rolling online education thread

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/minerva-gets-25m-from-benchmark/

mostly notable for the Larry Summers side

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/california-to-give-web-courses-a-big-trial.html

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents/High-Costs-of-Free-Online-Education.pdf

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http://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents/High-Costs-of-Free-Online-Education.pdf&PubID=5082 ?

ya

After the initial flurry of interest, is anyone actually using these (or more to the point, finishing their courses)?

There seems to be a huge number of providers sucking up venture capital investment without providing much of a business model in return. Interesting to see Lynda.com getting bought by LinkedIn for $1.5bn in April.

i finished 3, doing 4th now

quality v variable. have dropped maybe 6 after a week or two.

a lot of the open ones have been regrouping, adding pay-to-certify options, etc., sharivari

i have not worked in a position of privileged information in a university since the regular use of online courses really took off in my (geographical) area, so i don't know the political/institutional details well. but based on the way my own online courses were handled, and what i've heard whole departments of faculty say when they were a regular part of their teaching loads, it seems like their adoption at lower-tier schools is at present an admin-driven mandate (brings in the students who want 'convenience' and faster time-to-degree, makes school look modern, plus shadowy possibilities of lowering costs in the future) which weak programs are often forced to accept in preference to losing funding due to low-enrolled meatspace-only courses. and 'learning centers' (w/ the latest in pedagogical advice for faculty) on campus to the contrary, pretty much no one seems to want to talk about how these courses are shit.

i have a friend who was forced into teaching a logic course online for the above sort of reasons, and like, yknow, i'm sure something can be done with it (i know someone who runs a similar course via a quizzes-and-discussion LMS, makes the students turn in word documents w/ pre-selected symbols in them for their proofs), but the friend wasn't really in a position to do that, so the course is the bare minimum of content and instruction in an area where the in-person hand-waving and gesturing and by-hand chalk-on-the-blackboard pedagogy is p. key for students who are terrified of anything written in symbols. friend says, of the course, 'it's flat out immoral.'

That's really interesting, thanks.

I work in a sector where free market rules brought in under the Major govt have meant that vocational training is carved up amongst a cartel of private institutions who have all driven their course fees up consistently by about 5% over inflation every single year. It looks like this might be reformed in the near future and it will probably allow for far more flexibility in training methods, so I've been looking at a lot of this stuff lately with an eye on what we might be doing in two years' time.

I went to a talk during the week with a guy from futurelearn (for profit but owned by the OU). They have a freemium certification model, and he was pretty honest about the fact that partner institutions probably weren't making money off it - the statements of participation normally sold enough to cover the cost of a single run of the course (they're not wholly open in that courses still have loose weekly schedules) but wouldn't have covered the cost of developing the course in the first place.

j massively otm, i worked in online course development and implementation for years and "immoral" sums it up pretty well. if it's not a few pdfs linked on the CMS it's 90-minute lectures recorded on a single camera and posted uncut. there were of course exceptions, instructors who worked really hard to make some kind of connection with their students and had really rich involving courses, but in general it was very disheartening.

I'm looking in to this as a side project at work and have come to similar conclusions about most of the existing offers. The free / freemium stuff is fine as far as it goes but doesn't present an attractive financial model. Calling a lot of the premium courses "immoral" seems entirely legitimate.

It's interesting as some reasonably prestigious universities in the UK, like Liverpool, have started offering fully online postgraduate degrees. In their case, it seems to be effectively rubber stamping courses designed and delivered by L@ur3ate. I think more will follow, and will want to drive quality up to justify higher fees.

Anyone still doing any MOOCs? Any courses or providers anyone has good or bad things to say about?

I keep signing up to Futurelearn courses (OU-owned, courses are free but pay for a certificate of "participation" - or some courses allow you to pay even more and sit some kind of test and get a certificate of "achievement" instead) and not managing to keep up with them. Not sure if it's their idea of how long each course takes per week or my idea of how much free time I have and how long I'm spending on things which is way out.

Some of the courses are interesting (some don't live up to their descriptions at all) but each week's work is split into 30 separate pages with a short video on most pages and comments and maybe assignments or things to follow along with. Feels like even just clicking "done", "next" and waiting for a page to load 30 times takes a non-trivial chunk of the 2-4 hours per week, never mind actually engaging with the content.

There's also a higher emphasis on discussion than I'd like. Hi, it's week one step one of the course, everyone discuss in the comments how you hope to apply what you'll learn! Er, I've no idea, I don't even know what the possible applications are yet. Hi, it's week one step 4 of a programming/data course, here's how to add two numbers, let's all discuss the conclusions we can draw from the results of adding two numbers! Uhh. Also I stupidly signed up with my real name like it encouraged me to and have no desire to stick my idiot thoughts on the internet with my real name.

(Sadly it looks like a lot of actual degree+-level distance learning courses also have a required amount of discussion participation per week. Come and be judged by internet strangers and/or just repeat the obvious answers already given by 60 other people for 20% of your degree...)

The difficulty is keeping people engaged - i can't remember the real statistic so i'm going to say that 2.3% of people actually finish the courses they start - and it's often not much more than 10% even if you've paid money for it - so socialisation and the idea of bringing in the full classroom experience, including debate and discussion (not to mention the positive side of wanting to learn so you don't look like a dope in the comments), is seen as absolutely essential.

Working out how not to alienate people who literally just want to tune in, learn and tune out is tough though. The added pressure of peer-to-peer learning / students wanting to help out others who are struggling, as they might in a university context, is probably quite useful from an educational perspective but can add extra time / emotional pressure.