No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach. Simple, fine. But society wants teachers with research-frontier-level knowledge, so it unified the two functions in research universities. Unfortunately, society wants to pay at the level of free-to-cheap, both for tuition and for public investment.
So we get ever-rising tuition driven by state cutbacks, ever-rising student debt, ever-tightening research funding, and MOOCs. A reasonably good institution (research academia) is destroyed because nobody really believes in its original mission (uniting teaching with research) anymore, and just want its members to specialize in one aspect or the other.
I'm also struck by academics willing to give away their content for free, rather than hoard it for the students who might be going into lifelong debt to hear it in person. this makes me think the lecture model of learning is more of a status raising ego-trip for the professor, rather than the most efficient way to transfer information to students.
governments should be funding universities because R&D has social and economic benefits. However, the paying customers of universities (students) are primarily interested in the job market, so universities will have a role as long as companies continue to use them as hiring filters. since direct aptitude testing by corporations is a legally tricky area, i predict the current credentialing system is unlikely to change for a while.
The academics in question might have little choice but to give away some/most of the content for free, as it is often mandated by university- or department-level policy. At least as far as internal use of the courses is concerned, the incentive here is clear for the university: reduce your dependency on a given superstar prof leaving (very slightly, admittedly).
As for the ego trip, I doubt it (in most cases): research gives you the recognition of your peers. There is a clear trade-off in allocating your time towards stellar teaching or stellar research. Few professors manage both. And stellar teaching tends to get much lower recognition from the peers.
> No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach.
I disagree. Some academics want to do research. Some want to teach. However, the way for a university to gain prestige is to have active research programs, so prestigious universities emphasize research over teaching, and the prestige attracts students better than quality teaching does. If there's a contradiction, it's that students say they want to be taught, but when given the choice, choose prestige over teaching.
MOOCS are nice as a kind of podcast when they are on a n interesting subject. That being said I don't see them replacing academia until three big problems are solved.
The first is the value added problem, at the end of the day they aren't better than normal lectures and are actually a bit worse. It's funny that even the most innovate institutions have accomplished little more than putting lectures up online. Lectures are about on level with books when it comes to retention. A much better model would be adopting something more like code academy with a good balance of interactivity and theory.
The second and probably most important problem is the depth problem. You don't go to college to take general ed requirements. You go to take the high level sophisticated classes in your field. These classes are rarely delivered in the form of a lecture and often have extensive lab courses and student teacher interaction. I've yet to see a MOOC that can replace this effectively. Similarly, there is no good model for students to come in and pick up lab classes or lab materials. I'm sure there is a volunteer system that could do it, but it doesn't exist yet.
The final problem is of course credentialing. While many classes provide you with a certificate at the end the value of this is really up in the air. For most people, a certificate is unnecessary, the value is in the material, but if they plan to replace colleges they need to solve this problem.
I think MOOCs are the future. Just more like the 10 or 15 year future over the 5 to 10 year future.
"at the end of the day they aren't better than normal lectures and are actually a bit worse"
True, however I see the value in replacing horrible lectures. I haven't seen a MOOC with truly awful video lectures, yet.
However I personally attended classes where both the prof and the TA for all practical purposes didn't speak English. Given a well written syllabus and a non-MOOC lecture series like the MIT OCW calculus where you can search and skip around and pick the lecture to match your syllabus, you don't really need an English speaking prof or TA...
"if they plan to replace colleges" higher ed was originally an aspirational good where the smart and non-rich aspired to hang out with the rich. I don't think allowing any idiot to watch videos for free is quite the same business model.
Also I think it weird that most of the people discussing MOOC credentialing have clearly never heard of technical certificates. You can always identify the "insider techies" vs the "outsiders" by how people who don't know what the acronym CCNA stand for are mystified by how credentialing could happen, in contrast to the guys who got their CCNA in the 90s consider it merely business as usual and roll their eyes... another "future is already here, just not evenly distributed". Its hard to believe around a decade ago I was doing CCNA and CCNP tests online at prometric or whatever it was called. I see no particular reason prometric or whoever cannot offer a 32 test package where you get a BSCS equiv if you pass them all. If you eliminate the education and stick to training, thus eliminating the liberal arts classes, and skip the "see spot run" intro classes, a BSCS training equivalent is probably more like 10 to 15 tests not 32.
One big problem is Cisco tests used to be something like $250 and that kind of credentialing cost is rapidly approaching old fashioned school tuition.
