Dave, I don't think interesting describes my response to this post. More like disgusted. I would have said outraged but I'm getting too used to seeing nonsense on the web to respond as I used to. Although I agree with most of the points you and Bruce made, I disagree in a couple of important places but more than that I object to the characterization of what is going on in the post and how willing people are to accept some of its statements, most of which are a total misreading of what is going on with universities and MOOCs.
If I were to make a single statement about how to understand what is going on, I'd harken back to Deep Throat and advise people to take his advice: "Follow the money." It amazes me how many people are willing to see the faculty as the bad guys on the credit issue and not even look deep enough into the issue to see that is not the case for most of them. i've spent over 40 years in academia, a lot of battling administrators and often other faculty about these issues. But with regard to MOOCs, it's hard not to be a little sympathetic to the situation college presidents find themselves in, especially at public institutions. Budgets in states, including California and Washington, have been cut dramatically. Although there is some idealism in universities' support of MOOCs, they are not charitable institutions and other than a few elite universities which can afford to support experiments with MOOCs that provide high level classes for a global audience, the vast majority of universities are struggling to support their own students. From the administration's perspective MOOCs appear as a possible cost cutting measure, one that may be necessary even if quality declines a bit. Most of the faculty who are against MOOCs are fighting to preserve quality. Maybe that's a losing cause but not something they should for which they should be reviled. These issues have been discussed in detail in the Chronicle but the post that you sent ignores the underlying issues. Let me examine one course in detail that to me shows why granting credit is not justified. The Udacity computer graphics course is being taught by a very good friend of mine, one I have tremendous respect for. I am enjoying the course and am impressed by the quality of the tools that Udacity has made available to him to enhance the presentation. Nevertheless I doubt that even 1% of the students who finish the course would be able to pass the standard senior/graduate course in Computer Graphics that is taught by most CS departments (most of which use my textbook). If you want to take the view that what we do in academia is irrelevant than I'd estimate that even fewer would pass the certification exam in OpenGL that is being developed by the Khronos Group, the industry group that sets many of the standards including OpenGL, WebGL, and OpenCL. I don't think there are necessarily any bad guys here (other than those who intentionally distort the data). Nevertheless, it is totally unclear as to (a) whether there is a business model that makes sense for MOOCs and (b) what happens to students who complete a less than standard course via a MOOC. Is there a benefit to students who complete a beginning programming or graphics course other than to have sparked their interest? If they want to continue, most will be led right back to the system that is having financial problems and looked to MOOCs to get around them. From what I've seen, the same is true for essentially all the low level MOOCs. The situation is different for advanced technical courses such as the Stanford Machine Learning course but in the end I suspect that they will also have a minimum impact due to both money issues and to the problems facing non-traditional students other than the ones on this list. I have been involved with advanced technical courses for non-traditional students since 1967 when as a grad student I taught some graduate computer design courses for USC at Lockheed and other locations around Southern California. The students were desperate for advanced education since the aerospace industry was known to lay off engineers with 10-15 years of experience at the slightest downturn and then hire new graduates as soon as business improved. In spite of their motivation and good preparation, very few of these students could complete a standard course in a semester due to the demands of a full time job and a variety of other life issues. I've confirmed this over the years by teaching the same course on campus and off campus both live and via remote technologies multiple times. The on campus students were always able to get the course done while on the average the off campus students could handle about 1/2 to 2/3 of the course. In1972, as a junior faculty I taught one of the first remote delivery courses at USC to a similar audience using one way video and two way voice. It was a huge technical advance and provided high level courses all over the LA area. Later USC, Stanford and others, such as the National Technical University, went national with their programs. At UNM I used a variety of methods to reach remote students, including teaching live classes at Las Alamos, using the video system and recently the on-line system. For 30 years at UNM, almost all of my advanced classes were taught to remote students. Under all these systems, very little changed in terms of their effectiveness. None of the methods had a business model that was able to survive changing technologies, competition, and the true delivery costs. But more than these factors, are the difficulties of teaching in teaching non-traditional students. For every Owen who is willing to put in all the effort needed to get the most out of a class, there may be 10-100 others who are less prepared, don't have the time and are dealing with their jobs. In all the years, I've been teaching such students, I've had some great successes but I've also had to put in far more effort per student for remote students than I did for on-campus students. I note that many courses at UNM are now taught concurrently both on campus and on line. Many local students choose the on-line versions and are willing to pay an additional $100 delivery fee (which does come close to extra costs for the remote course). But most of these students actually are on campus so can access their cohorts, their instructors and the live lectures if desired. Thus they are actually paying for the extras of being able to not come to campus with its parking issues and to be able to review material on-line which to most is worth the extra $100 fee. Their performance is very different from that of truly remote students who cannot access the campus. My final comment is about the bandwagon everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon to dump on US colleges and universities. At this point in my life, I've taught in over 20 countries in five continents, including over 100 professional development courses. The reason I and others have been in such demand comes back to the successes of US schools in educating us. So while every other advancing economy is trying emulate the US success, here we are slashing budgets (what every happened to the free college education?), crapping on ourselves and looking for magic solutions in MOOCs. We have plenty of problems to solve, many that the colleges and universities have helped exacerbate and even greater problems with K-12 education but let's acknowledge where our colleges and universities have gotten us and not be so quick to toss out what we have achieved. Ed __________ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 27, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Prof David West wrote: > those discussing MOOCs recently, might find this interesting > > http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/ > > davew > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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