

Demystifying the MOOC - phjohnst
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/demystifying-the-mooc.html

======
Chevalier
It's not MOOCs that depend on mystification -- it's traditional universities.
Whether for-profit or non-profit, these are institutions that rake in upwards
of $50k per year per student in exchange for mostly worthless seminars on art
history and communications. The only way they get away with this incredible
fraud is that the fading mystique of a bachelor's degree (and increasingly the
mystique of master's and doctorate degrees) has become a minimum threshold
requirement to enter the professional workforce in a self-reinforcing
inflationary cycle.

I feel compelled to cite my own Ivy League professional degree every time a
discussion on education comes up. I'm not speaking from envy or resentment.
99% of the education I received was doodling during unbelievably inefficient
lectures and handing in token papers blaming the holy trinity of colonialism,
race, and gender for every possible subject matter -- literary analysis,
cultural study, or virtually any field where the professor wouldn't dare to
mark down politically correct answers. I can only imagine how much more
worthless the experiences have been of students studying less rigorous majors
at less rigorous universities.

Without default-proof student loans, few students would be stupid enough to
borrow such vast sums of money for such useless degrees. Nobody has ever
deemed an author or a poet worthwhile on the basis of their certificates
rather than their body of work. There was a time not so long ago that nurses,
cops, and teachers didn't need infamously pointless certification to do their
job. Even professional fields, like my own career in law, was traditionally an
apprenticeship rather than a three-year slog through relatively pointless
studies in exchange for (based on a ten-year repayment plan) more than a half-
million dollars in debt.

But at least I received a professional degree. Undergraduate degrees outside
of STEM fields (which may reasonably require certification) are increasingly
justified by the mystique of "teaching you how to think" or, in William
Deresiewicz's language, building a self and developing a soul.

To quote Steven Pinker's excellent takedown of Deresiewicz: "Perhaps I am
emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I
have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t
taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and
promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how
well he or she could accomplish it. I submit that if “building a self” is the
goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles
about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time." 1

\- - - - - - - - - -

Let's take down this article point by point.

(1) "There are several reasons for the disillusionment. First, the average
student in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher
education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-
time job."

It takes remarkable inculcation of the "whitey is bad" mindset to think that
intelligent, driven people studying in their free time is bad if they're
educated white men. Would the author condemn MOOCs if they were instead
dominated by impoverished African women?

Nor does this argument in any way mean that since white people are studying,
nobody else may study. Young white men are overwhelmingly the early adopters
of ANY revolutionary technology, including the Internet and cell phones. Every
time access to knowledge was pioneered by young white men, the resulting
benefits were quickly taken up by the rest of the world as soon as
infrastructure was established.

(2) "A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an
extremely high number of students fail."

Yes... that's what happens when you study a subject in your free time, which
vanishingly few of us have. Most of my colleagues can barely sleep, much less
have dinner with their girlfriends or sustain marriages with their
increasingly dissatisfied wives.

And we're the lucky ones! Poor and middle-class Americans work absolutely
ridiculous hours at multiple jobs for virtually no pay and certainly no
benefits or savings. Worse, the bottom 85% of the country have increasingly
abandoned marriage and important social support structures in favor of having
children without partners or with a rotating cast of partners... with all the
consequent dysfunction that you might imagine.

I myself have signed up for a number of MOOC courses in computer science that
I've barely started, for lack of time and focus. I'm hoping to transition soon
to a job that allows me regular hours and secure employment so I can spend my
free time learning for its own sake... but until then, my MOOC courses will
remain incomplete (and failed) and my favorite books will remain unread.

If this point argues anything, it's that leisure time is valuable. I don't see
why a teenager would be better off paying $50k+/year to attend lesser quality
artisanal lectures from lesser professors than they would be simply spending
those years living in a city and studying Harvard's MOOCs at Starbucks.

(3) "What’s more, for many instructors, the courses are on-the-job training in
online education. Two-thirds of MOOC professors surveyed by The Chronicle of
Higher Education in 2013 said they had never taught a fully online course
before their first open online class."

