Student Goggles

I'll introduce myself, since I think my role and perspective are a little different from most of the faculty on this blog. I'm a member of the library faculty at Furman University. I've been here almost 20 years. I did my undergraduate work at Occidental College in L.A. -- like Furman but smaller and far more liberal. So I'm heavily steeped in the liberal arts. I don't teach regular catalog courses but I do visit classes across the curriculum to teach research skills and theory. I also teach an occasional 2-credit May Experience course.

Last Spring, I took a MOOC entitled “The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness.” It was taught by professor Charmaine Williams, an engaging lecturer from the University of Toronto.  There were about 27,000 students from more than 90 countries enrolled. It lasted 6 weeks, with about 2 hours of lecture and 15 pages of reading per week. Course completion was contingent on 3 essay assignments and one objective quiz. 

When the course began, I tried to imagine myself as an undergraduate or Master's-level student taking the course, comparing it to both my undergraduate experiences at Occidental and the graduate work I did largely via distance education from the University of South Carolina. The first thing that struck me was an extraordinary sense of distance between myself and Dr. Williams. It wasn’t the physical distance, and it wasn’t the screen. I was used to both of those from my M.L.I.S. work, and I had gotten to know almost all of those professors well despite these factors. It was the overwhelming number of other students enrolled in the course, among which I felt that any possibility of my voice being heard by Dr. Williams was extinguished. Douglas Adams fans might recognize my referring to the incident as being something like the torture of the Total Perspective Vortex. Many of the very best of my prior educational encounters had centered around one-on-one or small group conversations with my professors – extending the classroom discussion and digressing in fascinating and provocative ways. It was instantly clear that there was no such possibility here. As I lost myself in the nostalgia, I also briefly lost interest in the course.

But I roused myself and my interest again and decided to explore the discussion boards, in hopes of recreating feelings of connection and stimulation through interactions with my classmates. This had rather the opposite effect. At the point in the course at which I counted, there were 4,270 threads with about 32,000 posts. Searching for keywords related to course topics of interest yielded a hall-of-mirrors of unimaginative posts. I'm sure there were fascinating ones out there. I just couldn't find them. Reading the “top threads” was no more effective. And perhaps the most frustrating (albeit at times fascinating in a gawkish way) were the countless confessional posts relating to the participants’ own mental illness experiences. I should clarify here: I LIKE confessionalism. I LIKE for people to connect the content of their lives outside the university with the content of their courses. So for me to say this was TOO confessional is a really extreme statement. This wasn’t expanding or more deeply exploring the course content. This was wallowing and discussion-board therapy. I’m sure it was useful to the students who received feedback on their personal situations, but it wasn’t what I was looking for in the course. I would imagine that much less of this sort of thing goes on in courses unrelated to psychology and social work, but even the Leo in me is amazed at some of the narcissism and need for attention displayed in these boards.

MOOCs are not the problem

I’d like to talk like a philosopher for a few minutes—that means that I want to make naive, sweeping generalizations, and to ask some questions that most people think are kind of pointless.  Of course, talk about education very often has those qualities, even when there are no philosophers around.  Maybe I’ll fit right in.

I think that liberal arts colleges are always in a battle.  If they didn’t need students to show up in high enough numbers to pay the bills, who knows what their educational programs would look like?  But they do need students, and so they do try to change in ways that can interest and reconcile bill-paying parents.  This is an old problem.  The MOOC phenomenon won’t take away our students—I just don’t believe that anyone is out there thinking:  Hey, should I go to an expensive, private, liberal arts college....or just take a bunch of MOOCs instead?  Even when there are more and better MOOCs this will not happen much. 

But I think that MOOCs do indeed contribute to the ways in which we see the methods and purposes of education shifting.  And that does indeed affect what bills-paying parents want to see in their kids’ expensive colleges.  Parents, almost all parents, want their kids to get jobs.  If we told them that the education we offer would not help their kids get jobs, we’d never see their kids.  Likewise, if we told parents that we could, for the same money, get their kids jobs without having to go through four years of school, they’d pay the money.  That is, very few parents really care at all about what “liberal arts” means or contains.  They have purely practical concerns. 

