Will MOOCs position select professors from elite universities as "rock stars" while learning at strapped for cash public institutions is relegated to watching these instructors through MOOC video? The US is already turning out thousands more PhD grads each year than available jobs in academia. Will MOOCs contribute even more to an already shrinking career field? I can only imagine what will be lost in areas of competing ideas and research should this MOOC prediction come to fruition. However, I still am wary of both the MOOC hype and "sky is falling" predictions. San Jose State recently suspended their partnership with Udacity after the first six months of courses brought far too high of rates of course non-completion and failure (Oremus, 2013). The San Jose State faculty who wrote, "we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students," in protest to the edX collaboration are likely feeling vindicated after the results of the Udacity experiment.
It is my opinion that students can learn a lot of leaders in the field, in mediums such as MOOCs, however, this cannot replace real time engagement with other students and instructors on a personal level...even if they're not "rock stars." This may be a tangential issue, but one that immediately came to mind...the long term societal effects of professors being replaced by teaching assistants. Do we want to live in a society with only rock star professors? While there are plenty of negative aspects to our state's expansive community college system, how would those communities be affected without the local faculty involved with both students and the local area at large? To me, this seems to be one of the larger negative points of the potential MOOC explosion that is not yet being discussed.
Video on Micro MOOC (of course youtube is being persnickety)
Engagement and interaction with the instructor and other students are major concerns for me. No matter, if a rock star professor is teaching the course or not, it is hard to manage a course with thousands of students. MOOCs have the potential to be beneficial to students and possibly higher education. However, these issues along with retaining faculty must be addressed. Otherwise, there will be a fierce response as with the San Jose faculty about how this is affecting them in a negative way.
ReplyDeleteHi Jen,
ReplyDeletePutting on my student affairs hat on for this reply. :-) With all the research out there on college student adjustment and connections, I cannot at present see how MOOCs can bridge the gap of contact. More on-campus housing, smaller class sizes, faculty living residence halls and honor's college dorms, and so on. Higher ed has made great progress in our efforts to create communities and connections to help with academic and other transitions. Would MOOCs be more for upper division and graduate students? How much of a degree would be a MOOC? Would the transfer of credit or MOOC credit in residence be limited? I always seem to have more questions as we move forward!
Just because an instructor is well known or teaches at an elite institution does not mean that video lectures capture learning styles of all course participants. What about the student that needs clarification of the course content presented? I think it may be frustrating to pariticpate in a course with limited interaction from the instructor.
ReplyDeleteHi Jen,
ReplyDeleteThanks much for a thoughtful post! I'm interested in your discussion of engagement with the professor in MOOCs. I think I agree with you that this could be an issue. What's making me scratch my head about it a bit though is whether it is an issue in any online class. Is it the separation by time and space, or is it simply the numbers of students would make it impossible to have as much personal interaction. If it's the latter, could at some point we use pedagogical agents to bridge that gap, or at least the feeling of the gap. Interesting times!
I think the sheer number of students really limit meaningful interaction with instructors and other students. I mentioned before I made one post on my MOOCs message board and was inundated with replies...all of which would have been meaningful if it wasn't in the HUNDREDS. I hate to admit that I still get alerts that the thread has updates and I just delete them...it was too much. I can't imagine what it would be like on the other end as the professor and even attempting to engage with MOOC participants. Now, this is a Coursera MOOC, so I can't speak for MOOCs that are not massive in the tens of thousands of participants.
ReplyDelete