](https://www.coursera.org/specializations)
\- they're charged per course. According to them, when you pay the $50+ per
course, your completion rate goes up dramatically, to something like 70% -
probably due to the fact you've paid something for it.

------
cjrd
Roger Grosse and I (Colorado Reed) were just chatting about this article: we
created [http://www.metacademy.org](http://www.metacademy.org) with this goal
in mind.

Recently, we've been discussing the future of Metacademy and how we can better
work towards building an open, flexible, and modular educational system. I'd
love to hear any ideas (if you're in Berkeley, I'm also open for a coffee-chat
on this topic!)

~~~
incision
Very nice. I'll be using this.

* At a glance, some sort of automated progress tracker would be my first request. I'm certain that I'll end up missing sections and/or losing my place and drifting away as long as it's manual.

* Offering an estimate time to completion is great. Leveraging those estimates to give me an option to select 'something that will fit in 5/15/60 minutes' from my current topics would be even better.

* The site snaps, that's great.

* Creating a TOC of the off-site content (video, books) in the overview of each roadmap would be nice. If I decide that I'm going to commit to follow one of these roads I'm going to be looking to source the books and download the videos so that I can watch them on the subway.

* Interactive 'exercises' where possible. This is a major plus of the EdX courses I've done - submitting results or complete Python code and getting instant feedback.

* Suggested background / prerequisites for a roadmap would be nice as well.

~~~
cjrd
Great feedback, thank you. I agree that better progress tracking would be
quite helpful. Also, we hadn't thought of giving people learning material
based on the amount of time that they have to study -- really interesting
idea.

------
mrcactu5
this is very progressive, but in the MOOC era, schools have also moved much of
their content to be accessible only to their students. Education is becoming
more open, but also more closed.