MOOCs combine the INCREDIBLE FREEDOM (and efficacy) of self-directed learning with the benefit of access to discipline-leading educators, scaleable web-based interactivity, and active participatory online community.
Even given all that, nothing can replace the educational value of a 5 minute meatworld conversation with someone more knowledgeable than you. Unfortunately, this does not describe 99% of university experiences. I get better (more productive) conversations at my local hackerspace than I ever did during my undergrad years. And I'm the kind of person who is not happy unless I am learning.
I'm never going back to academia because I need relevant, active learning to be an every day thing.
Academia is really only appropriate for people who want to produce original research, (and also want that research to be taken seriously.)
And that's only because we haven't figured out a better system of peer review outside of academia with sufficiently high standards of ethics, quality, credibility and adherence to scientific methods.
So yeah. Even if you don't consider the depreciating real-world value of university degrees, academia is in trouble.
IMHO if academia wants to survive it needs to take a serious look at the real, tangible value it provides society and focus on that (and only that.)
Aside: There are plenty of shitty MOOCs, plenty that don't suit my learning style, but there is also a handful of golden MOOCs that have absolutely changed my life, and shape how I view the world. The difference between a shitty MOOC and a shitty pre-requisite or required university course is that you can leave the MOOC, stop participating and learn the content elsewhere. You are never locked into an unpleasant learning experience. Shitty MOOCs will either have to get better or die. In the shitty university course, you either suffer or fail. It's not a hard choice to make, given a choice.
Many in Europe are eyeing it as a possible opening. If U.S. academia implodes over its teaching-related parts (tuition/etc.), perhaps accelerated by MOOCs, will it take the research dominance of U.S. academia down with it, too?
As least in Scandinavia, we don't feel MOOCs are a huge threat to us, because there is no tuition, so there is no real financial reason for students to prefer MOOCs. Maybe some will out of personal preference, and some might take some extra MOOC courses as enrichment, but it seems unlikely that most students will choose to forgo a university degree. Therefore they will probably damage U.S. academia but not ours.
If so, is this an opening for Europe to take over world leadership in academic research, through a mixture of internal cultivation and hiring away distressed American faculty? The recent addition of English-language degree programs (and increasing internal use of English) removes some of the practical problems that used to be in the way of doing so.
I only skimmed this article, but I don't see how this argument works. US "academia" (in the sense of the top handful of universities in any given field) isn't supported by student tuition in any meaningful way. It's supported mostly by government grants to the science departments and by alumni giving (typically buffered by a large endowment foundation) to make up the slack. Only schools with no graduate programs (i.e. pretty much "not academia" by typical definition) need to get by on tuition.
US academic institutions are dominant because they have more money (largely because of historical government policy), not because of any monopoly position enjoyed over the students. I can certainly see European or Asian institutions taking over this lead, but certainly not because students want to attend "MOOCs". If you want a top-tier university go and buy one.
That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recent years (as those grants have fallen) tuition/fees. If we decide that we don't really need to educate people that way anymore, then the University of California system should be much smaller (if it still exists at all), and those researchers are going to have to find somewhere else to research, or leave research and do something else.
If that happened, California could take the money they aren't spending on the UC system anymore, and decide just to fund research directly, setting up a state research institution that isn't a university. Maybe they will; I have no idea.
Makes sense. Though again, that's not exactly breaking the back of an existing monopoly. Frankly if you wanted to do direct research funding the obvious mechanism would be just to increase the direct grants paid right now, which are going to existing university faculty.
I think you and the grandparent both seem to be arguing that "removing the undergraduates and sending them to MOOCs" will somehow change the character of the way "academia" works, and that's what I just don't see. Undergraduates are a side project at these schools -- as mentioned, they don't provide meaningful funding (tuition breaks even at best). And at most, they provide a cheap labor pool for the research programs. Take them away and you'd never notice the difference.
I expect the top tier schools will see their positions strengthened while everyone else sees the bottom fall out from underneath them. There are private schools that, rather than having a big endowment, have large amounts of debt which require revenue growth to service.
Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.
Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.
But there are other data points. Stanford's rise to prominence in the 1960's (people forget that for quite some time it was a tiny college with no notoriety at all) was driven by almost exactly this kind of thing: they came into a huge endowment and embarked on an affirmative program to recruit top-tier talent in a big list of fields. And it worked.
Obviously details matter. A university in Riyadh is going to be disadvantaged vs. one in Palo Alto, but the idea that professors can be encouraged to move by big paychecks shouldn't be controversial.
I hope this doesn't come across as defensive, or as some form of national pride ... but I'm not sure I agree. If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more education to more people, then the lower cost of obtaining said education should produce more, not fewer, researchers.