I’m not knocking that impulse.  Folks need jobs.  It’s bad luck for us that our institutions ever came to be seen as useful in that way, but there we are.  And so we, not wanting to become purely vocational training centers, have developed an interesting kind of sales shuffle.  Liberal arts is about nurturing the spirit in a thousand ways, in line with the ideals of the ancients, and the pursuit of the Good...and it will also get you a kick ass job.  And just to make sure, we’re changing our curriculum and our methods to make sure that they have practical value.  Future doctor, you don’t have to take Ethical Theory, for we can now offer you Ethics and Medicine, a values-oriented course with practical value.

So as we try harder and harder to filter liberal arts goodness through practically valuable pursuits, the whole idea of what it means to be in college changes.  There are some things that I can’t do in a MOOC, and those are just the sort of things that are less and less part of our notion of education.

For example, what if I believed that the real essence of liberal arts education was composed of conversation?  Conversation with my colleagues, with my students, with my intellectual ancestors and descendants?  What if I believed that the point was to pass down, and participate in, the human search for self-understanding?  Those of you who read Michael Oakeshott will recognize that picture.  For Oakeshott, the point of education was to carry on a tradition of inquiry...not to produce anything, not to decide anything, not to yield any practical payoffs.  It’s a tradition of talking together, and especially one by which students are brought to fluency by teachers who immerse them in the conversation of the ages.

To contemporary ears, it sounds batty.  We are encouraged to be practical, to be marketable, to use the latest technology, to open the classroom to all, to assess rigorously, and so on.  To say that technology isn’t needed in my classroom is to say, virtually, that I am a dinosaur and a bad teacher.  To say that I have nothing practical to impart is to admit that I’m here (on the faculty) as a kind of indulgence, a nice enrichment, but not a key player.  To say that it is impossible to assess the most important “goals” of my teaching is to confirm, to some administrators, that I teach nothing. 

The tide has shifted so that where once it would have been possible to say:  “There are really important things we do here that can’t be done through a MOOC,” we will now say:  “If it can’t be done through a MOOC it is either worthless, undemocratic, or both.”

So I don’t think that the MOOC phenomenon is a threat.  (Some of my administrators do, but they’re wrong.)  I think that it is an indicator and a criterion.  It indicates our growing comfort with the idea of education as transferable product.  And it will become a criterion of pedagogically respectable aims. 

Liberal arts colleges are being pushed in this direction, but it should be obvious that they can’t head that way forever without giving up what makes them distinctive.   Resisting the MOOC movement sends a nice signal about how we feel about where we’re headed.  But nothing much will change if MOOCs turn out to be nothing but another passing fad.  To my mind, no institution has had the courage to say:  “We’re not a training center, and what we offer is not practical.  Go somewhere else for that.  Come here to inherit the questions and conversations of the human search for meaning.”  Until someone has that courage, we won’t really know what hope there is for liberal arts colleges.    

   

Lessons from the Latin mini-MOOC

Here's the recording of our conversation with Dr. William Turpin of Swarthmore College. Dr. Turpin ran a summer latin translation group using Google hangouts.

 

MOOCs' Murky Future, and the Liberal Arts

I am no pundit, and I'm hesitant to predict what will happen in the MOOC-o-sphere in the coming years.  Likely MOOCs will improve some.  Hopefully certain totally ineffective approaches to online education will die out (though I wouldn't count on it).  More MOOCs will surely be developed -- some of them quite educational, while others will be a waste of precious time.  There was a lot of hype, and MOOC-providers over-promised.  Many are now taking a more measured view of the (limited) success of MOOCs.  This, in itself, is a promising sign for the academy.  But again, my crystal ball is cloudy, and I won't pretend clairvoyance.  Besides, it's always possible that I can't see the forest for the trees.  So I won't go down that road.

Instead, I'm going to take a pragmatic look at some of the ways that I think MOOCs could interact with a small selective private liberal arts college. 

But first -- a note on variability.  Throughout this discussion, it is very important to keep in mind that MOOCs are each individual courses that vary dramatically.  Some courses seem almost like jokes.

