One of the things I’ve heard about MOOCs, those free massively open online courses, is that they can help students obtain their degrees for much less money than from traditional means. They can use these courses to supplement ones they would take at an established college or university. Even the American Council on Education, a highly respected educational organization, has given its blessing to some of the courses it deems worthy of full credit. Here’s a question? It’s great that so many people are able to learn about a variety of topics for free, and even some can get a certificate for their efforts, but how exactly would these courses fit into a traditional program of study? Another question is Could enough of these courses be combined in order to constitute a full degree in a particular topic area? If so, how? These and other questions are being raised as the dive into MOOC-dom continues.

Bill Gates thinks that MOOCs could be good for students at 2-year colleges (Mangan, 2013). One thing Gates supports is the so-called flipped classroom, where students watch videotapes outside of class and do their homework in class, where the instructor can be there to help. Another suggestion is to use the MOOCs to free up space for more and more students to enroll and be served. He sees the MOOCs as freeing up time for professors to concentrate on more personalized teaching. That assumes that the majority of instruction is still lecture-based. Of course, we know that not every subject or every professor follows the same format. The freeing up of space for more students sounds good, as long as more students actually want to come and are not scared away by the prospect of taking on too much debt or have other reservations.

Where do students who want to follow a Catholic education fit in? Malesic (2013) writes in a commentary that MOOCs undermine a Catholic education because they do not “develop[] human dignity and promote[] social justice”. If the desire is to reach the poor, then “you have to go to them”, Malesic writes. “To educate anyone fully – addressing their moral and spiritual development as well as their intellect – teachers and students must be present to each other”. He also brings up how the personal connection helps students fit in their learning with the rest of their lives. A MOOC is seen as impersonal and there is no way to truly connect to it without some form of guidance.

It seems that many universities and their professors were eager to get on board with MOOCs. They saw this as a great way to reach hundreds and thousands of prospective students at a time. Of course, one question I have is – Who grades those papers, if there are exams and such? One professor who wrote an article on her early experiences into teaching a MOOC (when I find the reference, I’ll put it here) stated that the students are the graders. Apparently, students have to prove that they can peer evaluate by putting their skills to the test. They get a set number of chances to show that they are capable of this. But one glitch is that after so many tries, a student who is not capable can still be put into the peer evaluator pool. Hmmm. So, one of your peers is evaluating your work and that person hasn’t successfully proven that s/he is up to the task but you are supposed to trust that his/her evaluation in on the mark anyway? Hmmm. Questionable, right?

A question from the teaching side, besides not feeling confident that a real teacher is evaluating my work from an expertise point-of-view, is whether professors who contribute their work for free to this effort are undermining their own institution’s efforts. Sure, many institutions are on board with this effort. Students definitely win by being able to access lectures and such from professors who know their fields. They can get an awesome amount of knowledge at no cost. But does this “free for all” eat into their college’s or university’s bottom line? Could giving away for free what an institution pays you for and paying students pay for somehow cheapen your work? Of course, if the course in the MOOC world is accepted at the same institution where the professor teaches and students pay for that teaching, is it fair to make the students continue to pay for it when they can go online and pay nothing? Or maybe they’d have to pay a slight fee, a fraction of their tuition costs.

Will enrollments eventually be affected at traditional brick-and-mortar institutions if MOOCs can be assembled coherently to make up more and more of a “real” degree?

One of the topics that came up during the Tuning Symposium I attended in June 2013 in Indianapolis, IN was how MOOCs fit into Tuning or vice versa. After some debate, someone stated that perhaps they should be viewed as a resource. This seemed logical. They could be treated like other resources that professors find to help their students learn the subject matter. The professor of the course would have to ensure that the material from the MOOC met the requirements and criteria for the course, the tuned course, that is. And this makes sense.

But what if an entire course is accepted at a particular institution? And what if that institution’s program is tuned? Who decides whether the MOOC is a proper fit? Could a MOOC be tuned? That one is easy to answer. Yes, it could be tuned. But, the creator of the MOOC would need to be on board with tuning. And would s/he be willing to do such a thing? The goal of the Lumina Foundation and IEBC is to help more and more colleges and universities tune their academic programs. These MOOCs could be brought in line with tuning as long as the professors who provide these materials join the effort. But what’s the incentive to do so? The great thing about tuning is that the learning outcomes for a particular academic discipline are established.

What about students of these MOOCs who could not care less about getting credit? And who will assess the knowledge that would be decided from such a course? A fellow student who is not trained on the use of a learning outcome rubric? A student who has no degree in the field but has passed an evaluation test online so that s/he can grade papers? This is an area that might be undergoing some discussion or it might be premature at this point.

If students could eventually get a degree solely from piecing together MOOCs, where does that degree come from? Which institution of higher learning? Can any institution claim it since the courses come from several different institutions? Would a diploma just state “Coursera University”? Would this domain have to remain with the brick and mortar institutions? Probably so. Only a certain amount of the courses would be accepted into a program, just as if the student were transferring from another institution. This makes sense. But to know that fellow students judged the work instead of fellow professors who are experts in the area…would that change they way the course is viewed. I don’t know about you, but when I sign up for a course, I want to get the wisdom and evaluation from a person who has studied the area and knows a heck of a lot more about it than I do. If my fellow student is judging me and me her/him, which of us has that expertise the real professor has? Answer: neither of us does. That’s why we’re in the class in the first place. This obviously works for some courses and not others.

And then there is the actual evaluation. Essays. Multiple choice. Short answer. A variety of assessment techniques target different learning and expression styles. But what helps students understand material better? Choosing a, b, c or d? Or actually having the student write about the topic? Or a combination? Again, it depends on the subject area. Chemistry might lend itself better to multiple-choice questions, while English literature could have a written evaluation.

In my doctorate program, we wrote many papers. Most of our courses had a final project/paper that demonstrated to the professor that we understood the material we had learned. We analyzed, synthesized, integrated, and compiled coherent arguments. We posted answers to discussion questions to get our intellectual juices flowing and gain the perspectives of others in the class. We opened each other’s minds. We had small classes. They had to be. I could not see these as having thousands of students. It would be unwieldy, to say the least. Doctorate and master program courses are designed to challenge students beyond a multiple choice answer set. Otherwise, how do we know that they have a good understanding of what they are studying?

The saga continues.

References

Malesic, J. (2013, September 16). A Catholic case against MOOCs. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mangan, K. (2013, October 3). MOOCs could help 2-year colleges and their students, says Bill Gates. The Chronicle of Higher Education.