MOOCs meet your match: the MBC

Educational psychologist, Marilla Svinicki has analyzed the potential learning in MOOCs in the National Teaching and Learning Forum (December 23, 2012 and reproduced in Tomorrow’s Professor Msg. #1229).  She concludes (correctly in my view) that online learning is good at providing information but not (yet) quite as good at giving guided feedback. Compared side by side, this a cogent and reasonable comparison, but what Svinicki, and other MOOC critics miss, however, is that there are MASSIVE asymmetries here.

MOOCs are massively cheaper. Assume for a moment, you are buying a car and comparing the $25,000 Honda with the $250,000 Rolls Royce (“entry level model”). Even without a college degree, you can probably figure out there is a massive difference in price, so you reasonably ask “how different in the product?” or “what could possible be worth 10 times the price?” If the answer is, well there is a little more feedback that results in a little more learning, that is a very weak sales pitch. (Probably better to stick with “The Rolls Royce (or the elite college degree) will give you much more status and you will be better able to attract a mate.”)

But our classroom-based courses are not just 10x the price. MOOCS are FREE! So all of us teach at colleges are that massively more expensive. (Yes, for all the math geeks, we are ALL actually infinitely more expensive.) I am not sure we can be infinitely better, but we need at least to be MASSIVELY better. A little more feedback for massively more price, and we will still end up like Tower records and your local newspaper (who discovered that browsing was fun, but not MASSIVELY more fun and worth a small premium price.)

The only match for the MOOC is the MBC: the MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOM.

It is true that there is more feedback in college classrooms, but for many students, especially at large research universities (like the University of Texas where Prof Svinicki teaches), it is not massive amounts of feedback. Of course, there is (usually) more learning in a 12-person discussion or an active-learning based classroom vs trying to learn with 100,000 massively different people in a MOOC. But, the real question (for students, parents, governments, and hopefully universities) is whether it is worth the MASSIVE extra cost to sit in a lecture classroom with 300 fairly similar (mostly white American and upper class) students, and take 2 midterms and a final, with little other feedback.

Indeed, a problem with MOOCs is that the learning community is vastly different. That can be an advantage, but perhaps not yet when there are quite so many in the virtual classroom. Classroom teachers have an advantage here, but they often do not exploit this. (When you have changed universities did you spend the summer analyzing the differences in your students and reworking every syllabus before the fall?) If we want to take advantage of this asymmetry, teachers need to spend a lot more time on what Dee Fink calls “situational factors”  and which, of course, is the first step in his approach to designing significant learning experiences.

Another asymmetry is the audience. Universities are doing MOOCs because they are a public good. For students who can’t afford or reach an elite American university, they are a massive opportunity. So again, the comparison should not be just an absolute question of where is there more learning. MOOCs won’t replace all college classrooms, but they were not designed for that. For a student without the access or means to afford an expensive American higher education, the MOOC is a massive new opportunity for learning.

MOOCs will get better quickly. There are important reasons for some universities to do this. Soon there may routinely be as much or more learning in MOOCs. The response, however, should not be for everyone to start offering MOOCs. Roll Royce’s expertise is not necessarily in building a $25,000 car. But MOOCs are indeed the new (and cheaper) competition and that can and should be good for us, but we need to work just as hard to get better quickly and make sure that can justify our massively higher cost with MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOMS. MOOCs, meet the MBC.

What Happens when MOOCs Count for Credit?

MOOCs are now for credit. At first, MOOCs seemed harmless enough. Yak herders in Tibet could “audit” courses at Yale or MIT: elite universities were giving away an important resource, but one that leveraged the internet to provide more for less and did not threaten our standard revenue models.

While it is clear that anyone with the tiniest desire can learn a great deal on the internet, this learning didn’t “count.” What still counts in higher ed are credits! Credits which are largely determined by the amount of time you sit on your rear in a physical classroom. The “credit” here is clearly going to the wrong part of the body.

It is impossible to stay current on what is happening in the MOOC world. In October Antioch U said it would offer MOOCs for credit through Coursera . Then Blackboard joined in.

Then last week, the American Council on Education agreed to start reviewing MOOCs, offered through Coursera, for possible inclusion in the council’s College Credit Recommendation Service, that currently certifies many non-traditional courses for transfer credit.   Most of us already take many different types of transfer credit (mostly community college courses and AP scores). Get ready to add MOOCs.

MOOCs are now being offered to huge numbers of students, and they will only improve in quality.  Soon, students will have lots of low-cost or even free options for most basic courses. These are the courses, Econ 1, Basic Chemistry, Calculus, Introduction to Anthropology, or History 101, for example, that most schools offer in a huge room with an army of TAs. With a dynamic lecturer, carefully designed assignments and close supervision of TAs, these courses can be good, but we know that much of the time these are a necessary evil. We offer them because they offer an economy of scale.  It is also often our most vulnerable students (freshmen) who are subjected to most of these courses and we tolerate this, because we have not had a better option.

Now comes a new report  from the National Student Clearinghouse  on student persistence to graduation.  Perhaps not surprisingly, 71% of students who first attain an associates degree and then transfer to a 4-year school, graduate with a BA. Kay M. McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, said the report “debunks some myths” about the quality of instruction in community colleges.”   The same will surely be true of MOOCs.  The point is that success leads to success.

I suspect that we will soon have lots of MOOCs that are at least as good, or substantially better than the large freshmen courses most of us endured. So if I am a HS senior and I can take a couple of my freshmen courses before I start college at a much lower price (or even for free), and the quality (or success rate) is better, AND they transfer to my four-year college? Why would I not take a year off and live at home for free?  Yes, some will want to join a fraternity or climb on your new rock wall, but they will still have the option of taking an “extra” course as a MOOC or doing a short course at the holiday or over the summer.

Colleges will have three choices.

One choice would be simply to stop offering the large lecture courses and essentially outsource them to MOOCs (sort of like we do AP and community college credits). This will work for some, but it has a problem.  Most of those courses are cash cows. It is the small courses (hopefully where most learning occurs occurs) that also cost more money. How will we sustain this model without the cheap high volume courses?

Two, we could offer our own MOOCs.  But, oh yeah, they are free. They are useful for branding, but even if we charge for the certificate, this is not likely to be a money maker, at least not for most schools.

Or three, we could make sure that our freshmen Econ 1 course is better than the MOOC. This would involve measuring learning (and not just giving grades) to truly demonstrate the extra value, but this will probably also cost more. On a simple level, it is probably easier to design and deliver a more effective course if it is smaller, but that immediately raises cost.   (Of course, MOOCs have the same problem.  At the moment they are being subsidized by elite universities and external philanthropy. If that continues, most schools will not be able to compete.)

Any way you slice it, colleges are going to have to pay more attention to cost and benefit, and especially to being able to define that benefit (LEARNING in my view).

I’d buy stock in start-ups offering new proctoring software.