Jesus christ. Really.

In the first place, MOOCs have barely entered their first couple years of
existence. No kidding you don't have many people experienced in broadcasting
lectures online. Why would this negatively impact the quality of these
experienced professors' lectures?

In the second place, the author says the solution is to introduce
certification in teaching MOOCs. Can't cut out that institutional middleman,
can we?

In the third place, inexperienced adjunct professors absolutely DOMINATE
college teaching. The tenured professor who earns six figures is vanishing
quickly in favor of bloated administration and harried graduate students who
waste their youth on useless doctorates and burn out on underpaid teaching
positions. If Selingo wants experienced senior professors teaching courses, I
can't imagine a better source than any given MOOC.

(4) "Coursera and edX, the two main MOOC providers, are essentially acting as
gatekeepers for American higher education online, replicating in their virtual
world the pecking order in the physical world as determined by U.S. News &
World Report rankings."

INCREDIBLE. In an effort to decry free access to the best educations, Selingo
complains that MOOCs generally pursue the best professors from the best
universities, as defined by the best students. Because in the absence of
MOOCs, anyone could attend Harvard courses for free from anywhere in the world
at their own schedule. Calling MOOCs "gatekeepers" rather than educational
institutions requires the highest level of intellectual dishonesty.

Selingo also implies that these talentless schmucks from Harvard are crowding
out more talented professors from no-name schools. Not only is there literally
nothing keeping a competing no-name from publishing their own course, there's
nothing keeping them from publishing their own PLATFORM to rival Coursera or
edX. It's not as though Udacity has a long brand history or a monopoly on
competent teaching.

Nor are existing platforms hostile to non-Ivy courses in the first place. I'm
currently working my way through some UToronto courses in computer science, an
opportunity I would never have had otherwise. Of course, I could have attended
a vastly inferior course at a local college at amazing expense in terms of
time and money... but at least I would have employed inferior institutions and
kept the student loan money rolling in.

\- - - - - - - - - -

To Selingo's credit, he acknowledges that MOOCs allow students to study their
passions at their own pace. To introduce that obvious fact after this series
of libelous attacks on MOOCs doesn't feel particularly redemptive, but...
let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

I actually purchased Selingo's book when it was published, in aspirational
hopes of working through my enormous backlog of unread books in the near
future. Of course, by Selingo's calculations, my failure to complete his book
signals the pointlessness of book publication. I should instead pay enormous
sums to have vastly inferior writers cobble together their own inadequate
interpretations on the subject of MOOCs three times a week, in a schedule that
prevents me from maintaining worthwhile employment and forces me to take out
predatory student loans that fund such middlemen institutions.

We should expect these attacks to continue as the value of worthless degrees
is called into question. There are going to be a LOT of unemployed doctorates
and administration in the coming decade, most of whom have no practical skills
except professional outrage. Allow me to state the obvious: MOOCs are an
unqualified blessing on the world, and impart the best parts of an education
without the cost of kids' youths and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They
are the future of education. And that is a wonderful, wonderful gift to every
generation to come.

