
Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead - cardamomo
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/are-courses-outdated-mit-considers-offering-modules-instead
======
WestCoastJustin
No kidding.. Personally, I think for MOOCs [1] to really take off you need to
let people choose how they consume the course. Look at Netflix and House of
Cards. People can choose the pace at which they consume. MOOCs are trying to
use the class structure and convert it to the online world, not to mention the
price structure ($7k for an online course?!? [2]). It is a major pain point,
but this seems to be the norm, at least for any of the courses I have looked
at.

My personal use case is that I want to take a MOOC to learn a specific topic
(after I've left school), so that I can use it in my real life, but you want
to slow me way down (on some artificial schedule), and then charge me a crap
load of money. Yeah, that's going to work great!

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-
tec...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-tech-udacity-
shock-higher-ed-with-7000-degree/)

~~~
prezjordan
Coursera has a few self-paced classes. I've signed up for a few, and I've
never come close to completing one. On the other hand, I've completed a few
courses with a strict time schedule.

I think they've tested the self-paced idea out and found it just doesn't work
as well under the circumstances.

~~~
yodsanklai
I totally agree. To me, one of the advantages of these online classes is that
they usually impose some kind of pace. It's something difficult to enforce
when self-studying. Otherwise, I may as well read a book which I think is a
better format than a video.

~~~
jghn
The problem, at least for me, is that there's no real incentive to get a "good
grade" in those courses. I can't imagine one single employer actually caring
that someone has an actual coursera course completion letter.

So when I do those time sensitive classes, if life gets a bit busy and I can't
keep up, I'll just skip that week. And then of course I'm kind of screwed as I
likely don't have time to do 2x the coursework the following week and it
snowballs.

If instead it was self-paced I could go ahead of pace at will and behind pace
at will. If I fell behind pace there I can still complete it AOK.

And perhaps this is just me, but for some reason once I fall behind in the
time sensitive classes I rarely manage to complete it on my own time. There's
something subconsciously working on me with the time schedules such that I
throw my hands up and say screw it.

------
zt
What I often do is sign up for any Cousera class that I could conceivably be
interested in. I do nothing when the course is live, since I don't care about
the certificate (paid or unpaid). Having signed up for the courses, though, I
have access to the content in the future and can pick and choose what to
watch. I then come back to the course and can consume it rapidly and with a
focus on the materials I care about.

For example,
[https://www.coursera.org/course/money](https://www.coursera.org/course/money)
. I had no idea what in this course and its sequel were important to me. But
then a bank mentions how Standard Treasury should understand repo markets, and
then I watched the lectures on that topic.

So the idea of consuming courses in modules is very appealing to me, and
honestly how I consumed most classes in college: the material prescribed was
basically incidental to what I ultimately learned about the topic. I'm the
type of person who gets really focused on some applied problem and then teach
myself the, for example, CS, stats, measure theory, machine learning, etc, to
do what I want on the problem.

Tangent: My only compliant so far is that the (pure) math I can find in MOOCs
goes exactly to the point I stopped: advanced calculus and theoretical matrix
algebra. I don't expect it to have the types of statistics classes I'd like (I
majored in the topic) but I'm annoyed that I can't really find an analysis
course...

~~~
Russell91
Yea, it's really tough to find an analysis course. I looked around online for
a long time and never found one. Ended up picking it up as a regular college
class and learned a lot. I don't understand why nobody has bother recording
analysis lectures and posting them as they have with other subjects. It seems
the only autodidactic way to learn analysis at this point is to download a
book and dive in. If you're looking for pure math though,
[http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-
initiative/ab...](http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-
initiative/abstract-algebra) is a really great Abstract Algebra course taught
by Gross at Harvard though.

~~~
swimfar
While not a course in the udacity/coursera sense, I found these real analysis
lectures by Professor Francis Su extremely good. He breaks down every step of
the derivations. And while sometimes the questions he asks, or the things he
states may seem trivial I think it helps to focus on these simple but very
important details.

[http://analysisyawp.blogspot.fr/](http://analysisyawp.blogspot.fr/)

------
dinkumthinkum
This is just so simplistic. I'm surprised it comes from MIT. The idea that
students pick songs and not albums seems a silly analogy to coursework. The
use of MOOCs as evidence of anything seems very thin. I'm sure many students
_report_ that they only studied the parts they were interested in of a course
rather than 1) they did not have the time to devote, 2) had some free time but
did not take it as seriously, 3) it was hard an gave up, or just that maybe
the student genuinely only interested in learning the pumping lemma but not
much more about push down automata; however I'm not sure that sort of cherry
picking does a college education make.

We can talk about costs and all of this kind of thing but I feel like we dumb
down higher education because it seems hip (like picking songs for your iPod
because we are all have hyper attention deficits, or something).