For instance, I haven't really been watching the lectures of this Open2Study course on Game Development, but emails have reminded me to drop by for the assessments.  There are only four graded assessments for the course, one for each "module".  Each assessment consists of answering 5 multiple choice questions, basically all focusing on surface-level vocabulary definitions from the lecture (that I didn't watch).  After years of standardized tests, I'm a pretty good "multiple guesser", so I gave it a try.  First time round, I missed one of the five problems -- thank goodness I can "redo" the same assessment twice more!  Oh wait, 60% is a passing grade.  And I only have to complete three out of the four assessments in order to get a certificate.  That's clearly one to frame, and put next to my diploma!  If I can narrow down the multiple-guess answers to two, what are the odds that I *don't* pass the course?  (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader).  (I should clarify -- I think there may actually be some decent content in some of the lecture videos... several students praised the course highly on the discussion board, and felt like they'd learned a lot.  However, the assessment and certification process for this course feels like a horrible joke.  It's especially worrisome since Open2Study's partner, Open University, offers accredited bachelor's online programs... I can only hope that those courses are evaluating their students on the basis of more than 15 to 20 multiple choice questions, that students can re-try 3 times each.

Other courses, such as this Coursera cryptography course that I started, before realizing that I didn't have enough time to devote to it, are quite rigorous, with challenging questions (even if some of them are multiple choice) that force you to dig deeper into the material and understand it.  Also, the Coursera Scala programming language course, and the Udacity A.I. for Robotics course both offer examples of how rich/challenging computer programming assignments can be effectively auto-graded by the computer.  Like courses at brick and mortar colleges / universities, but to an even greater extent, the quality of the course experience will vary widely, depending on the professor, the content, and how effectively the course has been adapted to an online format.

MOOCs in the liberal arts environment?

I work at Centre College, which is a fairly small institution, with enrollment between 1300 and 1400 students. Not very "massive".  We also have a fairly selective admissions process, and, despite the best efforts by financial aid to make the college experience affordable, most students/families must pay a fairly sizable tuition check for the students to be here.  Hardly what you'd call "open".  At Centre, we are devoted to giving students a highly personal education.  It's even in the college motto: "Personal education, extraordinary success".  And we faculty do have personal interaction with students regularly, from small classes to one-on-one tutoring during our office hours, to showing up to cheer them on and take pictures at their weekend soccer game.  That sense of the personal, and the learning community that forms in close physical proximity on the college campus, is a central part to what we do here.  Not exactly "online".  By this reckoning, it's hard to see what role MOOCs might play at a place like Centre.

And for these reasons, I don't see MOOCs as causing any fundamental changes to the college experience (barring fallout from the feared "MOOCpocalypse" that causes the higher education sector to melt down completely -- but I find that version of the future unlikely). However, it's worth pondering -- how might small liberal arts colleges take advantage of MOOCs, or the technologies behind MOOCs, without compromising their school's distinctive character?  Here are some avenues to consider:

Avenue 1. Professional Development.  Various surveys (like this one) suggest that the audience of students who enroll in MOOCs is commonly people who've already earned their bachelors degree or higher.  Morever, I would argue that it is continuing education and professional development that are most likely to be heavily impacted by the rise of the MOOC.  There is no shortage of post-college people who have jobs, but need or want to learn new skills.  The low-cost high flexibility structure of MOOCs is very conducive to this.  What does this have to do with a small private liberal arts college like Centre, whose student body is primarily 18-22 year olds fresh out of high school, and not professionals taking evening classes in accounting?  Well, professors need professional development too.  This is especially true in a field like computer science, where the landscape of languages and technologies keeps shifting, and (like Alice) I must run as fast as I can just to stay in the same place.  As such, I view MOOCs on new languages (like the Scala course) as an extremely valuable and productive way to keep up-to-date on my own skills, and thus also my teaching.  And while less crucial, I suspect even classics professors could benefit from taking another course on the Oresteia now and then, just to get a new perspective. 

Avenue 2. MOOC-as-a-textbook.  MOOC-wrapping.  Blended learning.  The flip-flopped classroom.  Whatever you'd like to call it.  The central idea here is to use the MOOC as a resource that students would participate in outside of the classroom, within the context of a traditional college course.  It would serve as the course textbook, giving students both lecture-ish video material, quizzes, assignments, an online forum, etc.  But students would still meet as a class with a professor, and this is where the real discussion would take place.  Furthermore, students would engage in projects that go beyond the MOOC.  Some see this as the final step in the convergence between textbooks (which have been trying to become more multi-media for years) and MOOCs (which don't live up to their promise of being a real course).  This model has quite a bit going for it.  Students could benefit from a wealth of high-quality instructional materials that have been organized, sequenced, and scaffolded online.  At the same time, they could benefit from guided discussions and deeper conversations with their peers, in a physical classroom setting, and the professor's personalized feedback (which is an element sorely lacking from MOOCs).  There are potential caveats, however.

