Reason and Persuasion On Coursera – or – Look, Ma, I’m a MOOC

So what happens with these 34,000 students? Is there progress tracked in some fashion? They get some version of ‘credit’ somehow? And this is all done by Coursera? I’m presuming you don’t have a battalion of TAs at your disposal. Just genuinely curious. But the ceding control over evaluation, which is what I’m imagining must happen, does seem a bit strange to me. (And I’ve taught classes with TAs.)

Well, I wasn’t really thinking of your own institution keeping your videos and ditching you! I was wondering what Coursera would be able to do with your lectures outside of whatever particular set-up they have with your institution. In other words, could Coursera take the materials you’ve prepared and repackage them for other institutions, other state college or university systems?

I’m guessing a big MOOC development company — Coursera, Udacity, etc. — that had acquired/accumulated the work of many profs at many institutions could figure out a way to cobble together a made-to-order MOOC-based general ed curriculum for a state system, a curriculum that could be managed by TAs or graders or discussion board monitors. In fact, the governor of Texas has been pushing for a $10,000 4-year degree program, which would no doubt require a great deal of online instruction in one form or another. If enough profs at enough different institutions make that initial and quite considerable investment of time/expertise to develop courses, then Coursera (or some other company) will eventually have enough raw material to shape into a some kind of basic curriculum, and something like that $10K mostly-online B.A. becomes a real possibility — though what kind of possibilities or opportunities such an education would open up for students is another matter.

I guess I see this as a kind of two-tier system of cultural capital in the prestige economy of higher ed. There are the MOOC-producing-institutions and the (potential) MOOC-consuming-institutions. Stanford, for example, is probably not going to be accepting MOOCs for undergrad credit any time soon, but there might be many institutions who would be pleased to offer credit for a MOOC featuring lectures by a Stanford prof — or a NUS prof, or an MIT prof, or whatever. That seems like an undesirable outcome, especially for students at institutions at the bottom of the prestige ladder –large underfunded state systems or community college districts looking for cheaper, more “efficient” means of teaching more students with less money.

As you see, I’m leery of MOOCs. But I’m considering enrolling in yours, if it isn’t too late. It’s either that or work on my dissertation.

“Flipped classroom”: students study at home (lecture material plus follow-up material and wider reading), then come together for discussion.

How we taught at a Russell Group institution where I worked once: students come to lectures, then go home and study (lecture notes plus follow-up material and wider reading), then come together the following week for discussion.

Compared to that, this model strikes me as not so much flipped as truncated.

As for adjunctification, I think we’ve got plenty of that already – and it’s certainly true that developing and delivering this stuff doesn’t of itself call for more adjuncts. But what I think it does throw into the mix is, firstly, greater pressure on those precarious positions themselves (the sector as a whole just isn’t going to need as many adjuncts as it does now); secondly, obstacles in the way of progression out of adjuncthood (“we really need someone who’s got experience of teaching and publishing and funding applications and MOOC delivery…”).

“I am simultaneously using this material ‘internally’ at my own school to teach a class of just 100 students. I am doing a ‘flipped classroom’ thing. The idea being: contact time is not lecture time but discussion time. We’ll see how it goes.”

I would be interested to know how you make/will make a 100 person discussion work — are you still in the same lecture room for 100 students as before? or what? I am interested in this flipped classroom aspect myself but a bit unsure of what it means in practice, and whether students will have incentives to turn up for the discussion of they can keep up minimally via lectures at home.

“Even so, I’m nervous about it. Purely peer-assessed paper marking? Seriously, that can work?”

In the two MOOCs I have actually taken, the peer assessment was fairly well done in the first and not well done in the second. In neither case were we given anything approaching a rubric for reviewing other students’ work. And in the second case, there was a fair amount of (peer) pressure just to give everyone high marks.

By the way, I had signed up for your course, but dropped out about a month ago, as I have wound up teaching two courses this semester (in my “retirement”). I hope it goes well.

Can you watch videos of the lectures w/o signing up for the course?

I don’t know the details of Coursera’s business plan. But it does enter into partnerships with institutions, and those institutions pay a fee for Coursera’s hosting. In addition, Coursera has begun charging for some versions of some courses; those courses provide a higher level of interaction with the instructor and/or TAs than do the free courses (or free components of courses). And you get a shinier certificate.

Where this is all likely to wind up is anyone’s guess. My guess is that the “free” tier will remain much as it is, with low completion rates. The current “pay a little” tier (but $100 from 20,000 students in a course is, after all $2 million) will continue to look like it does. And I expect a “for-credit” tier, in which the online platforms (Coursera, Udacity, edX, etc.) will share tuition revenue with the institutions offering courses for credit. But we’ll see.

I spent the past few days plowing through the first week (videos first, then the reading, but I think the other way around is maybe better?) and this is very impressive and incredibly interesting already.

And I didn’t think of it when I signed up, but just putting a, well, personality to the name of someone you only know through writing is kind of a big deal. Part of what makes me love Bloggingheads (and the heads who blog there) so much.

So people sign up by the thousands to take a course where they are graded by other people who’ve signed up for the course (implying they are not expert in the subject?)

That’s what I don’t understand. How do they know they’re on the right track? I can’t imagine my students providing the only feedback for my students. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this experience at the end of the course.

Not that peer assessment can’t be great, of course. It can, in my experience, work brilliantly in a class of 30. In a class of 300, I continue to have somewhat serious doubts.

The novelty of the game of “telephone” results from slight misunderstandings chronically enhanced from multiple serial iterations. MOOCs it seems to me synchronize the same phenomenon proportional to audience population. What a live face-to-face smaller audience also faces in this same way is ameliorated by (potentially) instantaneous feedback on matters of interpretation by the standing call for clarification (by raised hands) that then smears across the ensemble for the real possibility of more precision and insight. I fail to see how MOOCs can possibly solve the synchronic telephone problem that it faces by virtue of the medium it embraces in the first place.

Oh noice, consider me signed up ! Though I wont be doing the coursework. For people wondering, watching the videos only is fine, with the only downside really being that you forget 98% of it within the month. Ive done it on a HEAP of them so far and learned nothing (except that game theory really has no applicability to real life) but some of the basics do stick if you make minimum effort. Theres also, of course, a scale on this stuff between doing nothing and doing all the work, so people could easily work out a happy medium and do as much as they please and learn what they like..

John Holbo, Ive always wondered what you spoke like (well not always, of course) but more do you speak in exclamation marks ! ? Now I’ll know for good ! Ive always pictured dsquared speaking like Al Pacino in dog day afternoon with a Welsh accent (‘Im dying here dyn’ ..’why are you always saying youre dyin, dyn? youre not dyin’.. that sort of thing)

The February issue of the AHA’s Perspectives includes a forum, “Historians respond to MOOCs,” with comments from Elaine Carey, Philip Zelikow, Jeremy Adelman, Ann Little, and Jonathan Rees. Here’s a link to the TOC, which contains hyperlinks to each paper in the panel:

Perspectives 52, no. 2, February 2014

The perspectives represented range from MOOC-friendly to MOOC-agnostic to MOOC-skeptical. Some interesting insights from people who have taught MOOCs about what worked/didn’t work.