everything you think you know about moocs could be wrong (166367284)

7/29/2019 Everything You Think You Know about MOOCs Could Be Wrong (166367284)

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Educause

Everything You Think You Know About MOOCs

But they often don’t really know what they think they know. So our next two speakers are performing a bit

of a Socratic function here and will help carry on that tradition helping us sort out facts from fiction.

Michael Feldstein is an Educational Technology Consultant and lifelong educator. Previously he was the

Senior Program Manager of MindTap at Cengage Learning and Principal Product Strategy Manager for

Academic Enterprise Solutions. Michael was at one point Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning

Network.

Phil Hill is an Educational Technology Consultant and analyst who has spent the last ten years advising in

online education and educational technology markets. Phil is also an author, blogger at e-Literate, and

speaker and has become recognized in the educational technology community for his insights into the

broader education market trends and issues. In addition to e-Literate, Phil also has written for the

EDUCAUSE Review and has been quoted at Inside Higher Ed and The Washington Business Journal .

Phil and Michael have recently joined forces to form MindWires Consulting, a company intended to assist

both K-12 and higher ed schools’ transition to the world of digital education.

Michael and Phil, welcome to the focus session and please begin.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Malcolm, and thank you for everybody at ELI for setting up this opportunity for a

very important discussion. And I think the introduction actually captured quite a bit of the issues very well,

and that there is so much hype or madness around MOOC that there’s a lot of discussion going on, and it

includes discussion by people who have not previously been involved in online education. So there’s

been a little bit of a frustration as many of us who’ve been in online education for a while almost see

different groups looking like they’ve invented online education just within the past two years. Not only

that, we’ve actually had – the terms have been misunderstood, so for example, there’s quite a prevalent

trend where online education and MOOCs are used interchangeably as terms.

So I think it’s very important to think about what are MOOCs, not just what they are over the past year,

but what are they merging into? Because if we’re going to have a productive discussion, which I think this

focus session is really set up to do and in a great opportunity to lead this effort, we need to be pretty clear

about what things are and what we actually mean by MOOCs and where they’re going.

And part of the reason I find this very important is the fact that higher education as a system is a set of

institutions. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation, but the time frame of the innovation, and the

model of how we try out new innovations, see if they work and adjust to them, is done on a very different

time scale than particularly the venture capital backed corporate world is used to. And a lot of the MOOC

discussion, not all of it, is driven by venture capital backed companies as well as others. And there’s a

different model involved. It’s much more experimental, let’s try something out, let’s fail fast. If we learn

something, let’s adjust to it, let’s see what works. To a certain degree it almost seems like throwing

spaghetti at the wall.

But what that means is there’s a lot of change going on, and we need to be clear that we’re not having an

argument about what might have been the case six months ago, but what’s actually happening right now.

So that’s what we’d like to explore. What if everything you thought you knew about MOOCs could be

wrong?

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I really appreciated the hype cycle graphic. It had a lot of great information in there. I definitely want to

download that after the session and learn from it. But here I just wanted to present a different view of sort

of the history of MOOCs. And, as of about nine months ago when we came up with this graphic, part of

what we’re showing is the fact that MOOCs originated – the first things that were considered MOOCs

were the connectedness branch of MOOCs created by mostly some people in Canada, Stephen Downes,

George Siemens, Dave Fournier and others, and this has been around since 2008, this connectedness

branch of MOOC. And there was a strong exploration of how to scale, but not centrally scale but actually

distributed scale, and setting up connections. That’s what the top line is showing.

The thread, however, that’s getting most of the discussion comes in from what is variously known as the

Stanford branch of MOOCs or the X-MOOCs, which really started out in 2011 and quickly branched

beyond the Stanford courses into some startup companies which everybody is aware of, Audacity and

Coursera in particular, and then Ed Acts is the joint venture from MIT and Harvard that’s now expanded.

These X-MOOCs are a very different model, and they certainly have been, and it’s been very much more

of a content distribution model from a centralized perspective.

But all of the MOOCs have had some potential future problems from the very onset that we have captured

here. One of them is the fact that there’s no revenue models, or how are these issues going to become

self-sustaining? Another issue is how are people going to actually get credit or credentialing or sometangible outcome from MOOCs? So there are several different areas where there are barriers and

challenges that MOOCs need to present. Not that they’re flaws in the MOOC, but to become a self-

sustaining model these issues need to be dealt with in one way or another. And so I think a lot of what

we’re seeing now is MOOCs trying to evolve and deal with these various issues, and that sort of sets up,

do we even define MOOCs the right way? What is a MOOC, and what if our assumptions about what

they are actually is no longer accurate going into 2013?