A) Do the video-lectures of a MOOC provide enough detail that they really supplant  a textbook?  In most cases, I would say not.  But other written texts could easily supplement the MOOC as well.

B) Will the physical professor (e.g., I) lose authority in the classroom, if students are looking to the superstar MOOC professor in the videos as the main source of knowledge?   Again, I am not too concerned.  As long as I really do have knowledge that goes beyond the material that is being covered, I feel confident that my students will continue to trust and respect me.  A similar case could be made regarding the textbook author, who may have greater depth of knowledge about the subject than I do.  And it's not like students haven't had access to the Internet for years, with the ability to seek out higher authorities than myself on just about any subject matter I might be teaching.  Nevertheless, the students have an educational relationship with me that they don't have with the Internet, and they can't with Dr. Superstar Online.

C) Most seriously, such use of the MOOC materials may be prohibited by the profit-seeking MOOC providers, without some form of licensing structure.  Which, perhaps, just brings us even closer to the textbook analogy?  But letting one or two powerful MOOC companies control the terms of licensing seems like a dubiously strategic move for the academy to make, especially when there is the arguably superior alternative of truly open educational resources.  There's a can of worms here, but the upshot is that the "free" part of MOOCs isn't as "free" as many people think it is -- it isn't free if you want to get a "verified" certificate from Coursera (who recently made $1 million off of this), and it won't be free (for someone) if you're doing the MOOC as part of a regular college/university course.  In short, it seems that any way that you might get real credentials out of the MOOC is going to cost you money.  All that said, supposing licensing a good quality MOOC for classroom use only costs $10 / student, that pales in comparison to the skyrocketing textbook costs that students often pay these days.

Avenue 3.  Advanced independent/directed studies.  Being in a small academic program (3 faculty, 2 full time equivalent) at a small school, I am painfully aware of the challenges of offering very many special topics courses for students, beyond the core computer science curriculum required for majors/minors.  Thus, we often have talented students that are interested in exploring areas of the discipline that we can't offer courses in.  The simple truth is, if these students had gone to a large state university, they would have a much broader range of courses/topics to choose from.  Personally, I hate to see student interest stifled, so this term I am (without receiving any additional teaching credit) overseeing five students doing independent studies (three students working on learning Android phone app development, and two studying the intersection of robotics and drama).  I love doing things like this, but it can take time, and students can get a bit lost-at-sea if I don't give them enough direction.  Wouldn't it be nice if the students could do an online course on a relevant topic that they could work through on their own, and which would support their work on their independent project?  Yes, yes it would.  Would I still meet with them weekly to discuss their progress on the project, and help them to apply what they would be learning in the MOOC?  Yes.  But would they learn more, better, faster?  I think so.  In fact, I think there's a lot of great potential here, for augmenting the (sometimes limited) course offerings available small colleges with hybrid independent-study/MOOC combinations.  It has the benefits of high-touch interaction with the professor and independent project-based learning, combined with the benefits of structured content, dynamic lectures, and automatic assessment from the MOOC.  Any problems?

A) See the licensing caveat from Avenue 2 above.

B) Would I trust the MOOC alone without an additional project?  i.e., Would I feel comfortable awarding a student Centre College credit just for having completed a MOOC?  I think not.  First of all, as I mentioned way up top, the low level of effort needed to complete some MOOCs is ridiculous.  So it would need to be carefully vetted.  But even if it were, there's the potential for cheating.  I don't think that problem has been solved yet.  So I think it's important that the professor meet with the student, and have the student demonstrate what they are learning in some manner, outside of the context of the MOOC.  There are many ways that the newfound expertise might be demonstrated, but a project of some kind has a lot to recommend it, especially if it can force the student to apply conceptual knowledge to solve a problem that's grounded in the real world.

C) Many MOOCs are not the equivalent of a full college course.   That's fine for two reasons: 1) there's the additional project/work to complement the MOOC, and 2) students can simply be awarded less than a full course's worth of credit.  Most of the independent study projects that I do now only award the students 1/3 of the credit they would get for a regular course.  The students aren't doing it "for the credit" -- they're doing it for the incredible learning experience, which is as it should be!   (And having the independent study course title listed on their transcript will be a good thing for their future employment, etc.)

