Another example, for the last three years, I’ve been producing a weekly listing of public events at Harvard, MIT, other local colleges and universities, and other community venues on energy and other things (http://hubevents.blogspot.com). I did something similar for two and a half years in the mid-1990s. There are so many lectures, performances, showings, and panel discussions with great people that you could go crazy trying just to pick which ones to go to. This listing service a model that could be useful in any area where there are a number of schools that offer public events.

These opportunities to learn and to network, to collaborate and to develop together are almost infinitely available but what is not there is the simple recognition of that fact and the effort to link people and interests effectively.

MOOC’s will be a ten day wonder and buzzword but can serve a useful purpose. What I worry about is our habitual tendency to ignore the simple stuff that makes it easier for those who want to get together to connect.

For something that isn’t computer science, Gary Barlow’s Introduction to Improvisation looks interesting. The text-books + CDs from the Berklee College of Music, where he usually teaches, are pretty good. Though I’m a bit sceptical on how the peer-review approach is going to work out with something like musical performance.

In the US this shows up in the way we consider the provisioning of public education. Schools in areas with resources offer Latin. Schools without don’t, and there is a real suspicion that it takes time away from important things.

I’m on the same page as Cian here in his general assessment of why MOOCs are less likely to be a game-changer. I think that the key point here is, for better or worse, credentialism. But there are others, which I will now summarise.

Small fact correction – the OU doesn’t don’t use documentary video nearly as much as we used to. Nearly all the key learning outcomes in OU study nowadays are delivered by text featuring interactive self-assessment exercises – the same technology we developed when I was about three years old, and it became clear that ‘lectures on the TV’ would not work alone. Increasingly, this is being delivered with embedded audio, video and hyperlinks: we announced this morning (on our intranet, but it’s leaked to twitter) that we’re sticking everything onto a mobile multiplatform app by the end of next year (Career-saving news for me, because I’ve been designing a course on the basis that this would happen by 2014, and I would have been deeply screwed if we’d stuck to paper…). For a taster of the format, get onto itunesU and check out ‘A207 Brighton Pavillion’. It rocks.

I checked out OERcommons a couple of years ago in order to see if there was anything worth lifting for a module (C20th Euro history) I was convening, and reached the conclusion that the quality there was massively variable (tip: if you’re sticking a lecture course online, get your lighting and your facts right, Rice U) and – more to the point – that the content was integrated into _other peoples’_ curricula, both at the module level and at the course level. Thus it was remarkably difficult to work out how to cut and paste it into any other module. So: if you want integrated teaching material which doesn’t contain morale-cruching amounts of cruft, you have to design from the ground up. Caveat: for subjects where the curriculum is set by a professional body, e.g. Psychology, this doesn’t apply to the same extent.

All this stuff needs to be written, designed, credentialised, stuck online, and maintained, bya couple of thousand reasonably expensive people. I don’t think that you could offer a half-decent comprehensive university curriculum for less than £100m a year, even if you started from a clean techno-sheet. And that’s before you start paying the human tutors. We’ve been trying to automate them for years but the required level of natural language processing has been five years away for a couple of decades.

Still, OCR spent a decade or so being nearly ready, and in the end it arrived, so NLP might, one day. Setting it up right is likely to require quite a few more expensive people on an ongoing basis, though – although it would then make tuition into a fixed rather than a variable cost and allow us to cut our fees by about 25% . . . but our fees are already lower than everyone else’s, except for Coventry’s cut-price offshoot.

Peer assessment? Might work, but there are going to be an awful lot of cock-ups unless you have a significant number of tutors (who need to (a) know their subject and (b) eat)keeping an eye on it all the time.

And another thing: it’s very easy to call yourself a university in China, hand out degrees which have some kind of value, and not get sued. India, not so much. Most other places are closer to the Indian pole than the Chinese.

If ever I get the sack, I would try to do as Grayling’s private university aimed to do, and set up an organisation which was designed to prepare students for examination (which will of course cost them money) in an existing system: the University of London’s external examinations. I think there might be a niche there.

Techies don’t really _have_ the story of “Other people tried this and it didn’t work” in their bones, because they live in a world of counter-examples: videoconferencing was a dud, and then there was Skype.

For those of us with a working memory, the last fifteen years have been filled largely with over-hyped techologies/solutions (and and MOOC is a solution, not a technology) that failed to deliver, punctuated by the occasional success. The fact that your memory only seems to remember the survivors is not an argument. And videoconfering is still mostly not a thing, FWIW.