~~~
th3iedkid
the very concept of structured courses in education is because we don't know
what to study to understand XXX things.When it comes from a teacher , it comes
with a dependency graph drawn by a person who knows the course.If proper
knowledge gathering is considered an objective.This dependency is a natural
consequence of subject-matter than an optional one .

For e.g. for someone to learn abstract algebra ,its highly suggested that they
take up linear algebra first.As for me, i've always the dependency graph quite
seriously .May be the gifted brains can leave linear algebra and directly take
up abstract algebra , is that so?

~~~
randomdata
I'm not sure about abstract algebra specifically, but in other subjects that I
have tried to take up on my own, I have found that the dependencies become
obvious once you realize you are in over your head. In fact, my preferred
method of learning these days is to start with your goal, then traverse that
so-called dependency graph to the dependent, and often simpler, concepts until
you are able to work your way back to your original goal again.

~~~
sj4nz
This is a nice way of priming your mind for the concepts you're interested in
--and is probably another example of why the current educational system
languishes under standardized testing for metrics: when the goal isn't in the
students' direct interest, the system can only provide an indirect benefit for
their minds. It's very inefficient.

The class structure has grown out of the physical limitations of presenting
course information to mass groups of people in physical classrooms. Take the
MIT Modules, make them asynchronous and add accountability (limitations and
commitments: something like, only 5 active modules at a time until you've
completed them) and mentoring (which is your next module? If you struggled
with X, maybe you should go back a couple dependencies?) and you could have a
really effective system that creates even more amazing people--at the pace
that suits them best.

------
frankydp
Surprisingly, the US military embraced online learning a little more than a
decade ago. This was a boom for annual sustainment courses and the ability of
highly active units to maintain OSHA, EPA, and other more job specific annual
training requirements was greatly increased.

This great success in high level reporting percentages for training ended up
driving even more training online.

This concept is a very slippery slope. The amazing statistics that accompany
online training will provide very direct motivation to
administrator(generals). Those administrators will easily come to the
conclusion that training should be greatly standardized and moved online, due
to the high level of efficiency.

In reality the DOD has moved some entire training programs to online. The navy
has moved entire A and C schools(basic job fields) online. These are resident
schools, and they are primarily schools based on hardware, that may also have
strong software/theory based systems. The result is highly drilled students
with almost no real world or problem solving skills in the field that they
have been schooled on. I know this is anecdotal, but I have seen the change in
the students first hand and the ability to teach critical analysis on a
specific subject with out labs and 2 way live debate can not be
underestimated.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Given the level of tracking of job performance the military does, and pretty
much everything else, it seems quite surprising that the result of lacking
"real world or problem solving skills" should show up somewhere. Has it?

If it hasn't, what would the military need to track for the alleged harmful
effects of this to be visible?

------
ThePhysicist
Well, how do you define a course? For me, it's a series of individual lectures
/ modules that each teach you a given concept belonging to the same topic
(that of the course). Concepts will often be dependent on each other, i.e. you
will need to first understand concept A in order to be able to understand
concept B.

So, taking apart a course and splitting it into modules might make a lot of
sense, since it allows students to only learn what is most relevant to them at
the time and be rewarded for their learning successes more easily and more
often. Considering the horrendous dropout rates of most MOOC platforms this
might be a very good way to incentivize students to "keep at it". However,
this makes only sense if the individual modules are independent enough, so
that students can learn about them individually (which, for many courses might
not be the case).

For me, the concept of a "course" is mostly obsolete when delivering
educational content online, and is probably mainly still in use because
everyone understands what it means. It might even be a good example of
skeuomorphism in this sense:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph)

I currently work on a (real-world) course platform that allows people to take
"micro-courses" which can be completed in one single evening session and which
(mostly) build upon each other. Like this, students can decide more easily
which skills they want to learn, get results faster and spend less money on
the course.

A concept which is similarly outdated (in my opiniion) is that of a scientific
journal: These were created to (physically) group articles from a given field
together so that they could be distributed to people working in that field.
Digital distribution through the Internet makes this obsolete, since articles
can be simply grouped using tags (or other meta-information). Like this, the
concept of a "journal" gets replaced by that of a "view" on a group of
articles that are similar in a given way, such as "all articles in the field
of biophysics published last year", or "all articles [across all domains] that
investigate sleep patterns". Using views instead of a journals is vastly
superior (again, in my opinion) since it allows you to search for knowledge
spanning different disciplines and fields of research.

~~~
nitrogen
_Considering the horrendous dropout rates of most MOOC platforms this might be
a very good way to incentivize students to "keep at it"._

I don't think a high drop rate for MOOCs is a problem in the slightest. They
should be evaluated like any other funnel on the web, where even 1% can be a
good completion rate, rather than like paid lecture courses.