Of course, if this comes to pass, then the same would be true for every country with ubiquitous access to the internet. In such a case, the proverbial rising tide would lift all boats equally :)
Even if they do succeed in that goal, I'm not sure the result of more researchers follows. Most of what they're targeting is replacing bachelor-level education, for one thing, not PhD-level. But more importantly, research is currently more constrained by funding and positions than availability of researchers. When either a university or Microsoft Research opens a position, they get hundreds of applicants. Even for postdoc jobs there are many more researchers than jobs. If several physics departments have to close, thousands of new students who've successfully taken physics MOOCs isn't going to make up for the closure of those research labs, from the perspective of progress in physics.
It's possible something else could replace those physics labs. Maybe Microsoft Research and similar non-academic labs will get larger, and expand out of computer science, more like the old Bell Labs? The U.S. could decide, alternately, that funding research is a priority, but doing it via hybrid educational/research institutions (the classic "research university") isn't going to work anymore, and choose to fund research-only institutions, e.g. bring the national labs back to the forefront. That's plausible, but I'm not sure there's political support for it.
I think currently it really comes down to the type of person enrolled in a MOOC. MOOC's certainly lower the barrier to accessing top level educational material, however that helps the people enrolled in them minimally if they are not motivated to fully take advantage. The comment made about MOOC's not having the same effect on people because they have no tuition is partially valid because of this.
My point is that with our current culture surrounding education, I don't believe that MOOCS will be powerful enough to topple academia. People just simply don't care enough about their education in America. I think that MOOCs would probably be much more effective in other countries, where education is not taken for granted.
However as time passes, and the culture around education shifts in the US, perhaps people would be more inclined to use MOOCS to their fullest potential.
Bold statement that has been proven wrong already. Khanacademy is a point against decreasing "willingness", as is Coursera. Most of their participants would not otherwise attend a formal course, either because of cost, living circumstances or some other factor. In fact, the "poaching" of students from traditional venues is limited.
"As least in Scandinavia, we don't feel MOOCs are a huge threat to us, because there is no tuition, so there is no real financial reason for students to prefer MOOCs."
At least the best Stanford MOOCs, Machine Learning and Databases, were taught much better, and the material and exercises were much more carefully planned, than most of what I'd expect at least in any university in Finland.
Now, I hear Coursera has also some bad quality MOOCs, but as long as the very best courses by the very best lecturers can be offered to the whole world as MOOCs, their better quality should be a strong reason the prefer them over some mediocre course in a local uni.
I took a class on Coursera. In that particular instance, I found no value in the online discussions (which seemed often pretty off-topic), and mainly I just watched the videos. I don't know how common this is for Coursera classes, but it left me with the impression that they might not need to be "classes" at all: just make educational television programs (or YouTube videos, or DVDs, or whatever).
This spring I am participating in the MIT Media Lab class on Learning Creative Learning, which is running online in parallel with an on-campus class. Between the combination of live videos from campus, readings, relevant online discussions, and assigned activities that we share with others in the class, to me, this class feels much more vibrant and engaging than my Coursera experience.
If future of MOOCs is more like this Media Lab class, then I'm looking forward to it. If it's more like Coursera, then I'd just as soon read a book in many cases.
But do either of these topple the existing world of academia? Coursera, sadly, might be a fine replacement for huge standard classes in which students are lectured at, and a Media Lab-style class could probably be a good replacement for many other classes.
I think though that the students need to take the classes more seriously for it to really work out. It seems to me that students are more likely to make a reasonable attempt at learning if they are paying tuition and risking getting bad grades on their record at a physical school than they are in a free online class which offers no particular negative response if they just totally blow it off. While we see huge numbers of people registering for MOOCs, it appears that a much smaller number of people actually complete the classes in any meaningful way.
Books accomplish pretty much the same thing as moocs, yet the academy survived the invention of the printing press. I'm sure moocs will have their place, but I think fears about the destruction of academia are a little exaggerated.
Moocs are in the majority better than corresponding books.
Generally books are more detailed (and expensive) than most students would need or benefit at a "first read". When I pick up a university-level text without the need to study for an exam, I usually don't follow through. Mostly because I get stuck somewhere. With Moocs that doesn't happen.
Moocs are currently only scraping the surface of what is possible with computerassisted instruction. They offer quizzes. But in the future I fully expect interactive Tutoring software that would for example be able to "nudge" you towards the solution of a problem, train you in a particular skill through repetition or even check a proof for a math problem.