1\. [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-
league...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-
should-judge-students-standardized-tests)

~~~
droithomme
Excellent take down. I'd also like to add that Mr. Selingo's paragraph here is
so disingenuous that it can not be considered anything but a blatant lie:

> A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an
> extremely high number of students fail. A well-publicized experiment backed
> by Gov. Jerry Brown of California at San Jose State University flopped. In
> one of the MOOCs, just 25 percent of students passed; in another, only 50
> percent passed, much lower rates than for the on-campus equivalents.

The experiment in question involved a remedial algebra class offered to
students at SJSU who had not only failed "elementary math placement tests",
but who had previously paid for and taken a on campus "SJSU Plus math" course
and failed it. These were not normal students, these were from among the 50%
of entering high school graduate students who were incapable of meeting basic
requirements. They paid $150 to take the remedial class, much less than normal
tuition at SJSU. When you fail the remedial class at SJSU, you are kicked out
of the university and made to go back to community college and reapply to SJSU
later. These students were given a chance at a second chance - to try their
hand at an online class.

The results[1] were that the SJSU on campus college algebra class has a 64.7%
pass rate. The Summer 2013 pilot of the on line version had a 72.6% pass rate.
That is a higher rate. For the remedial math class called Entry Level Math,
the on campus pass rate has been 45.5%. For the on line summer 2013 pilot the
pass rate was 29.8%. That is lower. However, in this case these students had
already failed the on-campus one and were selected from that population. They
were not the general population of students. The class was not replacing an on
campus class since these students did not have the option of taking remedial
class a second time, their only option was to leave the university and go to
community college.

When offering the same class to the general population of students, and not
students that have failed remedial classes already, results are always better.
The numbers for college algebra are above and represent a tremendous tuition
savings. For SJSU's Circuits and Electronics class, 40% of on campus students
got C or lower. For the online version of the same class, offered for SJSU
credit through the EdX platform, only 9% got a C or lower. [2]

In reporting these results, Mr. Selingo states that "when MOOCs replace
traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail". This claim is
false.

1\. [http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2013/sjsu-plus-
fall-2013-update-...](http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2013/sjsu-plus-
fall-2013-update-2/)

2\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/california-
to-g...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/california-to-give-web-
courses-a-big-trial.html)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Isn't there a statistical issue akin to mortality being swung by massive
infant mortality.

The barrier to entry to MOOCs is very low (submit your email address, for
example), whilst the barrier to entry to traditional courses is high (pay
large amounts of money and often move home too).

Many people will, I imagine, sign up for MOOCs but fail early, within the
first couple of weeks. There's a similar thing in multi-year university
courses I think, some will fail their first year, those that make it through
that will have a far higher rate of success.

The lower risk/barrier to entry is part of the reason to offer MOOCs IMO,
you're enabling many people to try tertiary education for whom the risk-reward
analysis is simply too adverse otherwise.

Surely provided MOOCs enable more people to acquire a given educational level
they are working, whether that is cost effective or not I guess is the
question to ask then.

------
scobar
The author seems to have completely overlooked that a "young white American
man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job" can generally afford more
time for continued education than those who may benefit most from MOOCs. Also,
those without personal experience may not fully grasp how mentally exhausting
poverty with no fallback options can be. MOOCs alone probably won't maximize
the positive effects of high quality, affordable, and easily accessible
education. However, they are an extremely important first step so that other
disruptions can help those who need MOOCs take advantage of them.

Advancements in AI and automation are going to replace a lot more jobs, and
MOOCs are a great way to quickly/affordably retrain for a new profession. The
end goal of my current project is to reach a point where we can actually pay
people a livable wage to educate themselves with MOOCs as they pursue their
desired professions. MOOCs have already been incredibly helpful for me
personally, and I believe that they'll be considered one of the most important
innovations in the future.

------
linux_devil
I have a link to share (Why the “Low MOOC Completion Rate” Statistic is a
Bogus Argument) : [http://augmentedtrader.com/2013/07/24/why-the-low-mooc-
compl...](http://augmentedtrader.com/2013/07/24/why-the-low-mooc-completion-
rate-statistic-is-a-bogus-argument/)

This blog is written by one of the Coursera Course(Computational Investing)
instructor. I will quote him "Much of the criticism of MOOCs centers on
supposedly low completion rates. And these rates do seem low when compared to
completion rates of regular university courses. But the comparison isn’t
apples to apples. Let’s dive in by considering what does it mean to start a
course. "

------
Denzel
MOOCs are merely a stepping stone along a much broader movement. They were
based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how degree-granting institutions
work. For most people, knowledge gained during the pursuit of a college degree
is secondary to the projected $17,500 increase in salary. [1] MOOCs have no
such carrot motivating people to complete them.

Online courses are just that: courses + the internet. Anyone can load up on
MIT OCW, Coursera, and Udacity lectures that have a value of ~$0 on a resume.
What does a 10x improvement upon education look like? What happens when we
stop watching talking heads in a video and start taking part in individualized
tracks that can prove our knowledge of a subject to a certain degree of
certainty, as it evolves over time, for any subject. The issue has never been
learning, it's been proving that you know what you've learned.

As it stands now, college degrees serve as a signal for what someone knows. No
matter how outdated that notion is.

[1]: [http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-
income-...](http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-gap-
between-young-college-and-high-school-grads-widens)