So I’d like to turn it over to Michael.

Great. So, thank you Phil. I think one of the biggest contributions that MOOCs have made to higher

education broadly so far is to reawaken our imagination about what’s possible with online teaching and

learning. And to open us up to the possibility of new models. As Phil mentioned, there’s already quite abit of variety and change in the short few years that we’ve had MOOCs so far, and some of that change

and variety comes from different notions of the goals for MOOCs. The connectivist MOOCs in particular

were not necessarily designed for institutional use and institutional benefits. In some ways they were

designed to be done around and without an institution and to meet direct needs of students, and most

specifically including students whose needs are not being met by those institutions.

Now since then institutions have become interested in this notion of a MOOC, very much so, and most of

you here, I dare say, are representing institutions. So as you think about MOOCs, I think it’s important to

also be thinking about what problems as an institution you hope to solve with them. What needs are you

trying to meet for your students? And as you think about those things, you should think about the current

definition of a MOOC, which is very changing and squishy already, and think about what aspects of it are

useful to you. Focus on that process of reawakening the imagination rather than what you think a MOOC

is based on a course that you saw in Coursera six months ago. Right?

What we think we know about MOOCs, the very basic based on their name is that they’re massive, open,

online and courses. Let’s look at even just those four basic characteristics and see what happens when

we start playing with those parameters.

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So let’s talk about non-massive MOOCs. And let’s talk about what massive means. I think what

galvanized the universities as institutions around MOOCs more than anything else we Peter Norvig and

Sebastian Thrun’s course in which they attracted 160,000 students. And that’s very attractive and sexy

and people think about those numbers as massive. Hard to argue that 160,000 students in one course is

not massive. And that is a number that makes a lot of sense if you are looking to reach out and educate

masses of people around the world who don’t have access to the kinds of residential colleges and

universities we have in the United States. And it also is a kind of massive that makes sense if you are

trying to promote the brand of your university through marketing.

It’s not necessarily the kind of massive that’s particularly meaningful if you’re trying to solve a bottleneck

course problem at your college. And it’s not necessarily a productive characteristic if you’re trying to

increase the quality of the education in the class. It may or may not be, depending on what you’re

teaching and how you’re teaching it.

So we know already that there are institutions that are beginning to play with this notion of massiveness.

Harvard’s copyright online course was capped at 500 students. They had a relatively traditional model in

which they felt like in order to teach the course with quality they had to have a certain student-to-TA ratio.

And so they said 500 student is plenty for us, that’s a good size.

Meanwhile we’re seeing other changes, and this is one that we’re going to get to repeatedly throughout

the rest of this talk. We’re seeing schools begin to play with the notion that some elements can be

massive while others are not. So SJSU, San Jose State University, has been piloting with both edEx and

Udacity courses which have used MOOCs essentially as courseware and as online support groups, but

they have instructors running classes. There are benefits to this. Maybe you think the quality of the

course materials in the MOOC are great. Maybe having real lectures from people who are top in their

field is something you think your students would benefit from. But maybe you think the students also

need a local instructor and the kind of support network that comes with being in a residential university.

Maybe you think that it’s possible using this mixed scale the number of students that are in a class

supported by a teacher to meet your bottleneck problems and budget problems, but not necessarily scale

it massively in terms of student-teacher ratio. Just enough to solve your problems.

Then we – let’s talk about openness. Now this is a particularly odd one in some ways because depending

on your definition of open, many of the MOOCs that we see today are not necessarily open. If you mean

open content, the connectiveness MOOCs had a very strong connection, and this is actually where the

term MOOC comes from. They had a very strong connection – have a very strong connection – with

open licensing and creative commons. The X-MOOCs, or the Stanford MOOCs, not so much. So it’s not

clear in what sense they are open. Some are open in the sense of free, if you choose to equate those

two words. Others recommend pay textbooks. And others could charge fee in the future.

Probably the most dominant kind of open across various MOOCs is open access, meaning anyone can

sign up for this course. And that’s not the same thing as free. Right now you see courses that are both

open and free. But you could have open access and still charge a fee. And on the surface it seems like

this is probably the closest to the definition in people’s minds to what a MOOC is. Well, anyone can sign

up for it. That’s what enables it to be massive and that’s kind of what makes it different than a typical

online course from a college.