My problem with MOOCs is twofold:
1) It is being overhyped.
2) It is not particularly innovative.

First the hype. What this seems to be currently is a correspondance course updated for the online age. Well that’s a C19th phenomenon. The teaching company offers lectures by college professors to those who want to pay (or borrow them from their local library). And the OU of course offers a first class distance learning university education that is way more innovative than anything being offered here.

The fact that you single out IT is telling. Programmers are very motivated to keep up to date, it has always been a field where it was possible to self-teach and get a job and there are loads of very good online teaching resources out there (not to mention excellent books). Also programming is a field where you can easily learn on your own – there’s a strong online community (back in the day Usenet, today all the various mailing lists, forums, blogs, etc). Plus of course open source, which is an astonishing learning resource. So while more is good, its hard to see this as anything earthshattering in that field. Outside IT things become trickier, as programming is very well suited to online learning in a way that other things (chemistry for example) are less so.

Thirdly, Open University. Which is way ahead of anything being offered here, plus you get a real degree at the end of it.

Fourthly, the claims seem hyperbolic given that its mostly people who are either educated, or already motivated to keep learning (and programming is a field where that’s part of the culture – at least in comparison to most other fields). There’s no sign as of yet that this will reach those who don’t already have access to educational resources.

Fifthly, peer assessment. Please. Ever taught undergraduates?

And sixthly, the idea that somehow you can make credentialism somehow disappear is techno-utopianism at its most ludicrous.

Seventh, the big problem with students isn’t addressed by this model – they don’t want to learn for the most part. Sad but true.

Secondly the innovation.

There’s not a lot that I’ve seen other than very dated types of assessment (hey, AI assessment goes back to the late 70s, and its still yet to deliver anything very significant). Online communication is nice, but hardly innovative (hey, Open University). Delivery of lectures (which date back to when, the C13th) shows a remarkable lack of imagination (interestingly, the OU mostly uses documentaries to deliver their material, and has done for a long time). There seems to be little thought about how to address the most significant part of the university experience, the seminar, online.

Ongoing lifetime education is hardly a new thing. Long history of it in the UK (much of it at a working class level, interestingly), for example. It’s good, improving it would be good – but its not earth shattering either. I’m not sure this is better than the excellent Pelican books that Penguin used to publish. Or that the model scales better than something like the University of the Third Age.

I don’t have a problem with making universities more accessible, but I do have a problem with the hype and pretense. That somehow this is democratising education, is doubtful. That this will modernize the university is a claim that requires extraordinary evidence (as well a the counter-question, why this rather than the OU model which has been proven to work). If the hype is dialled down, and people have more realistic expectations (hey, you could learn some interesting stuff at the level of a popular science/history book) that would be great.

And when the people pushing something have a history of over-hyping stuff (hey Clay), and seem to be ignorant of prior history, it doesn’t bode well.

Of course, but this could be beneficial in certain ways. Right now, higher-level units of the education industry have a mixed set of roles in which imparting knowledge and training, pretending to impart knowledge and training, credentialization, and class filtering and replication are conflated. These roles distort one another. For example, one of my younger relatives, seeing that I made a lot of money as a computer programmer, attempted to major in Computer Science. (Not my route, but times had changed.) She was compelled to take numerous courses which had nothing to do with computer programming in order to fill out a four-year program. She ran out of money, time, and energy and went on to a different fate. She could have been taught computer programming well enough to do productive work without any of the irrelevant stuff. The largely useless parts of her prescribed program of education were dictated by the perceived need of institutions at the lower end of the food chain to imitate those at the higher end, where credentialization, class filtering and acculturization are dominant concerns, and these can supposedly be accomplished by spending a certain number of years (four) in a quasi-monastic setting. Suppose these functions were split apart. She could have learned the computer programming at home, or in some Illichian group at the local library, and at some later point passed a test proving she knew how to program a computer to solve business problems which would have been acceptable to potential employers, at least the more rational ones. Since she was never going to be part of the aristocracy or even the upper middle class, the class filtering and acculturization were superfluous, indeed, highly detrimental.

As for the aristocracy, their withdrawal from the world of real work will make them easier to get rid of when the time comes.

So far we have three CT posters/readers who have flunked out of a Coursera course.

Not to boast, but if you are counting… I sent in the final assignment for Martin Odersky’s Scala course this Saturday, so I’ve completed that course. Also, data against the hypothesis that us programmers don’t prefer MOOCs.

