What if, as a novice teacher or professor, you began a course and the
entire class decided to leave—either from apathy or boredom or the
popular student conviction that whatever is not a part of the lesson is
inherently more interesting than what is? That old educator’s nightmare
is now a digital reality: massive open online courses, or
s,
born a few years ago of the seemingly well-paired utopianisms of
Silicon Valley and the élite American university, are seeing that
classroom management can be a difficult task without a classroom.
,”
it seemed, in the words of the paper, that “everyone wants in,” with
schools, students, and investors eager to participate. But, as can
happen in academia, early ambition faded when the first few assessments
were returned, and, since then the open-online model appears to have
earned an incomplete, at best. An average of only four per cent of
registered users finished their
, and half of those enrolled did not view even a single lecture. EdX, a
collaboration between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has shown results that are a little more encouraging,
.
And a celebrated partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, the
company co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor turned
Some of the problems encountered by
MOOCs echo those of an earlier model of alternative learning. Last month, the General Educational Development exam, or G.E.D., was
replaced by a more challenging computer version. Like
MOOCs,
the G.E.D, which has been around since 1942, is partially an attempt to
save time and money in education, and to extend opportunity to students
outside the traditional classroom. As a marker of high-school
equivalence, it holds the promise that an entire academic career can be
distilled into the knowledge required to pass a five-part exam.
But according to
a September, 2013, American RadioWorks report,
of the forty per cent of G.E.D.-holders who go on to college, fewer
than half complete more than a year, and only about four per cent earn a
four-year degree. The additional rigor of the redesigned exam might not
be the solution. The military tried a similar approach when, in the
nineteen-seventies, it raised the G.E.D. scores required for entry. Even
then, G.E.D. applicants quit or were thrown out of the service at a
higher rate than enlistees with high-school degrees.
Here we stumble up against a familiar
MOOC-themed
mystery. Motivated students complete their G.E.D. as a waypoint for
college, and, like those who signed up for the online courses, around
ninety-five per cent of them don’t succeed. But what happens in between?
Somewhere short of the finish line, something that the G.E.D. cannot measure, and that the
MOOCs
aren’t equipped to address, is siphoning these students off. It may
have to do with the noncognitive aspects of education. In 2010, three
University of Chicago economists found that, while the G.E.D. does
approximate a high-school degree as a measurement of scholastic
aptitude,
it reveals nothing about the non-academic skills—traits
like persistence, motivation, and reliability—that are developed over
the course of a high-school career, and that are necessary for success
in work or at college.
The G.E.D. is not the same sort of learning experience as a
MOOC,
but there are points of contact between the two. They both attempt to
trade most, if not all, of the traditional classroom experience, where a
student’s noncognitive skills are tried and tempered, for access and
convenience. And that can seem like a good deal. On a physical campus,
courses are often a negotiation between motivation and curriculum, in
which the success of a class depends as much on how much sleep students
get, who’s sitting next to whom, or personal opinions of the instructor
as on the lesson plan and lecture notes. When a student’s attention
drifts in a classroom, it can be regained. A skilled teacher can bounce
the curriculum back into the messy real world of education, focussing
and flipping distractions into the lesson in a sort of pedagogical
jujitsu.
Traditional classroom educators long ago realized that when you crowd
ten or twenty or a hundred students close together, learning, by
default, becomes a social experience. Rather than constantly fighting
the disorder of the system, some classes learned to harness it, adapting
their practices and assumptions accordingly. Around the seminar table,
where students work face to face and elbow to elbow, the harmonies and
dissonances between individuals can be played out in an academic
discussion. The class can draw upon differences in perspective and
persuasion to build a conversation, solve a problem, or interpret an
experiment.
Online classes also have this potential, expanded many times over by
the Earth-shrinking capacities of the medium. But, in an online
discussion or in an offline
MOOC meet-up, it’s easier for
a person to disengage or not show up, to “agree to disagree”—that
polite fig leaf of social shorthand—and fall out of the experience. The
same point of disagreement that sparks a classroom discussion for an
hour has the potential to scatter Internet participants to the four
corners of the Web in minutes.
If, like the G.E.D.,
MOOCs are missing a vital social
element, that doesn’t mean they’re without value. The data tells us that
very few of the students who enroll in a
MOOC will ever reach its end. In the ivy, brick, and mortar world from which
MOOCs
were spun, that would be damning enough. Sticking around is important
there; credentials and connections reign, starting with the high-school
transcript and continuing through graduate degrees. But students may go
into an online course
knowing that a completion certificate, even offered under the imprimatur of Harvard or UPenn, doesn’t have the same worth.
A recent study by a team of researchers from Coursera found that, for many
MOOC students, the credential isn’t the goal at all. Students may treat the
MOOC
as a resource or a text rather than as a course, jumping in to learn
new code or view an enticing lecture and back out whenever they want,
just as they would while skimming the wider Web. For many,
MOOCs
may be just one more Internet tool or diversion; in the Coursera study,
the retention rate among committed students for a typical class was
shown to be roughly on par with that of a mobile app. And the London
Times reported last week that, when given the option to get course credit for their
MOOC (for a fee),
none of the thousand, or so students who enrolled in a British online class did.
In the context of the ever-expanding Web, where apps and sites live
in some multivalent state of becoming and unravelling and becoming
again, the preliminary grade of incomplete may not be so bad for
MOOCs. In traditional courses, incomplete almost always signals frustrated expectations, left lazily unmet.
MOOCs’
incomplete also means potential. It hints at an unclaimed territory,
for teachers and students, novices and autodidacts, to explain in their
own ways. Someday soon they may find a better and more sociable way to
do so, but for now there is still much to learn.
Photograph: Troy Aossey/Getty
