What remains to be seen is how higher education will change in response to the new technology.
Image: Flickr/John Walker
When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. “We need courses for this thing — yesterday!”
Uriagereka, associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park, knew exactly what his boss meant. Campus administrators around the world had been buzzing for months about massive open online courses, or MOOCs: Internet-based teaching programs designed to handle thousands of students simultaneously, in part using the tactics of social-networking websites. To supplement video lectures, much of the learning comes from online comments, questions and discussions. Participants even mark one another's tests.
MOOCs had exploded into the academic consciousness in summer 2011, when a free artificial-intelligence course offered by Stanford University in California attracted 160,000 students from around the world — 23,000 of whom finished it. Now, Coursera in Mountain View, California — one of the three researcher-led start-up companies actively developing MOOCs — was inviting the University of Maryland to submit up to five courses for broadcast on its software platform. Loh wanted in. “He was very clear,” says Uriagereka. “We needed to be a part of this.”
Similar conversations have been taking place at major universities around the world, as dozens — 74, at the last count — rush to sign up. Science, engineering and technology courses have been in the vanguard of the movement, but offerings in management, humanities and the arts are growing in popularity (see 'MOOCs rising'). “In 25 years of observing higher education, I've never seen anything move this fast,” says Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist at Stanford and one of the leaders of an ongoing, campus-wide discussion series known as Education's Digital Future.
Image: Courtesy of Nature magazine
The ferment is attributable in part to MOOCs hitting at exactly the right time. Bricks-and-mortar campuses are unlikely to keep up with the demand for advanced education: according to one widely quoted calculation, the world would have to construct more than four new 30,000-student universities per week to accommodate the children who will reach enrolment age by 2025 (see go.nature.com/mjuzhu), let alone the millions of adults looking for further education or career training. Colleges and universities are also under tremendous financial pressure, especially in the United States, where rocketing tuition fees and ever-expanding student debt have resulted in a backlash from politicians, parents and students demanding to know what their money is going towards.
When MOOCs came along, says Chris Dede, who studies educational technologies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they promised to solve these problems by radically expanding the reach of existing campuses while streamlining the workload for educators — and universities seized on them as the next big thing.
There is reason to hope that this is a positive development, says Roy Pea, who heads a Stanford center that studies how people use technology. MOOCs, which have incorporated decades of research on how students learn best, could free faculty members from the drudgery of repetitive introductory lectures. What's more, they can record online students' every mouse click, an ability that promises to transform education research by generating data that could improve teaching in the future. “We can have microanalytics on every paper, every test, right down to what media each student prefers,” says Pea.
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8 Comments
Add Commentthe coursera initiaative has allowed students like my self to be able to have better plaform of learning, through making information more accessible. the only challenge that our generation has to solve is, pushing for greater levels of open access. because the internet is still a barrier to young people who are not in cities and Universities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy hope is that more African Univerisities join the likes of Washington University and other institutions on this initiative because Open Access enhances the system of innovation.
Even Scientific American is after wrong information .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMOOCs are not massive at all .
The average attendance is around 500 .
Do not count initial clicks to register, they are not registration but just clicks .
Also there good MOOCs and bad MOOCs .
Only elite universities must provide MOOCs since they can attract many students. Since fee is very low nobody would follow a normal college .
Today most important issue is . DEGREES.
MOOCs must provide degrees . Otherwise they will die within 2 years .