I'm old enough to just barely remember frantic screaming about VHS video cassette lectures would destroy academia. 20 years later academia was still around so I could pay lots of money to attend, but a decade or to ago VHS cassette tapes mostly disappeared.
It is rather reminiscent of claims the VCR would destroy Hollywood back in the 70s/80s. Complete with the (hidden?) assumption that the existing business model is worth saving, that useless jobs must be saved at any cost, anti-technological progress rants...
I've found MOOC to be a real new hobby of mine. I believe they have more value for a lifelong learner or a professional than for a bored 20-something.
I hold especially dearly edx courses (though I'm doing something at udacity and Stanford), which are "semi-self-paced", i.e. there is freedom, when and where you want to listen to them, say a bathtube after a long day. But there is also a stick in the form of (rather hard) homework and exams with a long but hard deadline. Maybe I'm too little self-disciplined, but those deadlines do help me with following the course. BTW, I've totally failed CS50x where deadlines are voluntary.
With my professional work and family duties I would never be able to attend a normal course during the day (in addition to a transatlantic travel to Boston). In addition, I don't need to engage in 4/5 courses at a time like I would have to at the university. On the other hand, the cost is not that much of the problem for me and I would probably be able to pay for the course or at least the final exam, which is how I suppose they are willing to monetize in the future. Of course, provided it's nowhere near $27k tuition ;)
To sum it up, I think there are rather few people that choose an MOOC instead of going to the university providing the MOOC, where "choose" means a real choice of people that could afford it and would be admitted. However, for the rest of us it is of an immense value.
Such is the natural supply-and-demand backlash resulting from promoting excessive demand for overpriced supply. Telling every kid "you must go to college" and then persuading them to sign up for absurdly huge loans cannot end well. The end, then, is MOOCs, and whether it is well, well, the author seems to think it isn't.
Charging some $3000 per class when many classes are little more than the content of a borrowed $30 book will, with a little social media technology, culminate in a teacher loaning the books to 100x his usual class population, charging 2% the usual per student cost, and coming out of the session with more money, more successful students (though perhaps a lower percentage), and the ire of anyone else who didn't pull off this stunt first.
The long-term consequences of prolific government-promoted-and-backed loans & grants skewed the educational economy so much that the correction will be dramatic and dire - and the correction, however many may dislike it, is unavoidable thanks to the nature of supply-and-demand. Such economic meddling should be avoided in any market for exactly such reasons: there will be a correction to the natural norm, and the longer that correction is held off and the process distorted, the more destructive the correction will be ... but the correction will happen.
And really, there are at least two important counter arguments:
- if you suck, how can you preserve heritage?
- do not MOOCs also preserve heritage at least as well?
Also, the despair and lack of alternative here to the "recession" (actually, it's not a recession any more, it's a hugely unequal wealth distribution) is striking.
I'm confused, are you actually advocating only reading things you agree with? Or is this last line supposed to be indicative in some negative way of the overall quality of the article?
Well, it was rather bizarre way to close the article, which to me seemed like more of a summary about what MOOCs are and how Academia is threatened. He never really makes the case for why MOOCs are bad, which is why it was startling to me to hear his opinion against them at the end.
MOOCs have serious problems, no doubt, but declaring them to be a negative after less than four years is a bit much. And he doesn't even have a proper critique of MOOCs, he just dislikes them on the grounds that they're a danger to traditional universities.
Credentialism is destroying academia. Professors have been under pressure for decades to lower their standards, avoid making their courses difficult, and to teach things with obvious vocation relevance. Humanities departments are being slashed. General education requirements have been weakened.
Eventually, employers will realize that two-year degrees are as good as four-year degrees when it comes to vocational training. If a four-year degree represents nothing more than vocational training, why bother requiring one when a two-year degree generally suffices? By catering to credentialism and caving to student demands for vocational training, universities have set themselves up for a disaster.
> If a four-year degree represents nothing more than vocational training, why bother requiring one when a two-year degree generally suffices?
Because a debt-laden employee is a docile, loyal employee?
If you need the job badly to meet your basic obligations, you'll probably make fewer demands on the employer.
Not sure why you are conflating credentialism and vocational training; a big part of the problem is that these two are very different things. That is, students invest 4 years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up with a piece of paper that can get them in the door, but no useful skills.
It's interesting because (in Ontario, Canada) there is an ongoing trend to adopt online classes because of the touted lower costs.