Avenue 4:  MOOC creation?  Creating and running a quality MOOC takes a lot of effort and money, and it's not clear whether this is the kind of game that small liberal arts colleges should be playing.  However, the possibility of creating an educational experience that your students could take part in along with other students from all over the world is a tantalizing one.  And there could be situations where it would make sense for a faculty member of a small liberal arts college to design and run a MOOC.  However, there's a more exciting possibility.  I was just talking to a colleague the other day, who said that if he were going to do something with MOOCs, he would want to build a MOOC *collaboratively with his students*.  That's right -- his students would get the experience of designing a course for people around the world to take.  The end result could be amazing, or it could fall to the ground in a flaming mess.  But either way, I feel confident that it would be an incredible learning experience for the students building the course.  There are interesting possibilities here for teaching our students to be producers of knowledge as well as consumers.  Perhaps the MOOC revolution will only come full circle when everyone is creating their own courses for everyone else.  Or maybe that's already happening at Udemy, and it's not the panacea for all the world's educational problems after all (surprise, surprise!).  But I insist -- there are interesting possibilities here to consider.

Avenue 5: Taking the M.O. out of MOOCs?  As the technologies related to MOOCs and MOOC-authoring improve, these same tools may be used in Small Closed Online Courses.  That is, I may be able to put together a few videos (or audio-over-powerpoint slides, or audio-over-tablet-scribbling), with integrated auto-graded quizzes, which I could incorporate piecemeal into my own more traditional courses.  Right now, that feels like a lot of work to go to, for probably not enough gain.  But as the tools improve, it may become easy enough that it's worth doing.

Avenue 6:  Combining some of the avenues above, it may become worthwhile to do some collaborative online course-sharing between small liberal arts colleges (say, within a consortium like the ACS).  This would still be a small course (say, fewer than 20 students), but they could be spread across 3 or 4 campuses.  Again, this could be beneficial for upper-level special topics / elective courses that small schools can't offer regularly on their own.  The technology for live video-streaming needs to come along a bit more, but there's hope.  The students might be able to all meet with the professor (or several faculty from several schools) via a Google Hangout for discussion, while completing MOOC-like videos & other materials outside of class.

Am I convinced that all of these avenues are good ideas that will work well for a place like Centre?  No, certainly not.  Do I think that we need to "jump on the bus" and drive down all of these roads at break-neck speed so that we don't get "left in the dust"?  Absolutely not - that's a recipe for disaster!  But I do think that we ought to try taking a few deliberate steps down at least some of these avenues.  Just because these paths might lead us into the woods, that doesn't mean that the view from these paths isn't worth seeing.

A Clearer Picture Begins to Emerge

In a revealing interview with Information Week, Sebastian Thrun states the following:

What Udacity is creating, Thrun said, is "an online version of education that really works, that has great retention, great outcomes of education and really reaches people -- not just the world's most motivated 1% -- but can be made to work for many more people."

And what is the secret to creating "an online version of education that really works"? (Emphases mine.)

Thrun's magic formula is not a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments. In other words, it's not a MOOC at all. To get better results, he said, "We changed the equation and put people on the ground." By adding mentors and a help line, and making phone calls to remind students to do their work, Udacity found it could get more students to do the work, finish the course and pass. Longer term, he has some ideas about using adaptive learning software to eliminate some of this labor, but for now it takes manpower.

"When we look at the data, which we are still analyzing, we do find a whole bunch of people for whom online education doesn't work," Thrun said. "But we're now massively driving students through education with good outcomes -- where these are not the classic, highly self-motivated people."

For this observer, the following questions come to mind:

• Why did it take everyone so long to figure out that teaching requires human labor that is not readily automated? 
• What does Udacity know about online education that many traditional universities with online programs do not know? 
• And here is the multi-billion dollar question: Given the degree to which for-profit universities have invested in online education, what does Udacity know that the University of Phoenix does not know?

As MOOCs is Gaining Popularity, What Should ACS Institutions Do to React?

In his article “The end of universities as we know it,” Nathan Harden (2013) has made a bold prediction that in fifty years, or even sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. He further depicts the picture of the future of higher education as follows:

    Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

 

It is easy to guess that the driving force for this revolutionary change depicted by Harden is attributed to the “massive open online courses” (MOOCs). Harden concludes that MOOCs are “poised to forever change the way students learn and universities teach.”