Please also I appeal to all schools, do not jump into bandwagon if you are not a TOP school . Do not waste your time and money
I suggest we should have several edx each with 10 top schools. That is enough for the world .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey must be non profits. Fee just covering cost + small profit for new investments .+
An interesting article but the three charts that accompany it are all very problematic. The first chart, a dual axis line chart, is a chart type that can easily be confusing as chart expert Stephen Few has pointed out. It appears from the chart that the magnitude of the increase has been about the same for supply and demand yet supply has gone up approx. 3100% while demand has gone up approx. 1700%. While the chart looks impressive, a description in the text about how course selections are exploding at a rate greater than user accounts would perhaps suffice. The second chart, a single stacked column, is one that should never be used to convey percents summing to a total. Since a pie chart for this information is also astonishingly poor at conveying information, the best option would be a bar chart arranged in a Pareto format IF one wanted to convey that information. One of the most interesting things about the second chart is that fully 42% of users are spread around the world in bits and pieces of fewer than 2.2% each. To me, that's the amazing thing about these data and it's reflected in the article by the reference to the 15 yo Mongolian prodigy. A chart type that highlights the low level of participation but extremely wide geographic distribution might be more informative. The third chart, a doughnut chart, is what JunkCharts refers to as a useless chart made worse. It's a pie chart with a hole in the middle - hence the useless made worse. A table would be the best option for this chart since it is comprised of only five values.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes even I am hopeful that this is a positive development As mentioned in the post it is virtually impossible to provide education to such large number of learners at affordable price.Increased penetration of internet and improved version of virtual classroom (http://www.wiziq.com/Virtual_Classroom.aspx ) is only going to enhance the quality of education imparted.I am not surprised to see that the percentage of students coming from India is only next to USA. I know there is enormous demand for quality education which only the MOOCs can provide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“My aspiration isn't to reach the 1% of the world that is self-motivating,” says Thrun, “it's to reach the other 99%.” That is the same goal that WikiPedia and Google U-Tube seem to address quite well, once the 99% have been turned into "self-motivated" by getting basic web training in grade and high schools, that leads to easier use of MOOC's from colleges.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExample: Statistical Analysis
Most MOOC and university classes in Intro-Stats wastes most of the time trying to teach probabilities math games with normal curve tools. Students could be productive faster by focusing on real-world datasets and graphical methods that avoid the theory until the student starts THINKING statistically.
U-tube covers that better than EdX so far as I have found.
Variance components can be understood by Multi-Vari plots long before a student is ready for the numeric methods, like Bayes, REML, or even Anova. And that same plot type can analyze DOE results fast before teaching regression methods. And SPC charts that can also quickly stratify the data BY various categorical factors, and recalculate limits quickly to show the impacts, can teach practical SPC even before the long story about Shewhart's assumptions, auto-correlation impacts on limits methods and run rule options. Just my opinion from 54 years of using these tools in industry.
And intro course should include treatment of outliers, data stratification graphs that re-calculate as outliers are removed and put back, and trend charts that have "SPC" options for viewing numeric trends BY many many categorical factors using "phased" graphs rather than separate plots. EDA, SPC, DOE, are just data visualization when the datasets are done by someone else, but they can start the mind thinking about why, when, how and then the theory and history can be taught later (and proofs if you are getting academic degree in advanced math/stats). Labs can be workshops where NEW data is generated, and analyzed by teams over the web.
Any expansion of knowledge has to be good.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis will emphasize what you know rather than on a degree.
Probably independent testing will be the only way this whole situation can be managed with a positive outcome.
People need to have credentials documenting mastery of a body of knowledge, and independent testing is the best way to document it.
We are faced with increasing numbers of high-school graduates who are deficient in basic skills such as reading and basic arithmetic.
The only solution is independent testing, not connected with the teaching institution.
In schools, as currently set up, in the USA at least, with "No Child Left Behind" mandates, teachers are given bonuses if their students perform well, but the tests are standardized, and so there is teaching about taking the test, rather than teaching a body of knowledge, so even though a student may do fairly well on a test, they still may not have a handle on the basic skill, such as reading or math.
The internet has the potential to really transform education however, for those really in need, those living in inner cities, broken homes, in poverty, and only erratic school attendance, emphasis being on those essentials such as food, finding a place to live, clothing and health services, I don't expect the internet to provide anything at all.
The internet and these advanced education courses will be most beneficial for those who are bright, want to learn, ambitious and self starters, or self motivated.
Those qualities probably can't be taught on the internet, and probably come from direct interaction from, a parent, neighbor, friend, or even in some cases a teacher.
So the online courses are great, meet a need, but will need to provide real knowledge to make them worth while, and independent testing to document and certify mastery of a body of knowledge.
Although elite schools would intuitively provide the best educational experience, probably any school willing to put together a program and willing to commit resources will be able to do the job, but independent certifying exams possibly through a consortium of higher educational institutions or independent certification of course content and certification procedures will be necessary for the ultimate success of such a program.
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/all/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA/B or Split testing - 'A/B testing was a new insight in the realm of politics, but its use on the web dates back at least to the turn of the millennium. At Google—whose rise as a Silicon Valley powerhouse has done more than anything else to spread the A/B gospel over the past decade—engineers ran their first A/B test on February 27, 2000.'
will determine the direction of MOOC.