I did try another course before it, though, which I did not complete: Scott E. Page’s “Model thinking” course. In my defense, I also had a lawsuit and stuff on my mind when it was nearing the end where I dropped off.

I don’t think there is any doubt that MOOCs will gain significant usership, whether it’s Katherine’s reskilling, Matt’s supplemental courses, JQ and dbk’s curiosity-driven learning, or Clay Shirky’s large-scale second class education for those who can’t make it into the top grade. But that leaves several questions unanswered:

- Would the widespread adoption of MOOCs lead to a “democratization of learning”? I’d say no because of the credential issues and the status issues around education. I’m sure there will be many anecdotes of the general form “Jane was a dropout, at the end of her rope. Then she found a course on Coursera in [insert subject here] and now she’s a successful professional.” But such anecdotes will tell us nothing.

- Would the widespread adoption of MOOCs lead to a better educated populace, an educational golden age? Again, I’d say this is a fallacy of composition and the chances are slim. Lots of people go to the gym, but the spread of private health clubs to the populace has not produced and will not produce a healthier population. The relevant question is not “how useful is a MOOC to the individual learner” – which may have the answer “quite useful for a lot of people” – but “how do MOOCs reshape the educational landscape?”

Finally, any story that provides impressive sign-up figures up front and mentions large drop out rates in passing near the end, as the NYT story does, is a fluff piece.

And really finally, surely someone can find a better acronym than MOOC.

“Also, I’m not a Ramanujan, most of us aren’t. We need feedback to feel confident enough to go on, . . . “

Even Ramanujan needed feedback, which is why he wrote letters out of the blue to foreign mathematicians asking for help. He did his best work not alone, but in close, face-to-face, collaboration with others. Also, it is worth noting that – contrary to the myth around him – his mathematical intuition, extraordinary though it was when it worked, was as often wrong as it was correct.

Incidentally, these are, I think, the subjects some programmers (and some managers in some computer-related fields) are talking about when they say, “College is a waste of time, because it teaches you things you can’t use in the real world.” These don’t only teach important concepts, they’re the courses with the sheep-from-goats-separating practical projects. Of course, on the other hand, some people don’t need to know Java and can get by with Perl or whatever.

On the other hand, there are concepts and skills that didn’t exist when one was in college, can be reasonably well self-taught by someone who’s interested, but where there’s no good credentialing mechanism that would convince a hiring manager (as opposed to one’s own existing manager). There are university extension courses for the more popular of these, sometimes taught not by faculty or even adjuncts but by IT staff, which I’d guess are populated in part by people who really don’t know anything about the area, and in part by people who do but would like a credential. And I don’t think those university courses likely serve as very good credentials in the first place. A course from MIT or Stanford might be entirely different.

As far as other kinds of courses, I’d love to see a good set of lectures and a good reading list. I’ve been enjoying some of the Yale Lecture series. But I spent too much time in high school phoning in research papers, and I have a hard time believing I’d be prevented from doing that in a course as big as these are.

I don’t think that MOOCs have to remake or replace traditional higher education to be amazing and worthwhile, but most of the discussion is about about traditional higher education’s reaction. To put it another way: if we were discussing Internet telephony 10 years ago, would the discussion mostly be about all the people who won’t use it? About how it can’t replace a telephone contact number for employers, banks, utility companies, etc.? About how it could threaten public subsidies for traditional phone service in low-income households? Or, veering too far into optimism instead, about how AT&T and BT were going to go out of business in a few years and nobody would ever pay for voice communications again?

My experience with Coursera was much like dbk’s. So far we have three CT posters/readers who have flunked out of a Coursera course.
;-)

Certainly it’s better than nothing, but it’s not like an education. With thousands of students, the lecturers might as well be reading out chapters of the textbook. I suspect most of the learning happens in the online forums and chatrooms around the course, rather than in the the lecture videos.

I share tomslee’s fear that this is part of the aristocratization of US society. The rich and well-connected go to Harvard as they always have, to get an excellent education; the merely rich can afford good state universities (like California, which now costs more than Harvard), to get a good education; and the rest of us get cheap online courses, to figure it out as best we can, and fall by the wayside if we cannot.

The question @35,
“How can we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year all around the world at a cost too cheap to meter?”
strikes me as sociopathic. If the cost of your programmers is ‘too cheap to meter’, they are probably living on a bowl of rice a day.

Cost of Harvard vs California State:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-its-cheaper-to-go-to-harvard-than-a-california-state-school/254073/