But maybe not. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

Then there’s a possible (audio break) of a course not being fully online. I’m going to go back again to that

blended model. This is a kind of classroom flipping where you say the MOOC fulfills part of the course

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and we could have a local group – doesn’t have to be a traditional class by the way – it could be a locally

organized study group that exists entirely outside the university. But there is nothing about MOOCs that

demands that they absolutely must be fully online and distributed. There is always the possibility for local

interaction, and I think if you’re coming at this from a university perspective, and you have a campus that

has a support network and brings together smart people who are sitting and thinking about the same

topics, there’s a logical opportunity for you to take advantage of that to enhance the learning experience.

And then, of course, MOOCs don’t have to be classes. They could be communities, they could be

project-based communities, like the photo-a-day challenge where you have groups of people who

challenge themselves to take a picture every day and share it with each other and just continue on their

way. Another course that’s not – I don’t think they define themselves as a MOOC – but there’s a course

started out (inaudible) Washington University called the DS106 that is in the tradition, I would say, of the

connectivist MOOCs, and it’s very much project based. And even though it does have a beginning and

an end to the semester because it is anchored in a residential school class and semester, students do

come in and do one assignment and then leave. They do whatever interests them in the online class.

They call this drive by assignments.

And, of course, MOOCs could serve as launch pads for larger communities. We saw with EdEx that

when MIT failed to offer a sequel to a popular class, a group of students organized the sequel themselvesand essentially created their own class. And it need not have an end, either. It could be that a MOOC

becomes a way of anchoring the community of practice.

But we think that really the way to frame this is to think about a continuum between the little bits of

materials that an instructor might put together for their traditional face-to-face class to hand out to

students, all the way up to, really it’s a question of how much of the course can you put online into a

package. Typically if there’s one thing an instructor will put online it will be a syllabus. And then if there’s

a second thing it will be readings. There’s your course materials package.

Then if they’re a little more ambitious they might put their lecture videos and assessments or assignments

online. Once you get to that level, past the readings, you’re starting to look at a package similar to what

you might get from, say, open courseware. It’s enough that another instructor could pick up those coursematerials and begin to teach the class.

You could go further, though. You could put learning objectives in and you could actually create a unified

experience so students know, okay, first I need to read this text, then I need to watch this video, then I

need to take this quiz, now I’ve finished the quiz, where did I leave off? If I log out and come back in I

should be able to find where I am. And, of course, this is what we would consider to be full courseware or

maybe commercial-quality courseware.

And then if you add on top of that instructional support of intelligent tutoring, so that students get help

when they get stuck, then you have – and I would add probably certification credit – then you have a full

course. And you have – and sort of overlapping those two categories is community discussion. You can

have a community discussion that is around courseware, so it’s a study group across courses, or you canhave community discussion that’s essentially class discussion.

We think that MOOCs are beginning to span these two categories, and some of the more interesting

future of MOOCs from an institutional perspective may be in that courseware category, may be as support

for a locally-based course rather than in the larger circle where most of the attention is focused today.

Moving on, so, you know, we begin to see that MOOCs as courseware, as opposed to MOOCs as

courses, begin to compete fairly directly with commercial publishers’ courseware offerings. And we think

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that this category of courseware, bringing together course materials and sort of designs and assessments

and so on together into one coherent, easily adoptable structure that can be locally supported, is going to

be an increasingly strong trend for institutions that are facing the kind of budgetary and population shift

pressures that they have today.

Moving on, let me just pause here and pass it back over to Phil.

And actually before we go on I noticed that there were several – a lot of questions in the Chat that it might

make sense to address somewhat or at least raise them. One of the questions that was coming in at the

end there, Michael, was saying about where do the instructors fit in and does this lead to the view that

instructors are sort of interchangeable based on what you’re saying with the courseware versus course

type of (inaudible).

I think (audio break) the answer to that question has yet to be written, but I think there is at least as good

a chance that it’s a move in the opposite direction, that, in fact, MOOCs as courses really suggests that

the MOOC is self-sufficient and you have, maybe, if there are five MOOCs on a topic out in the world, you

have five real instructors for that particular class in the world. Whereas MOOCs as courseware suggests

that there is a definitive value for an instructor as a facilitator and a coach and a local expert who is

engaged individually with the students. Now that role – the role of the instructor – is inevitably going tochange in this model, but it isn’t necessarily a devaluation at all.