Nathan Harden speculates that MOOCs may transform the future primary platform for higher education a third-party website, not the university itself. A global marketplace may be emerging where courses from numerous universities on a single website. From that platform, students can pick the best offerings and customize his/her education. Consequently, this marketplace will dramatically increase competitions among universities.  Harden articulates the impacts of MOOCs may impose on different-tier colleges and universities as follows:

Prestigious institutions, especially those few extremely well-endowed ones with money to buffer and finance change, will be in a position to dominate this virtual, global educational marketplace. The bottom feeders—the for-profit colleges and low-level public and non-profit colleges—will disappear or turn into the equivalent of vocational training institutions. Universities of all ranks below the very top will engage each other in an all-out war of survival.

 

The impact of MOOCs on professors, as Harden sees it, will also be drastic. While the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence, professors who are less popular, will be “squeezed out.”

As we are wrapping up our MOOCs experience project, I wonder what kind of impressions came to you when you read the predictions about future higher-ed made by Harden. And what suggestions we may make for ACS institutions to react to the challenges and opportunities posed by the ever-increasing MOOCs, if required? And personally, as “someone who has a horse in this race,” what should we prepare for the change? Fortunately, as demonstrated by this project itself, the MOOCs phenomenon has caused attention of ACS. I wonder what next step ACS is going to take to meet the challenge or take advantage of this opportunity.

Buffet-style schooling

I have tasted the Smörgåsbord of online learning, and it's time to reflect.
When eating out, buffets can be both exciting and perilous. Buffets allow you to taste a little of this, and a little of that -- sample anything that looks interesting, and avoid the things that look unappetizing. On the other hand, it's easy to get carried away, and load up your cafeteria tray a little too full (hence why many colleges have moved to tray-less cafeterias, since juggling plates is apparently an effective antidote to this problem!).
So now I am staring at a number of partially eaten MOOCs on my plate, and although I may not have given the whole experience adequate time to digest, I'm going to offer some observations on the various MOOC courses and platforms I've crossed paths with.

1) Coursera. My first experience with MOOCs was through Coursera, and as I mentioned in my previous post I completed two Coursera courses in 2012: one in computer science, the other in business. Last year I also started (but dropped) a third course on Cryptography. More recently, I got enticed into Coursera's course on Data Science, and completed a little over half of the course before other pressing events in my (real-world) life caused me to fall behind. Coursera courses start and end on a specific date, and have regular due dates for each assignment/quiz, and once I fell behind, I lacked the time and motivation to catch back up. After the course had ended, I was surprised to discover that I had earned a 70% in the course (good enough for a certificate), despite not completing the peer-reviewed exercise or the second graded quiz.

This course was innovative in that it provided an (optional) “real-world assignment” which matched up students with non-profit organizations to analyze real datasets and hopefully provide benefit to the organizations who provided the data. At Centre College, we regularly do something similar in our Software Engineering and Database courses, getting students to work on projects for real clients who can actually benefit from software solutions. While I didn't end up participating in this Coursera assignment myself, the idea of pulling off this kind of student-client match-up on a grand scale is intriguing. It's these kind of creative assignments that help MOOCs move past the working-in-isolation lecture-watching quiz-taking format. Of course, fair assessment and grading of such assignments is going to be a problem for MOOCs, but sometimes I think that grades are overrated, and the experience of building/analyzing something real is worth more to the student's education than a letter grade. Furthermore, a well-done project could be added to a student's portfolio and shown to potential employers.

I also enrolled in a Coursera course called “Startup Engineering”, which I have dabbled with a bit – mainly just to see what content/skills are covered in this course.

Finally, I'm pre-enrolled in a Coursera course called “Video Games and Learning”, coming from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It's quite dubious that I'll have time to really take this course, but to return to the central metaphor for this blog post: I keep seeing more dishes that look interesting, so I scoop them up and put them on my plate. (Even if my plate is already full.)

2) Udacity. I have continued working my way through the “Artificial Intelligence for Robotics” course here, in fits and starts, and the little blue progress part shown on the “My courses” page at Udacity suggests that I am about 2/3 of the way through. My “self-pacing” in this course has been decidedly unspectacular, with sporadic MOOC binging, followed by long gaps. Perhaps because some of the material is familiar, I don't find it riveting enough to stay “hooked”. Perhaps it's just my natural proclivity toward perpetual procrastination, and getting caught up in my own summer research projects. In any case, it raises continued concerns that the self-pacing model will not work well for some (many?) students.