~~~
narrator
The dropout rate in higher education is a big problem because the _marginal_
cost is high for each student (e.g classroom space, heating, cooling,
electricity, parking, etc). The _marginal_ cost for each additional MOOC
student is almost zero so it doesn't really matter if there's a high dropout
rate.

------
wolfgke
"But the professors on the MIT committee that drafted the report argue that
the numbers show that larger percentages explored significant parts of
courses, which may be all they wanted or needed."

For me the main reasons for quiting a MOOC were:

1\. I wasn't sure whether the course is for me or not. So I did the first
weeks, but then decided that I'm not so much interested in the topic/course.
Note that this mostly concerns courses which I would otherwise probably never
taken.

2\. Lack of time. As a doctoral student in mathematics, even having the time
for MOOCs is rather a luxury. Thus it can easily happen that suddenly
something important is due (for my obvious main obligations). Because MOOCs
have a schedule to follow, I mostly see no other option than quiting the
course (and feeling sorry for it).

------
cdnsteve
Educational institutions needs to get with the times. Their business models
aren't what they use to be. Governments have issued major cutbacks in funding
here in Canada (I'm sure elsewhere in the world). These Universities are
already largely funded by donations. They need to stop throwing all their
money in buildings and start putting it into their technology stack online.

I do like the idea of modular degree's. Most are already fairly modular where
you can pick and choose a variety of courses with a set of core required
courses. The problem is they can't figure out how to do it online.

There is absolutely no reason why these Universities don't offer complete
degree's online. Many offer a handful of starter/intro courses over
correspondence but that's about it. They don't need to turn into MOOC's, they
just need to offer quality online education - not 10 year old material. If
they offer it, people will take their programs.

The only University in Canada doing complete online degrees right now is
Athabasca. And some of the material is horridly out of date (COMP 268).
Business opportunity? Hello?

~~~
keenerd
> they just need to offer quality online education - not 10 year old material.

Quality and freshness are orthogonal, at least at the undergrad level. I
earned an electrical engineering degree a couple of years ago. I also collect
older texts in my areas of interest. Using only material from the late-1950s I
could have passed my classes. Using material from the mid-1970's, aced them.
(If you are curious, the reason for the difference is the development of the
MOSFET.)

This is not to say that the material taught was 40 years old. Rather that 40
years ago the body of core knowledge hit what could be reasonably taught in a
four-year time span. None of this "old" material has been proven wrong (at
least at the scales undergrads deal with). The material won't need revising
until either the silicon transistor goes the way of the vacuum tube or Laplace
transforms are part of the standard high school education.

~~~
hga
Indeed. For chemistry, for the basic knowledge you could go back quite a bit
further, probably to the 1930's when quantum mechanics was applied to it. More
recent for some of the lab work, there are some really neat analytical toys to
play with.

On the other hand, anything touching on biology, including to some degree
biochemistry, needs to be up to date. Very complicated systems about which
we're continuing to learn major things all the time. At the other end, at
least for MIT's core science requirements, physics of the 19th century are
fine (mechanics and E&M).

------
madcaptenor
In some sense, isn't what universities do already modular? To get a degree you
don't take a single course consisting of 1200 hours of classroom time; you
take 30 courses of 40 hours each. There's no reason to assume that 60 20-hour
courses, or 120 10-hour courses, wouldn't be better - or perhaps a mixture of
different lengths.

------
baristaGeek
MOOCs and the archaic university structure in general should shift to this.

There's obviously something really important to have in mind and it's that
knowledge is cummulative, meaning that in order to learn something you need to
have some previous knowledge of something else, which would be a disadvantage
for what MIT is proposing.

The articles and songs analogy is really accurate and necessary to point out.
It's not that the internet is creating an attention deficit disorder in us,
it's that it's giving us new alternatives on how to consume different products
that satisfy us more.

The best excercise to take learning to a whole new level in any kind of field
is "learning by doing", building something. Modules should not be focused in
throwing lots of information to the student and ask him to replicate it, but
it should be more about both teacher and students learning together,
discovering and inventing new things.

------
arikrak
I always thought learning should be more modular, which is why I broke down
educational content on my site into modules.
[https://www.learneroo.com/modules](https://www.learneroo.com/modules) (Some
people were confused by it though.)