Okay. And a related question I’m seeing (inaudible) from Kevin is like where does the practice and

feedback occur, you know, the focus on course materials puts the emphasis on content delivery which is

a small part of learning. And one thing – I would ask you to answer that, Michael, but before we do, I just

want to clarify, a lot of what we’re describing in what we’re seeing and where we see the trends going.

Don’t treat this as our argument on here’s what should happen.

Right.

So just keep in mind a lot of this is what we’re seeing, but if you could address that I think it would be

helpful, and then we can get to the last slide.

Yeah, that’s a great point, Phil. We’re not advocating for what the future of MOOCs should be except to

say that whatever the future MOOC should be, it should be adapted to meet the needs of the students

that you’re trying to serve rather than a copy of some MOOC you saw somewhere else.

In terms of where the practice and feedback comes, I think that’s going to vary widely from subject to

subject and approach to approach. Even in face-to-face classes, in some subjects we’re seeing a lot of

robo-grading where that assessment and feedback happens in the software. On the other hand, there

are subjects, writing being a prominent one, where there’s still a lot of human feedback and that’s still

essential. You could argue even in the subjects where there is robo-feedback, the goal there should be if

you’re in a biology class, use the software to make sure that students know the biology and use the

humans to help the students think like biologists. Even that’s probably a simplistic division. But I don’tthink there’s any one answer to that question, and then it’s another reason why we need to not take a

factory approach to MOOCs and decide that we know what they already need to look like.

Yep. And a very good point that I would actually highlight that Nathaniel just brought up is that the role of

teachers in MOOCs, particularly in X-MOOCs I would clarify, appears to be heading toward design and

delivery. I would agree with that statement. I’m seeing more of a trend that yes, teachers are involved in

the upfront design, but it’s becoming much more of a team-based design as opposed to an individual

design in a course. And that’s a trend, it’s not completely out there. But I see teachers getting very

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involved in that. And then I think you’re right, them getting much more involved in the actual delivery

and/or facilitation of that. So I do think that the role of the instructor, of the teacher is changing over time.

I think that’s a very valid point that’s been raised here.

So one other thing I’d like to bring up with this slide is the fact that if we look at where MOOCs are most

influential, in my opinion MOOCs are not necessarily hitting their biggest influence in and of themselves.

A lot of the discussion that’s going on within the popular media, particularly the New York Times, comesacross like, okay, because of the exact MOOC model coming out in late 2012, this is what will replace

traditional teaching. And there’s a lot of assumptions in there that I feel are incorrect, and one that we’re

bringing up is the fact that the definition of this is changing over time. The model of MOOCs in 2012 is

really not just changing, but branching out into multiple different approaches.

The other aspect of it is there’s a difference between a foreign element in a change process and then

what the transforming idea is. So what we’re showing here, this is actually a change model that was

created by Virginia Satir, who is a family therapist is her background actually, but it’s a very useful model

to help understand changes that people and organizations go through. And it’s sort of a variation on the

technology and option cycles actually related in certain ways. But what you’re showing is that over time if

you looked at the performance of a group, an organization, and this can be applied at a specific

institution, or online program, or even higher education as a whole, the performance is in sort of a statusquo, and that’s what’s known as delayed status quo. And there are different ideas that you tried out, but

at certain point, what happens in most significant change is you have a foreign element. And that’s really

where I see the X-MOOCs in particular being this foreign element. And the role in the change process is

it suddenly creates a change that dismantles the status quo. And that’s really the role is saying okay,

change is upon us.

Now that also triggers a pretty intense bout of resistance to the idea. And I think Malcolm brought this up

very well in the beginning talking about a lot of the pushback, a massively bad idea. Although I would

argue that in that case they misapplied what they were arguing against. It’s not just MOOCs for the

California legislation.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of resistance building up to MOOCs right now within higher education, and thisis to be expected. The performance of the system, if you will, actually tends to decrease during this

period as there’s a lot of arguing different ideas but we’re really not changing and making benefits quite

yet. But also starts to fluctuate wildly, and so you often get into a chaos period, which is I think we’re –

higher education, certainly in North America, as a system, I think we’re somewhere between the

resistance and the chaos period. And what this means is that quite often the average performance and

how well we do our job, if you will, could even be worse than when the original transforming idea came

up. And that it fluctuates wildly. You’ll find examples of just great adaptations of MOOCs that are really

helping out schools, but you’ll also find out cases, and I think we’ve seen some of these with the professor

who left the MOOC and the MOOC that was discontinued, where the performance really went to pot. It

really went down. So there’s a lot of fluctuation that happens as people in those organizations look for

what’s known as a transforming idea. And the transforming idea is when groups start saying, aha, if Iapply this idea or an adaptation of the idea, and apply it this way, I’m starting to get actual benefits,

performance benefits. And at that point, as you integrate the idea, that’s where you get the actual

performance increases and benefits to the system that we’ve done it. And then eventually you have a

new status quo.

