Tomorrow in the Land of MOOCs

THE MOOC! the movieThough it is still early in the history of MOOCs, many variations in that original model have emerged since 2008. I am not foolish enough to predict any specific evolutionary path for MOOCs, but I do see trends developing.

This is the final week of the "Academia and the MOOC" course I have been teaching in the Canvas Network and our focus is on the future of MOOCs.

A  post on the
StratEDgy blog talks about how MOOCs are evolving into MOCCs (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses). Just this past week, I heard 2 more additions to the acronym soup: MOOO (second 0 = Offering) and SPOC (Small Private Online Course). 

Why all these variations? Part of it is simply the evolution of a new way of offering learning. Part of it is universities and companies trying to create, license and own some of these online courses which they could use in a smaller, closed environment.

Does this mean the MOOC will become a thing of the past soon? I don't think so, because there is definitely a place for the massive and the open aspects of offering content. But attempts to get a handle on how to assess students and give some type of recognition or credit for working in a MOOC will create variations of the MOOC. Lowering the number of participants is one thing that will need to be done if you want any evaluation by instructors/facilitators to occur rather than the peer-to-peer evaluations and standardized tests.

When I took a class from
Peer To Peer University in 2009, I had never heard the term MOOC mentioned. Many of those courses are taught by non-academics. Several platforms encourage people to create courses in areas of their interest and expertise. A course in copyright that I took there was taught by a lawyer who had not taught on or offline before, but it was very well done.

Coursera, Canvas and other providers have much more stringent requirements and vetting for teachers and the online courses than many colleges I have observed. They realize each course is an advertisement for their platform.

InsideHigherEd has reported that StraighterLine is launching “Professor Direct” which would initially offer 15 professor-taught online courses. They say that "In this direct-to-student model, a self-described 'eBay for professors,' the individual professor sets the course price, office hours and class size. Tutors will be available to help students, and some universities will offer credit for these courses." Is that a MOOC?

If a MOOC has a fee/tuition, then it seem to me to be more of a variation on the MOCC. Some people have said that Udemy’s courses are examples of offerings that are not really pure MOOCs.

When universities get into licensing course content and start dealing with unions about what to pay a professor who has 500 or 50,000 students in her class, you know we are no longer in the MOOCland of a few years ago.
Antioch University is a school that seems to be headed in this direction already with courses it is doing with Coursera. And add into the mix publishers who already have content and who also have their own learning and content management systems. Pearson College is an example of this variation.

I believe that true MOOCs will continue to exist as online courses that are both open and massive in their enrollments. But we will see more variations being created and In the article "Why Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOC Deals, at Least for Now" the implication is that the hidden costs of free MOOCs is why some faculty members (here, it's at Amherst) are voting NO on MOOCs. 

I think fear(s) is a much greater factor. Fear of change; loss of control; fear that education is moving away from the institution that pays them; fear that the system of credits and degrees that has existed for 500 years will be devalued.

On the other side, you have the 
Senate Bill 520 in California that calls for establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by third-party providers outside the state's higher-education system.

It seems that state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in MOOCs. This will certainly bring these courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted and is a first wave that will probably impact other state systems such as NY's SUNY/CUNY.

A participant in my course pointed us to a video and slides titled "MOOCs are Great! What's Next?" from Chuck Severance at U Michigan. He taught a MOOC on  “Internet History, Technology, and Security” using the Coursera teaching platform. His talk discusses first some data on the course and then he discusses what it was like teaching in a MOOC. It's an interesting mix that Severance also works for Blackboard as the open source Sakai Chief Strategist. 

What I particularly like are his thoughts on openness and questioning why already 3 people at the 3 big providers are controlling who gets to teach a MOOC. Is "open" falling away from MOOCs already? I find it a bit depressing that Christopher Sessuns' talk on the future of MOOCs' actual section on the future was about "the ways MOOCs are being monetized to cover their costs."   Is that the future - money?

And in a Chronicle commentary, Kevin Carey also focuses on the issue of money:

"The cost of administering an exam to the 100,000th student in a secure testing center, by contrast, isn't zero, so students will end up paying for that. One-on-one access to an expert or teaching assistant also costs money, so students who need those services will pay for them as well.

