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| Poster, entitled "MOOC, every letter is negotiable", exploring t he meaning of the words "Massive Open Online Course". Photo: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Back in 2013, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that MOOCs—massive open online courses—were about to change everything:
Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty—by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education ...
MOOCs have since lost their hype, undergoing flameouts and suffering from poor participation and competency rates. A University of Pennsylvania study
of 1 million MOOC users who participated in 16 of the school’s Coursera
classes, for example, found that only about half of the registrants
viewed even a single online lecture and that the average completion rate
was just 4 percent.
Even so, it may not be time to write them off. An unexplained phenomenon in early MOOC data, now illuminated by another recent study
(this one from Harvard and MIT), could help the courses live up to the
education-reform hype after all—but with a somewhat ironic twist.
Perhaps one of the overlooked values in MOOCs is not in sharing Ivy
League wisdom with the masses, but in teaching educators—and, in turn,
improving traditional K-12 schools.
Source: The Atlantic
From the outset, analyses of MOOC students
showed that enrollees were already overwhelmingly educated. According to
various MOOC enrollment data, including that contained in the UPenn
study, a majority of those registering for the free classes (between 70 and 80 percent)
already had college degrees. That’s about double the rate of the U.S.
population at large. And in other parts of the world—where free online
college classes were envisioned as tools of social mobility—the portion
of already-educated students was even more dramatic. Last year, a piece of commentary that ran in The Times cited
a study showing that in countries such as Brazil, China, India, Russia,
and South Africa—where just 5 percent of residents have college
degrees—more than 80 percent of MOOC students had one.
Although there wasn’t a lot of hard research to support it, many analysts pegged
the high percentage of already-degreed students in MOOCs to an interest
in freshening up job skills. Meanwhile, some MOOC backers attributed the lack of degree-seekers in the free courses to limited broadband access among lower-income populations.
Then, earlier this year, Harvard and MIT released what’s ostensibly the largest study to date
of MOOCs and their participants. The joint study examined 68 courses
offered by the two institutions though the edX platform, covering 1.7
million participants and more than 1.1 billion “events”—what the study
defines as each participant “click” recorded in the edX servers. The
report not only confirmed that MOOC students tend to be
college-educated, but it also demonstrated that a striking percentage of
those students are educators themselves. “What jumped out for me was
that ... as many as 39 percent of our learners [in MOOCs overall] are
teachers,” said Isaac Chuang, one of the study’s lead researchers. In
some of Harvard’s MOOC , half the students were teachers. And in
“Leaders of Learning”—a course out of its Graduate School of Education—a
whopping two-thirds of participants identified as such.
Related link
Massive open online course (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