So I guess the point I’m trying to bring up here in terms of MOOCs and why it’s important to think about

how they’re adapting is I see this as an area where MOOCs, because of the publicity, because of the

involvement of campus presidents, because of various situations – it’s almost a perfect storm (inaudible)

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coming together, they help dismantle that no longer do you hear schools arguing, or the majority of

people arguing, that online education can never work. Now you have people saying, hey, the faculty, the

provost, the president, the board of trustees, they’re fully saying yes, online is going to happen one way or

another. So the status quo has been dismantled. That’s really what the X-MOOCs have done. What’s

happening in the system, however, is people are trying to adapt and learn what’s actually going to help us

out? And these are not necessarily the same things.

So the reason to present this is the fact that let’s not just look at MOOCs as of late 2012 and assume that

that is the specific pedagogy, the specific design that’s going to be implemented going forward, nor

should we assume that just by applying it that that’s going to make everything better. And I think that’s

what’s happening in the popular media. I don’t think it’s happening within – certainly within ELI in these

discussions.

But that’s part of the reason that we think the subject is important, is understanding what MOOCs have

been and what they are, but also understanding where they’re adapting to and what types of ideas are

really going to help your institution, your students, and fulfill the real mission that needs to happen, and

that might not be the same idea that originally disrupted everything else, or, you know, triggered the

changes that have happened.

So, let’s see, now with that I guess I’d like to open it back up and see if there are other questions that we

could address. Or Michael, have you seen any that we should address right now?

Well this is Malcolm. I have a $64,000.00 question for you two. Everybody – one that really cuts

(inaudible). Based on your perspective on the events since you are so up to speed on what’s going on,

here’s the question. Is the MOOC a good vehicle for learning?

That’s a loaded question.

Well, it’s a good one, too. Now just – it is – what do you think about that, because that must be a

question you get asked as well.

Sure. And I think it would be good to get both of our perspectives on it. From my perspective, is it a good

– give me the phrase again – is it a good method for learning? Or environment?

Vehicle. The term I used was vehicle for learning.

Vehicle. I don’t perceive MOOCs as they – particularly X-MOOCs – I don’t perceive them as, by

themselves, a good vehicle for learning. What I do perceive them is opening up a whole new set of

opportunities for learning because of the open access and the changing assumptions underlying our

pedagogies, for example. Now you don’t have all the same types of students. Now you have the

opportunity to have learners who come in just for a specific topic and then leave. It opens up a lot or

potential for student-to-student interaction and learning that happens in that way. So is it- I think it opens

up or enables very good vehicles for learning, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the current design of

MOOCs by themselves with no further changes are necessarily perfect or very good vehicles for learning.

They’re there, but I think there are bigger powers enabling new approaches.

Michael, do you want to comment Michael?

Yeah, I guess my answer is that asking that question is a little bit like asking if a poem is a good vehicle

for communication. And the answer is sometimes. And even within that category of poetry, we have, you

know, maybe the X-MOOCs are sonnets and the C-MOOCs are haiku, and you know, those have very

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different characteristics. Whether you’re – what are you teaching to whom, and what are their goals, and

what are your goals? I think the C-MOOCs have done some really interesting and important

experimentation around community and self-organization as an effective method for teaching. The X-

MOOCs have mainly reproduced the pedagogical strategies of the lecture hall and shown that to the

degree that those scale to 150 people, they can scale to 150,000 people. And those are very different

goals and very different approaches, and I think what you see, the value that you see in them depends on

the value that you see in those goals and in those methods. But, again, MOOC is a form. It’s something

that we use. It’s also like asking, you know, what is a blog good for? Well, what are you trying to do with

it?

Yep. I would just say, actually, Malcolm, one other quick note. I just want to pick up on what Josh

(inaudible) put in in the comments, the fact that X-MOOCs, I do have to say, have really opened up a

campus dialogue. People who have not been involved in truly looking at online learning and what it’s

(end of audio)

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everything you think you know about moocs could be wrong (166367284)

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