Serendipity35

It makes an interesting test case. Though the "course" (not really) had interdisciplinary objectives, it sounds like it could be fun for the viewer who wants to get more into it.



It was called "Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s 'The Walking Dead.'" It was free - as a MOOC should be - and it ran for 8 weeks. It was offered on Instructure’s Canvas Network MOOC platform (I taught a MOOC there last year.) The teachers/facilitators were four UC Irvine professors from different disciplines: Zuzana Bic, public health; Joanne Christopherson, social sciences; Michael Dennin physics; and Sarah Eichhorn, mathematics.

Their goal was to use the show as a way to do case studies related to concepts from post-disaster nutrition, the foundations of human survival and stereotypes in a Darwinian environment. Sounds like a course.

Now that it has ended, I have seen a few stories online that focused on the fact that just 2,203 of the 65,000 people who enrolled in the course completed it. Completion horror stories have, unfortunately, become the big story in MOOCs the past six months. The folks at UC Irvine say the low completion rate doesn't bother them. They did get 80% of participants to spend at least an hour working on the class.



Actually, the course was designed to allow students to drop in and out of the modules. I did the same with my course. If you passed a quiz at the end of a lesson, students would earn a badge and getting all eight badges meant a certificate of completion.

 

But the story here might be more about the idea of seeing whether or not offering a "pop culture" course would attract a new audience or mean greater engagement and completion. Their completion rate is less than the usual 10-15% that is usually attached to MOOCs - and no one is happy with those numbers in academia.



90% of the students said they had never taken a MOOC before. (They got survey responses from 12,000 participants.) It might be more significant that 59% had never tried an online class at all.



I am sure you could get even more engagement and "completion" if you dropped some of the school elements of a course, increased the pop culture elements ("Let's learn about the actors and watch clips!") and the gamification elements ("Correct answers help you kill zombies!) and offered some swag or prizes ("Meet the cast!").



Of course, that's not what academic MOOCs are supposed to be all about.



We are still learning about how MOOCs work and how they might help enhance learning online and offline. I have never viewed completion as the the mark of success in MOOCs and don't see all non-engaged students as "lurkers" because I know some of them are "auditors" interested in only a portion of the course content.



We have things to learn from non-academic MOOCs too.



 

The MOOC honeymoon seems to be over. 2012 was its year of stardom and then in 2013, it was the time to bash them. And 2014 is the year to...?

If you accept Gartner's methodology of "Hype Cycles" of how a technology evolves over time, then before 2012 (2011 or earlier) was the "Technology Trigger." MOOCs got started and we heard the occasional story of proof-of-concept example via a few articles. There were no products or platforms or business models.

In 2012 (called "The Year of the MOOC" by the NY Times) things began to shift. We started to hear about things like Coursera and more and more universities began to launch courses using vendors or on their own.

In late 2012, and then more so in 2013, we probably entered the "Peak of Inflated Expectations." All that press for the success stories brought on the inevitable stories of failures. Sometimes it was a single course, sometimes the whole program at a university and sometimes an entire provider. Udacity is an example of the latter, as its founder basically threw in the towel and said that MOOCs might be better suited to corporate training than college education.

So, perhaps we are this year in the "Trough of Disillusionment."  I have been working on a chapter for a book on MOOCs and one of the most difficult parts of the writing has been how things have changed since I first started writing only six months ago. Interest in the MOOC is definitely waning rather than waxing right now. The implementations that failed to deliver get more attention than the more successful experiments. I suspect that the amount of time and money to be invested in MOOCs this year may be less than in 2013.

Am I disappointed?  Not really. Surprised? No.

I accept the basic premise of those tech cycles. And if there is some validity to them, then we are going to work our way out of the slough this year. (A slough, by the way, is literally a swamp or side channel only sporadically filled with water. Figuratively, it means a situation characterized by lack of progress or activity.)

Hopefully, by the end of this year we will be climbing the "Slope of Enlightenment." We will need to be able to showcase some MOOC examples that consistently benefit students and institutions. The next generation providers and platforms will need to appear and some new enterprise investments will need to exist.

It may take a few years for us to reach any type of "Plateau of Productivity" where there is wide and mainstream adoption of MOOC learning. We don't even have clear criteria for assessing these offerings right now - but it is coming. The disruption has occurred. That was good. Now we need to see what can be built from there.

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Here is a presentation on MOOC progress by Una Daly, who I have worked with in the past on efforts to bring open educational resources (particularly open textbooks) up that Slope of Enlightenment.

I read a number of posts last fall about JPMorgan Chase's plan to give $17 million to start a doctoral program at the University of Delaware. The company plans to renovate a building to house the program, put up money to pay program faculty, and pay a full ride for students seeking a degree. There were suggestions that there may even be JPMorgan employees on dissertation committees and they may have input on which faculty members will teach in the program. (A university spokeswoman emphasized JPMorgan will have an advisory role, but not a decision-making role.)

Is this a trend?  Will we see donors having more of an interest and input in how money is being used? Will universities build programs and degrees suited to the employee needs of a company? At least 40 percent of the budget for the UDel program would come from JPMorgan, which is set to become the largest single corporate contributor to the University of Delaware in its history.

It's not hard to imagine Google and Stanford forming a partnership that develops the kind of doctoral students that Google wants to hire. Of course, that type of student would be attractive to other companies too, but "designed" in a Google way.