Several months ago, I also signed up for another self-paced Udacity course called “Differential Equations in Action”, but have yet to complete the first lesson. It's kind of like purchasing a (free) book that I think I'd like to read some day, but for now it's just sitting on my bookshelf.

3) Open2Study. This is an Australian MOOC platform, which is currently offering around 30 free courses (but is also affiliated with Open Universities Australia (OUA), which offers accredited online degree programs). I enrolled in a business course called “Big Data for Better Performance”, but then forgot about it. Unlike Coursera, which spews weekly emails into my inbox to remind me about upcoming deadlines, course announcements, and syllabus changes, Open2Study didn't nag me with reminders. In fact, I signed up for it before it started, and then I forgot about it until after the course was already finished, and I had (essentially) “flunked” it. Though I daresay the term “flunked” doesn't really apply to MOOCs... I didn't get a failing grade, because I got no grade at all. The site simply informs me that “no certificate was earned” for that course. Even though the course has officially ended, it seems that I can still go back and watch the lectures and take the quizzes – it just doesn't “count” for anything. Then again, did it really “count” for anything to begin with?

Just today I signed up for another course on Video Game Development at Open2Study. The smörgåsbord strikes again.

I must say that some aspects of this system feel a bit childish... see screenshot below. A bit surprising given Open2Study's affiliation with Open Universities Australia. This message feels more “elementary-school” than “collegiate” – but gamification runs rampant these days... and it might really work.

4) Udemy. Udemy has a distinctly different feel from the other MOOC providers. If Coursera, Udacity, and EdX are all sit-down restaurants with chefs trained at established culinary schools, then Udemy is a open-market bazaar (without health inspectors or restaurant critics, but with plenty of customer reviews to help you find the more reputable vendors and tastier food trucks). That is, the courses at Udemy can be taught by anyone – not just professors at elite institutions. In fact, if you wanted to create your own course (about just about anything – say “Viennese Waltz”, or “How to clean berry stains off of anything”), you could make that course and offer it on Udemy. (Think Youtube, but for education?) Another key difference is that Udemy *does* charge for many of it's courses, although many are also free. Or rather, the individuals who create the courses may charge for the courses, and Udemy takes a cut of the profits.

I signed up for a free course on HTML5 at Udemy. It started off too elementary for me, since I am already familiar with HTML, and just wanted to brush up on the latest developments in web design, layout, and scripting. I may skip to the later chapters, or I may ditch it entirely – we'll see. One thing that I did think was particularly well-done in Udemy was the integrated “note-taking” app that sat beside the video, allowing you to jot down notes while watching the video, AND those notes are hotlinked back to the time in the video that you took them, effectively allowing you to bookmark key concepts and jump to them. I haven't seen anything like it on Coursera or Udacity, but I think it's a great step forward, and once again it moves beyond the mere “recorded lecture plus quiz” format, to take advantage of the interactive nature of the media. I'm including a screenshot below.

In general, I think this open exchange marketplace for educational courses is a neat idea. But like many of the MOOC options today, it lacks coherence of curriculum, and I have trouble envisioning how it might replace a traditional college experience. On the other hand, it seems like a cornucopia for continuing education, especially for picking up new technical skills. I expect Udemy (or sites like it) will be a commonly-used platform for businesses looking to train workers in new technologies, or workers looking to update their marketable skillsets.

5) EdX.  I haven't taken any courses from EdX yet, but I know someone who took one of MITx's introductory physics courses, and who reported it to be quite academically rigorous, but deficient because of lacking the hands-on “lab” component, which is a key element for learning science.

 6) Of course, there are a plethora of other MOOC providers (here's a fairly comprehensive list), but I won't discuss them since I don't have any personal experience with them to relate.

To recap: at this point, I've signed up for 11 MOOCs in total, on four different platforms. Of these, I have earned a certificate in 3, failed to complete 3, will probably ditch 1 more, am still actively working on one, and 3 others are yet to start. If I don't complete any more, my completion rate will be around 27%, which probably still puts me well above average (given the ~10% completion rates reported for many MOOCs).

Buffet-style schooling has some important advantages over a traditional education (namely flexibility), but also poses some challenges. It's up to you to make sure you choose a healthy assortment of food, and you don't bite off more than you can chew...