What I Learned from Teaching a MOOC
And Why It’s not “The Future” of Education
A few months ago, as a result of a serendipitous conversation with a learning futurist and educator Maria Andersen, and having thought about the idea for years, I decided to design a massive open, on-line course (or MOOC). There has been a lot of discussion and noise lately about MOOCs and their implications on the future of higher education. While I want to contribute to this discussion, I should caution that my observations are very much those of an outsider. I am not a professional educator and the course I designed is an ongoing experiment. Having said that hare is what I learned.
About The Course
Before we get started, a few words about the course. The course was called Introduction to Strategic Thinking, in which I tried to take an interdisciplinary approach to teaching strategy to people from all walks of life. The course was designed to be completed in about one week and was open to students for a three-week period in October-November 2013 on Canvas Network.
Attrition & Engagement Are Relative
It’s been fairly well documented that the completion rate of MOOCs is very low. A recent study, found that only about 7% of students complete MOOCs. My course had approximately 1100 students registered and about 100 of them completed the course. So the completion rate is just under 10%. However, when your baseline for completion (or student engagement for that matter) is the number of students enrolled, it can be very misleading. After all, registration for the course in a MOOC environment doesn’t indicate any level of commitment to learn. When you compare it to a traditional classroom environment, a student has already made multiple levels of commitment by the time she is in class. Measuring participation rate in a MOOC using student enrollment number is like measuring participation rate in a traditional university using the number of college applications. The fact that someone is interested in a topic and wants to learn, in and of itself doesn’t make her a committed student. This presents a fundamental issue for MOOCs because their very nature makes reliable measurement of “engagement” very difficult. We can try and use other benchmarks as a baseline, like the number of students who completed a certain minimal portion of the course. For example, in my course, there were three units. Out of 1100 registered students just over 200 completed the first unit. If we take that as a baseline then our completion rate is at almost 50%. But if I keep tweaking my estimates this way, at what point am I just subjectively labeling participants as committed or uncommitted. The more significant point here is that we shouldn’t automatically rely on the same constructs to evaluate the effectiveness of MOOCs as we do in traditional classrooms.
MOOC Students are Well Educated
Early on, some educators and enthusiasts proclaimed that MOOCs could solve the problem of the rising cost of higher education. The critics of such bold and sometimes unrealistic predictions felt especially vindicated when last month, Udacity, one of the major players in the MOOC space, announced a “pivot” and will now focus on corporate training instead of fundamental higher education. One of my goals in teaching Introduction to Strategic Thinking, is to reach an audience that doesn’t have access to this material. I was more interested in helping a stay-at-home mom think strategically in her life than to help a gainfully employed person to “get ahead”. That said, I didn’t favor the content to any particular group. After all, that’s what MOOCs are supposed to be all about — open education for everyone. But the reality was different. It turned out that 66% of my students have already taken an online course before. In addition, for 40% students English wasn’t the primary language, which implies that they have had some sort of education. That’s not my idea of underserved students. A recent study confirmed my teaching experience, showing that most of the students who take MOOCs (at least currently) are well educated.
Remix and Repurpose
MOOCs can create a great platform for remixing and repurposing different types of media. It’s a great way to experiment with teaching methodologies and use various ways to convey an idea in a very personal way, which is not always possible in a classroom. For example, in my course I used a combination of traditional lectures (from other MOOCs), readings, quizzes and even games to teach certain aspects of strategic thinking. And since students can participate in a MOOC asynchronously (i.e. at their own pace), it allows for unique interactions across time and geographic regions. It also allows the instructor to see how students engage with the material over time and create more complex educational experiences as well as measurement mechanisms. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that MOOCs can be more effective. In fact, critics like Ian Bogost argue that MOOCs are just an entertainment medium and are an extension of the current para-education trend, like TED talks or books that sell “the big idea”. I think this criticism is valid only in the context of an argument that MOOCs are here to replace higher-education. I don’t think they are, which brings me to the next point.
MOOCs Can’t Replace Universities, and That’s OK
First of all, the kind of prolonged and sustained engagement a traditional classroom offers cannot be replicated online. It’s not just because the quality of teachers and students but also because higher education requires a completely different level of commitment than a MOOC. So by design, the learners in a traditional university are very different from those online. By contrast, online, students just don’t want to take a course for 15 weeks. It’s difficult enough to keep them engaged in a course for just one week. MOOCs satisfy a specific student need that universities alone cannot (like instant access to educational content worldwide).
The other important role that universities play is fundamental research. It is especially important for the kind of research that students may not even care about; the kind of research that challenges conventional wisdom and advances our civilization, and the fruits of which we may not see for decades. Universities can provide a safe haven for the academia to do all that. It’s not clear to me what role MOOCs can play in that function of an educational institution. What is clear however, is that as long as universities perform this function, MOOCs can’t replace them in any meaningful way.
The Bigger Issues Are Beyond Any One Medium
Whatever role MOOCs will play, I think it’s a distraction to pit one medium over the other in the debate on the future of higher education. There are much bigger questions to which neither can provide a satisfying answer. One of them is about the overall mission of higher education. For example, what difference does one’s higher education make in a world where the poor get poorer the rich get richer? Widening inequality and deteriorating social mobility have become a major challenges in the U.S. and some of the other industrialized nations. If the primary goal of higher education is to improve a person’s life professionally and socially, then it is not sufficient any more. At least not in its current form. So how do we deal with this as a matter of policy and how do we design a system where higher education makes the kind of positive impact it always intend to?
There are even more global questions to consider. We are entering an era where the activities of human beings are changing the very geophysics of the planet in unprecedented ways. Some argue that this era is so significant on a geological scale that it deserves its own definition and name — the anthropocene. What does it mean to learn about a world that we ourselves are changing and conforming to our needs, and not merely discovering it? What does it mean for human beings to be “educated” in this new era, where unlearning may be just as important as learning? The answers to those kinds of questions is what will help us determine the future of education; not the merits and traditions of any particular medium. We should remind ourselves that universities and MOOCs may appear centuries apart, but in the context of the entire human history, they are both relatively new phenomena; just blips on our civilizational radar.
Sandjar Kozubaev is an economist, experience strategist, educator and futures practitioner at InReality, a design firm based in Atlanta, GA.
Image Credits: CC sdbrown,Melanie, crlsblnc, Smoking Gun, Gates Foundation