Meanwhile, the dominant higher-education pricing model, in which different students pay a single price for a huge package of services they may or may not need, will come under increasing stress. Colleges of all kinds will need to re-examine exactly what value they provide to students, what it costs, and what price the market will bear."

On the other non-profit side of this is this view from
Ryan Tracey:

"MOOCs get a bad rap. Dismissed as prescriptive, or teacher-centric, or unsocial, or something else, it’s like a badge of honour to espouse why you dislike MOOCs.

Despite their pedagogical flaws, however, MOOCs provide unprecedented access to quality content for millions of learners.

It’s all very well for Apple-owning, organic-buying professionals to cast aspersions, but consider the girl in Pakistan who’s too scared to set foot in a classroom. Consider the teenager in central Australia whose school has only one teacher. Consider the young woman in Indonesia who can’t afford college. Consider the boy in San Francisco whose maths teacher simply doesn't teach very well.

Don’t all these people deserve a better education? And isn't content sourced from some of the world’s best providers a giant leap in that direction?

Sure, the pedagogy may not be perfect, but the alternative is much worse."


The rejection of a MOOC from a Harvard philosophy professor (via EdX) by faculty at San Jose State U recently is one of a few early unified backlashes to MOOCs.

I think its unfortunate that their rejection of the course is not because they felt the materials or the course was not of good quality but because it is a threat to their department.

"Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education," the letter said.

Earlier, at Duke University, a faculty council voted down a push by the provost's office to offer small online courses for credit (from 2U) saying that students "watch recorded lectures and participate in sections via Web cam—enjoying neither the advantages of self-paced learning nor the responsiveness of a professor who teaches to the passions and curiosities of students."

Although maintaining the status quo and fear of lost teaching positions are probably the strongest reasons to reject MOOCs, all three groups were careful not to sound like they were rejecting online teaching and focused on rejecting collaboration with an outside vendor.

I wish I would hear a similar rejection of curriculum design by publishers.

The New Community College

The New Community College (NCC) at CUNY is a new open admissions college. Open admissions is nothing new for a community college. The planning for this new college started in 2007 when City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Matthew Goldstein decided to refocus attention on the diverse, low-income, first-generation students that are attracted to open access community colleges.  One thing that was done was to launch the Accelerated Studies in Associate Programs

But we he hear a lot today about the “completion agenda” to improve academic success, persistence, and graduation rates.  The New Community College at CUNY is focused on trying to change the agenda that currently exists. It opened in summer 2012 with 300 students. Their mission is to rethink community college education in general and that completion agenda is certainly part of that.

NCC reports that the fall-to-spring persistence rate of their first cohort is 92 percent which is well ahead of most community colleges.

They accept applicants who have a high school diploma or GED, including undocumented immigrants. Currently, they do not consider applicants who require an F-1 or J-1 visa to study in the United States, or are only interested in taking courses on a part-time basis or a non-degree status, or are are transfer students.

Their Summer Bridge Program starts students and the "instructional team" in a learning community that continues through the fall semester. NCC uses field experiences along with classroom learning. Students have a city-centered first-year experience before they begin their major coursework.

They seem to be more tied into the city's professional community than most community colleges. Students value real-world experience and opportunities to apply classwork to outside. NCC looks to prepare students for continuing on to a 4 year college or jobs.

Their initial associate degree programs are inBusiness Administration, Health Information Technology, Human Services, Information Technology, Liberal Arts and Sciences and Urban Studies.

I'll be interested to see how things progress. Despite the "new" in their name, much of what I can find about the school (peer mentors. advisement etc.) has been tried before. What will they be doing differently?

They expect enrollment to increase to 5,000 students when the college moves to its permanent home.

Should Kids Be Taught To Write Code?

I reposted an article on my Tech+Learn+Tech scoop.it site asking if we should be teaching kids to write code. The few comments it received are split on the answer and I imagine that is true for the wider audience of educators.

Some people (non-coders especially) view writing code for web pages or for applications as incredibly dull and boring. On the other side are those that see it as a way to be creative.

Personally, I don't support teaching coding for the purpose of training young coders to some day do things like write iPhone apps. As much as I hated taking math classes in high school, I do recognize that there was some value in the practice because of the logic, precision and critical thinking that it required. I understand the idea of a "beautiful equation" but I never found any beauty in them.

