MOOC Morphing, Binge Learning, and What’s Happenin’ Over the Summer

Participating in developments in higher education is great fun these days. Perhaps most exciting is knowing that history is unfolding before our eyes, and this generation of faculty is defining the essentials of learning in the 21st century. We all suspect we’ll be using new tools to do our work; we just don’t know exactly how we’ll use them, which we’ll discard as unhelpful, and which we’ll identify as core to a modern university.

Things are happening at a pretty rapid clip. People have clearly not fallen asleep over the summer. Here is a set of diverse observations:

• We’re collectively learning about the market for MOOCs. Some are noting that the vast majority of those taking MOOCs already have degrees and are older than typical students served in brick and mortar universities. Many are outside the US. This is truly interesting. We’d all like to know if their motivation is what psychologists call a “need for cognition,” a trait that prompts consuming new facts and integrating them into current knowledge. Or are they job-oriented, seeking task-specific knowledge? Or maybe the current market merely reflects the current MOOCs being offered — an uncoordinated mix that resembles more an encyclopedia than an integrated set of courses of a degree program.
• Students vary greatly in the amount of time they spend to complete the same MOOC. Some appear to engage in “binge learning,” blasting through the course in a very short time. Others proceed much more slowly. If we’re clever as a field, the analysis of MOOC process data should allow us to predict different learning styles. This could improve teaching approaches no matter what the mode of communication.
• There’s been a lot of media attention on attrition rates in MOOCs. Commonly over 90% of the beginning students fail to complete the course. At least one MOOC-maker is attacking that by sending emails to students who fail to complete a portion of the course after a certain time period and by offering 24/7 hotlines for those with questions. Everybody’s talking about what motivates people to complete a course. Interestingly, inducing student interest is central to face to face teaching. MOOCs are morphing, really fast, picking up some features of the old approaches. Georgetown’s decision to evaluate blending technology with traditional approaches still seems a wise one.
• There have been interesting rejections by faculty from one university to offering academic credit for online courses built by faculty from another university. Similarly, there have been rejections to offering credit to students not having completed normal admissions review for the university offering the course. Indeed, the relationship between the MOOC movement and the traditional certification process of universities remains quite uncertain.
• We as faculty have traditionally valued small classes because 1) they allow us to observe and react to students who need different approaches to the material and 2) they permit student discussion about the material guided by the instructor. Some of the techniques in blended courses are creating similar functions. Online interactive exercises alert students immediately to weaknesses in their understanding, and recommend toward a remedial path of work to fill in the gaps. Some are no doubt tackling the issue of inter-student dialogue by using software as a virtual member of the dialogues.
• Another feature of use of web-based learning technologies is that they facilitate experiments in pedagogical techniques. For example, if there are two plausible examples to illustrate a key concept, software can randomly assign students to each of the examples, and analysis of learning outcomes can determine which works better for which kind of student. It’s difficult to do this quickly using traditional methods.
• I learned that at least one university is offering a credit-bearing course where students and faculty are together redesigning a different course earlier in the sequence by introducing new technologies. It comports with what academics know well — that teaching a topic produces a deeper understanding of the topic.
• Another on-campus course focusing on intensive analysis of literature used Twitter and other social media, generating comments and discussion about the focal work among people globally. This stimulated the students to conclude that what the course covered was really more important than they initially thought.
• There has been an important first move in the last few weeks — the creation of a new Master’s program in computer science at Georgia Tech, assisted by AT&T, with total tuition costs of $7,000. This same program on campus has a $40,000 price.
• There are some speculations that large portions of the first two years of undergraduate curricula will become commodities, with a small number of “market” leaders providing most of the course content (perhaps not unlike the use of a set of dominant textbooks for introductory courses).
• I heard a good question the other day — what if we were starting higher education institutions from scratch right now? What features would we want to have in a university, which assets would we want to use that didn’t exist earlier? How would we redesign what we do now? The question is a shocker, not really designed to be fully answered, but useful to motivate reflection on what we do.

All of the observations above testify to the fact that we are living in interesting times. Faculty leadership is key to success. Some early predictions of the future seem doubtful now, but it also seems that the universities involved in these developments are evolving more rapidly than those that have opted-out.