~~~
iopq
No, you prove what you know at a technical interview. I think a college degree
is not the best indicator of knowledge. There are really useless people with
Masters degrees in CS.

~~~
Denzel
You and I may believe that a college degree is not the best indicator of
knowledge, but industry at large (both inside and outside of technology) does
not. Furthermore, proving a lifetime of learning and knowledge in the span of
at most 8 hours is dubious at best and impossible at worst.

~~~
dougabug
College dropouts (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuckerberg, etc) can make it to the
top in the tech world. OTOH, top tech companies like Google and Facebook
routinely screen out candidates with Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees from
top schools because they don't pass the technical interviews. This process
itself is surely imperfect, but the ability to solve hard problems on the spot
is generally more valued than a vegetable with a (once) sacred piece of paper.

~~~
jobposter1234
All 4 of the dropouts you mentioned started their own companies.

I think the more mature the company (the more of a typical corporation it is),
the less likely they are to consider someone w/o a college degree.

~~~
randomdata
Interestingly, Google has seemed to go in the opposite direction. From being
staunchly vocal about hiring only graduates from top universities when they
were still comparatively small, to coming out and saying that educational
histories not correlating in any meaningful way with employee performance as
they've grown.

------
amoonki
I think the author's criticisms are mostly invalid (see Chevalier's comment
for a great takedown). With MOOCs, I worry more about these things instead: 1)
MOOCs lack the social/deadline pressure to get people to finish their work,
and 2) people learn by doing things actively, which is much harder to
encourage over the internet.

For 1, as a person with ADHD I struggle to get work done. The deadlines and
social pressure to meet them are sometimes the only thing forcing me to
actually do work. If people formed local communities to push each other to
finish their MOOCs, that would help, but this isn't built-in to MOOCs directly
like it's built-in to traditional universities.

For 2, I think people only learn when actively doing something. Passively
listening to a lecture does nothing; the lecture only becomes knowledge when
you think about it or use it in some way. Active learning exercises are harder
to build in to MOOCs because one of the best ways of evaluating learning -
having someone "qualified" look at your work and provide feedback - isn't
scalable. Multiple-choice questions are too easily gamed and rarely encourage
deep thinking. Things like discussions, or iterative feedback on problem-
solving, or essay critiques are much more useful, but again, not easily
scalable.

It might be that forums where other students critique your work or help you
through difficult assignments could be a good substitute. But maybe not. I'm a
teaching assistant for a computer science department, and it's difficult to
encourage a student in just a right way to help them get the answer for
themself. It's tempting to just give out the answer, which isn't helpful for
the student but is much easier for me. The collective wisdom of a forum might
not be a good substitute for the subtle patience of a professor.

However, neither of these concerns mean we shouldn't pursue MOOCs. I want
MOOCs to one day be a complete substitute for a university education. But to
do that, concerns like these will need to be addressed.

------
iopq
Of course MOOC students "fail" the courses, the whole point of it is to do
self study, not to adhere to deadlines. Why would I follow an artificial
deadline for my own studies?

~~~
Thlom
I've taken a few courses, but "failed" all of them. I don't understand why the
courses are designed from the constraints of college life and not the
possibilities of Internet?

~~~
mafribe
The "constraints of college" are a key part of what makes education work.
Deadlines are an anti-procrastination device.

This is rarely acknowledged.

~~~
uberwach
Yeah, deadlines definitely help. Additionally, the synchronization helps in
terms of discussing the material.

~~~
iopq
I think course materials should be there forever, sometimes being improved in
some places, and discussion/reviews should be there forever as well.

So like a forum about a specific topic with learning materials available at
all times. No deadlines, just people collaborating to improve each other's
knowledge.