I took COBOL and FORTRAN as an undergrad in that previous century. I had one of the first computers in my classroom in 1979 and I learned BASIC and taught it a bit. Some people thought we would need to learn to write code, but I always believed that other people would write the code (in education) and we would be the users. I can write code for web pages, but I'm falling behind in that area and don't much care to keep up.

But, as the article points out, teaching coding is not a new pedagogical idea. The original article gives 15 reasons why kids need to learn how to code. I picked some of the accompanying quotes to get your brain started. You'll notice that those quoted are clearly on the side of answering Yes to this post's questioning title.

“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” — STEVE JOBS, THE LOST INTERVIEW

“If you can program a computer, you can achieve your dreams. A computer doesn’t care about your family background, your gender, just that you know how to code.”
Dick Costolo – CEO, Twitter“I believe technology should give us superpowers. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn to think, analyze, and create with technology.” Hilary Mason – Chief Scientist, Bitly

“Coding can unlock creativity and open doors for an entire generation of American students. We need more coders — not just in the tech industry, but in every industry.”
Mark Pincus – CEO and Founder, Zynga

“Code has become the 4th literacy. Everyone needs to know how our digital world works, not just engineers.”
Mark Surman – Executive Director, The Mozilla Foundation

“To prepare humanity for the next 100 years, we need more of our children to learn computer programming skills, regardless of their future profession. Along with reading and writing, the ability to program is going to define what an educated person is.”
Salman Khan – Founder, Khan Academy“Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.”   Nicholas Negroponte – Founder and Chairman Emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab

“Learning to code makes kids feel empowered, creative, and confident. If we want our young women to retain these traits into adulthood, a great option is to expose them to computer programming in their youth.”
Susan Wojcicki – Senior Vice President, Google



The Gamification of Your Course Content

I'm not much of a "gaming" person. Never got into video or computer games. I didn't want my kids playing Nintendo and such for hours and hours. And I don't even like the term "gamification" which is a term I am hearing a lot lately on education sites and at conferences.

I realize that gamification is not synonymous with gaming. So, to "gamify'" a course means to use the mechanics and techniques that make gaming so engaging. Engagement. Another big buzzy word in education these days. If you can use these mechanics to create engagement and incentivize certain activities in a course, well... 

I don't imagine many students who will sit at a screen and work on their organic chemistry coursework for 4 hours because it is game-like, or that we should view that as a goal. But gamification addresses some needs that students today say they want addressed.

One that is always mentioned is immediate feedback and validation. That sends me back to my own Intro to Psych class and behaviorism, B.F. Skinner, Operant Conditioning and things like Random Interrupted Reinforcement.

Point, scores, status and rewards are some of the elements used to motivate actions in a gamified course. These mechanics are structured to achieve engagement. You may not feel comfortable about even viewing content consumption, comments and time spent on tasks as "engagement."  But whether you call this engagement mechanics, focus mechanics, or gamification, you should be interested in the intended result - more time spent in the course material.

Being that I am currently teaching an online course with about 700 students, I had thought about using gaming techniques in designing that class. I decided not to design in that way because I anticipated that the audience was going to be older professionals in academia rather than traditionally-aged students. (That turned out to be true.)

I did find a course on Gamification offered by Coursera taught by Kevin Werbach (UPenn). I would have taken the class, but I knew I wouldn't have the time to devote to it. (I actually had two colleagues who told me to take it anyway, just to see what he's doing because "it's only a MOOC" - THAT is a whole other issue).

His course 
description is:

Gamification is the application of digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. Video games are the dominant entertainment form of our time because they are powerful tools for motivating behavior. Effective games leverage both psychology and technology, in ways that can be applied outside the immersive environments of games themselves. Gamification as a business practice has exploded over the past two years. Organizations are applying it in areas such as marketing, human resources, productivity enhancement, sustainability, training, health and wellness, innovation, and customer engagement. Game thinking means more than just dropping in badges and leaderboards; it requires a thoughtful understanding of motivation and design techniques. This course examines the mechanisms of gamification and provides an understanding of its effective use.

You may not be interested in gamifying your courses, but vendors who provide course content - especially online content - are interested and are including it now. Gamification was one of the 6 technologies in the most recent Horizon Report.


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