And your vision of the future is, presumably, “same as it ever was?” – a future in which entire nations can be discarded because they lack adequate campus facilities and cannot pay competitive faculty salaries?

They may have ideas, but I at least couldn’t understand what they are. They basically say that they are good at what they do, not how they do it. Which is not enough to conclude that they will handle MOOCs.

I don’t conclude that they will handle them, and they say how they do it. The point is that there are respected organizations and accrediting bodies already dealing with these kinds of issues. That’s not an argument for or against MOOCs, just that whatever quality-control problems are out there may have existing solutions.

In the former Soviet Union private automobile ownership was discouraged by making the examination for a driver’s license quite challenging, including sections on automotive engine mechanics. Whose mastery, indeed?

Of course you could determine the level of subject mastery. The question is “Whose mastery?”. This makes credentialling difficult in MOOCs.

It seems that the higher ed status quo defenders want it both ways: they are running efficient trade schools that are all about jobs, jobs, jobs, but they are also providing an invaluable je ne sais quoi that is the product of irreproducible alchemy. One cannot engage in practical and magical thinking simultaneously.

= = = No, that’s not it. The crash can’t come unless you are able to convince employers that there is substance to your certificates. And credentialing is diffucult when you give it out to thousands of people. = = =

The business information / information systems / IT world is now flooded with people who have certificates proclaiming that they are proficient in skill X but who are utterly incapable of doing any actual problem solving, designing work. If you give them a test of standard questions similar to the certificate exams they will pass with a score of 100%, but when you given them an real world assignment they don’t even know where to start.

Perusing some of the technical discussion message boards where these certificate babies are asking for help with their work assignments because they don’t understand fundamental programming and database concepts where the snippets of code they offer are clearly coming from medical applications is quite terrifying to me.

Cranky

They may have ideas, but I at least couldn’t understand what they are. They basically say that they are good at what they do, not how they do it. Which is not enough to conclude that they will handle MOOCs.

@ JanieM 01.10.13 at 3:54 am

The article offers two solutions. The first is the network of Pearson testing centers in more than 100 countries. As far as credibility goes, let’s assume it is credible enough. Whether it is achievable, at least at low cost, provided that MOOCs become really massive, is another question. Currently, Coursera are offering more than 200 courses. In the future there will be more, which most likely will mean that there will be enough workload and intensive testing to make these centers dedicates. Right now they rely on institutions and organizations which are involved in similar activities and have slack capacity to do the testing – universities and IT training centers. But if these courses really become massive, the slack capacity may not be enough in the case of the latter and in the case of the former they may reconsider their role given that they work for the competitors. Of course, Pearson can still do it, but they either will have to buy these off as full time subcontractors, or run these centers for themselves, which in both cases will need money. The costs will still be smaller than education at traditional universities, but it will be hihger than what MOOCs organizers have originally expected and not so much different from running traditional distance learning programs. And traditional distance learning programs have been here for decades without changing the game. But now we have Harvard and Stanford on it and they think their name will be enough to make a difference. Will that be enough, really? I don’t think so, but then we’ve seen in IT how Apple manage to package old stuff in new clothes and present it as something revolutionary and people fell for it (e.g. tablets).

The second solution is ProctorU who hire people (currently around 100) for slightly above minimum wage to watch over those being tested on the computer through a webcam and a desktop sharing program. There are at least several ways to circumvent it. The first and most obvious is that you can’t catch anyone who gets help with an audio device in this way. The second is that desktop sharing is a double edged sword. I can also share my desktop with a third party, ot the proctor. I don’t even have to do anything, but pretend that I am doing something, when instead someone else is solving the test for me. If you can control your desktop remotely from your android device, then someone else can do that, too. There are other ways, but I think it’s enough.

ProctorU claim that incident reports get filed for only seven out of every 1,000 exams, which doesn’t mean that’s just it – these are the ones that get reported. But I’ll take their word for it. The reason for this is not necessarily that they are so good, but that they are not under pressure from suppliers of cheating services due to the fragmented character of the courses over which they have watched so far. There is this fallacious thinking that what works small scale will work large scale – if you have a working charity kitchen for the homeless in your neighbourhood, you can feed all the homeless in the country this way. But things often don’t scale up. The reason why Windows is more afflicted with malware and other types of attacks relative to MacOS is not the result only of the inherent vulnerabilities of the system, but also because of its massive use. The same goes for MOOCs – ones you become the standard, there will be people to subvert it – as the mechanisms for control will no longer work efficiently. Current distance learning courses aren’t exposed to that extent not because of the technologies and procedures they employ, but because of the current systemic structure which make third-party services for cheaters less attractive, but as scale goes up, the trade-offs will move in their favour faster than technology will be able to catch up.

And how massive is massive enough to make MOOCs a game changer? There are more than 18 million students in USA, of which 7 million part time. I guess some of the part-timers will be lured by the MOOCs and a smaller number of the full-timers, too, but you really need to have millions of people to make it a game changer. Coursera boasts more than 2 million users now, but 1) from all over the world 2) courses are free 3) much fewer get certificates. Of course, it will grow in popularity and in user base, but I don’t think it will threaten full-time higher education. And as “Udacity and Coursera, hope to make money by connecting their best students with recruiters and employers”, it looks more like a grand scouting and recruiting scheme where winners take all (you can’t possibly accomodate with jobs hundreds of thousands of graduates and those who are out are, well, on their own). This scheme will be less penetrable by cheaters, actually, but on the other hand it won’t be really massive in its outcome – credentialling is meant to serve only a few.

And then we have this: “EdX, the digital education partnership between MIT and Harvard, thinks it can charge students $100 or so if they want to obtain an official completion certificate.” However you have universities in Europe who will charge you this much for the whole semester of a full-time study program.

http://www.detc.org/accred.html

How are you going to do it with thousands of people from all over the world? IMO being a determined credentialing agency is not enough. What will be the mechanisms of control?

I got my A+ computer technician certificate by means of an exam administered online, in a facility that basically confined me to a room alone, with a locked-down computer, without books/papers/phone/other connectivity. It would have been difficult to cheat. Of course, there’s always the old bribe-the-proctor trick, but a determined credentialing agency could probably keep that to a minimum.