Companies frequently donate money and resources to short-term educational projects. JPMorgan's Code for Good Challenges, for example, is a two-day event that brings together college students studying technology to develop solutions to challenges faced by nonprofits.

The "JPMorgan Ph.D." (as I saw it described in one article) would be be in "financial services analytics." That kind of "big data" focus would be appealing to many financial companies.

Bruce Weber, the dean of Delaware's business school, said in an insidehighered.com article that working closely with industry will help academics prepare students for the real world, something some business school deans feel is not happening enough.

“I think it’s a great way for business schools to really enhance the education they provide to their students by reaching out to the industry,” he said. JPMorgan, which has a strong presence in Delaware, and the university have been working closely together since 2009. Weber, who joined the university three years ago, said officials had by then realized university programs weren't hitting the mark in terms of what employers wanted. So, JPMorgan helped the university create and pay for its Institute for Financial Analytics and Delaware created a minor in global enterprise technology. Now, JPMorgan has a fully staffed and functioning office -- using student interns -- on the first floor of the university's Purnell Hall.

Of course, not all faculty are pleased with the plan. Some seem to feel that this type of Ph.D. is "a non-academic Ph.D." Might a university's close ties with one financial institution hurt its relationship with others when it comes to internships, recruiting, and donations?

The bigger issue here is that at a time when colleges rely on donors to make up for declines in state support, these types of partnerships make sense. Colleges have always had corporate donors. You might name a lab or even a building for a donor. But generally, the donor had very little control over how programs were run.

Is this a sign of a new kind of corporate/university partnership?

 

 

Competency-Based Degrees (CBD) is a fairly new concept in higher education and has gotten some attention the past year. Unlike many educational ideas, I think it would have widespread acceptance from the general public. In fact, I suspect that if you defined it it to most people outside of education their response might be "Isn't that what you are doing now?"

This idea, which seems either common sense or radically new, is that instead of awarding college degrees based on the accumulation of credit hours, you base it on on achieving a set of demonstrated competencies.

Most of us got credits for the amount of "seat time" spent in the classroom. Yes, we also took tests and did assignments which were supposed to measure "what we had learned." But did those assessments measure our competency?

One of the aspects of some CBD programs is that you can accumulate those credits and competencies from places other than your primary college.

Education majors probably were taught that the credit hour was originally called the Carnegie Unit. It was established in 1906 as a way of measuring faculty workload. It was not intended, in the Carnegie Foundation's own words, "to measure, inform or improve the quality of teaching or learning." But the credit hour became the standard way to measure the student's workload and progress. It was used in both secondary and higher education.

I put in my title "the end of credit hours." That's provocative, but as with the "end" of science, writing, privacy and a long list of other things seen as doomed that continue on, I am not sure when the credit hour will end.

Late in 2012, the Carnegie Foundation itself declared that "technology has revealed the potential of personalized learning," and that "it is time to consider how a revised unit, based on competency rather than time, could improve teaching and learning in high schools, colleges and universities."

The Foundation says that they now believe that "a revised unit, based on competency rather than time, could improve teaching and learning in high schools, colleges, and universities."

That should have been bigger news in 2013 than it seemed to be. With all the attention that MOOCs received, it may be that those massive open online courses will be just a part of the changing way we acquire a degree.

A transition from the traditional degree program into a competency-based one will require many changes. One of the most daunting is in an area that schools already struggle with - how student work is assessed.

In a competency-based program, credit can be awarded after a 15-week semester, but also after 4 or 8 weeks or at any point when ability is demonstrated. "Grades" as we use the term now, may not convert easily in a CBD system.

An older concept may get more attention again. Students can earn credits for that CBD by demonstrating competency gained through life and work experiences.

It probably hasn't helped in promoting competency-based learning that for-profit online colleges have been some of the first advocates for CBDs. Capella University is one example. But, there have been a few nonprofit institutions embracing the concept. Western Governors University was founded on the idea of competency-based degrees.

The cost of a college degree has turned some interest to the CBD too. There have been many mainstream media stories about whether or not students are actually learning at college for the huge debts they or their parents accumulate. Return on investment is a concern for college. Is the competency-based degree program a way to deal with the learning? Is it also a way to lower that cost?

Texas A&M University-Commerce and South Texas College have partnered with Pearson to create a competency-based Bachelor of Applied Sciences degree in organizational leadership. Last fall, the University of Wisconsin System launched a CBD program called the Flexible Option. Northern Arizona University's started a competency-based online degree program that emphasizes "personalized learning."

If competencies are the skills or knowledge that are expected for the workforce or for graduate work, then we also have to decide what those skills and what that knowledge will be. I can imagine the arguments around the committee tables for those meetings. And who decides - the schools or the employers?

MOOCs have not yet found a widely-accepted way to measure a learner's competency or mastery. Maybe that is because we haven't found it in traditional face-to-face or online classes. 

Khan Academy founder, Salman Khan, lays out in his book a way to reimagine education. His one world schoolhouse emphasizes requiring from a learner "mastery" (competency?) before moving on to the next skill or knowledge set. That means a student can move on more quickly than we might have expected or allowed in a course. But it can also mean that some students will not move on. His model, and competency-based programs, also need to consider that some students will not complete a course in the semester timeline we are used to using.

Evaluating employees based on competency and performance is not a new idea. It is a way that people are promoted - or fired.  In education, a shift away from the credit hour that has been around for more than a century will not be an easy move. It is the way everyone in charge of academia learned. It is a complete rethinking of how we measure knowledge and mastery/competency, and then a degree is acquired.