------
icu
I like that MIT is willing to embrace the internet as a teaching channel and
open minded enough to be willing to question its approach.

After reading the comments posted here I wanted to add that, as I'm sure most
hackers/entrepreneurs here will appreciate, innovation is not a straight path
and you cannot know where you'll end up from where you started. The important
thing is to be willing to go out into the unknown and find a path to what
works.

I can appreciate the comments about how this approach to teaching may not be
the best way for everyone, but then again this would also apply to the
"traditional" face to face teacher to students approach. I'm not going to be
drawn in to making a judgement of which one is better than the other, but I
sincerely believe that having diversity in how content is taught is better for
everyone.

Also with regards to comments about MOOC completion I'll use my own experience
as a guide when I say that some MOOCs are taught better than others and some
courses I've been more interested in the content than others. This creates a
situation similar to when I was at University and I would say that my grades
reflected my interest in a subject and not my ability in it. The more I was
interested in a subject the more I would invest extra time and attention to
the course content. I have come to the conclusion that this was a lazy way of
thinking and now I have a different approach to learning, I can see how this
applies to MOOCs.

My take on modularisation is that it can be a good thing and I would point
towards Khan Academy and how modular the concepts are and how they build as
you go through a subject area. There you can find a supportive community
willing to answer student questions focused around the module. Also as someone
who is unwilling to go back to University to learn specific areas of knowledge
taught at University I'm happy to hear that I would be able to pull out the
areas I want to need to know when I need it.

Lastly, I would also like to say that perhaps there should be a MOOC on
learning from a MOOC. I'm not sure these comments apply to the Hacker News
community, but I've noticed that many people don't acquire an approach to
learning. I myself have self taught on a great deal of subjects, including
programming, and at times struggled through learning how best I learn. Amongst
the insights to I've had into my learning style I would humbly recommend
"Learn Anything: Hacking Your Education with Dale J. Stephens" from Creative
Live. Besides learning a new portmanteau word "hackademic", I learnt a lot of
new and useful strategies for tackling learning. The link is here for those
interested: [https://www.creativelive.com/courses/learn-anything-
hacking-...](https://www.creativelive.com/courses/learn-anything-hacking-your-
education-dale-j-stephens)

~~~
lcbiazon
There's a MOOC going on that explores the "learn how to learn" theme:

[https://class.coursera.org/learning-001](https://class.coursera.org/learning-001)

~~~
icu
Thanks Icbiazon, I wasn't aware of this!

------
nitrogen
I'm still waiting for and/or planning to create a directed graph of
dependencies between different subjects.

------
petercooper
The Open University here in the UK has been doing something like this remotely
for 30 years or so: [http://www.open.ac.uk/](http://www.open.ac.uk/)

I'm doing a BSc through them and while there are certain groups of modules I
have to pick from, perhaps half of my course could be done on modules that
other BSc grads in my subject _didn 't_ do.

In undergrad, you can also take an "open" BA or BSc (depending on what modules
you take) on almost any configuration of modules. You get the degree of BA/BSc
(Hons) Open assuming you did the right mixture of module levels and got the
right marks:
[http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/qualifications/qd](http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/qualifications/qd)

------
SeanLuke
> Many professors said they were game to try the approach. In a survey
> included in the appendix to the report, 25 percent of MIT professors
> suggested that their classes “could benefit from a modular approach,”

Is this another way of saying that 75% of MIT faculty are opposed to this?

~~~
hga
Or perhaps their courses wouldn't benefit from a modular approach.

A whole lot of STEM builds upon foundations, plenty of which are built up as a
course runs. There's also stuff in many courses for which the long term
motivation is not clear, and might not even be clear if an attempt at
explanation was made.

Once you get past certain points I can think of various fields where
modularity might work. Math, e.g. when you have to learn a particular thing to
attack another subject. Engineering where, after the initial principles, there
are various applications. Biology, a wild, wild world which after getting a
very solid foundation I study in a "just in time" manner because it's changing
so quickly and it's not my field.

------
TheAntiEgo
I think we'll see a variety of solutions appifying different aspects of
education that work best, while minimizing bureaucracy and barriers to entry.
MOOCs are a clear progression from the university system, but it's also
increasingly clear that a human element is needed in personal education.

That's why we're working on www.skillsesh.com

------
frozenport
I had good traditional classes and bad traditional classes. Does this mean
that traditional classes are archaic or only the bad ones?

~~~
programmer_dude
What if some courses work better with the traditional format and those were
the good traditional classes?