Since there is an explosion of demand of students who primarily see post-secondary institutions as job training grounds (and don't necessarily understand academia), the institutions wan't to adopt these online courses to help deal with demand and attract students with the appeal of 'remote' courses, all at lower costs.
If MOOCs can be credentialed and recognized by employers, I think it's logical that they'll steal a lot of the undergrads from universities, which are the primary revenue generator for these institutions.
In my experience MOOCs don't replace the academic experience of being in a classroom, and interacting live with students and teachers. It does not replace lively discussions and debate. It does have a place in continuing education and supplementing coursework especially in technical subjects. I finished a Coursera class last month. Here is my experience
http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-most-recent-mooc-exp...
"... the academic experience of being in a classroom, and interacting live with students and teachers ... "
What does it do the the argument that traditional hybrid schools started granting credentials to online students who don't do any of the above about a decade ago? I graduated from a regional college in a program like that almost a decade ago. You can't even tell from transcript, much less the diploma, that I took systems analysis online vs in person.
Also I suppose it depends on the level of your fellow students, but before I switched to mostly online, I took plenty of classroom classes, and I found that most lively discussions and debate were either students who didn't bother doing the reading and didn't mind displaying their ignorance very inconveniently and publicly, didn't have the horsepower to figure it out, or were trying to get into heaven by stubbornly insisting on some religious interpretation.
If merely making kids talk to each other resulted in brilliance, then discussions at bars, parties, and on facebook would be worthwhile... but they just aren't, not even close. I mean, realistically, what fraction of 19 year olds have anything to say worth hearing, especially about esoteric advanced topics, and then whats the odds of having one of those people in your class (pretty low, indeed). Frankly even after completing the class and doing pretty well, more than a decade later I still don't have anything intelligible to say about diffeqs or bode stability plots.
I don't see MOOCs and universities as fulfilling the same purpose at all.
Universities are for institutionalized learning, research, and credentialing.
MOOCs are for supplemental learning afterward.
A person really should continue taking classes and learning for professional development and personal enrichment throughout his or her career. MOOCs are fantastic for that. I don't really see them as ever being a suitable replacement for an undergraduate education, though.
Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions.
However, I think MOOCs will start to replace textbooks. These Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?) serve as supplementary material to those already trying to learn something new. Signing up for one of these courses serves a similar function to purchasing a textbook.
Some are doing this better than others. Take Treehouse, which is offers some of the better online programming courses, they offer engaging videos, and projects that go with them. Treehouse is more like a TV show, or a weird YouTube channel than a class.
I read somewhere that about 80 percent of those that sign up for a class drop out (Ill look for the source). That doesn’t surprise me. I haven’t finished 90 percent of the programming textbooks I have. The reasons are the same – I own more than I have time to complete, and I use them as a reference.
> Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions.
You can have peers and mentors to go to and ask questions online just as well as you can in real life. Better, in fact, since your pool of mentors and peers is much larger. Take the programming industry. If you have questions about a particular programming concept, library, language, framework, etc. you can easily find a dedicated, knowledgeable group to bounce questions off. There's no reason why this couldn't work in other fields.
I feel like MOOCs are part of a Universities cost cutting measure aswell as an advertisement for it. Many universities are moving their introductory courses to online. By using MOOCs they don't have to have as many students in class, they can schedule alot more classes to cover more students who say have a day job, and they can get away with hiring less people. The publicity is excellent because it is a good way to get self motivated people interested in the school. Notice that very rarely are entire academic programs put online. This is nothing but good for the university who sees decreased cost and increased student quality (potentially) and increased interest in the school. Once it stops helping the school profit then the MOOCs will go away. I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
They won't destroy academia, but I certainly hope that they will destroy the "grand lecture" format. There is no point in having an average professor lecture painfully for 2 hours when you can have the same content delivered to you by an energetic, world class expert on a video that you can watch at any time you want, wherever you want and speed up, slow down or replay at your convenience.
The time and money saved by having lectures prepared on video can be spent towards more office hours, labs and workshop where the teachers and TAs can directly interact with the students and help them dig beyond the lectures by completing assignments and projects.
The University's job is to provide guidance, supervision (including for exams that give credit) and interaction with other students.
Well, they could destroy academia if the credentials start to mean something. There is no reason that a university is some special place to learn things. There are three things colleges seem to do fairly well - knowledge transfer, credentials that mean something, and research.
Knowledge transfer can happen online or anywhere if done right. Credentials that mean something is possible if there are reasonably good standards behind them that are provable. Say, some kind of standardized test/certification. Research could happen outside of the way Universities do it now.
For now those things are all tied together, but there is no intrinsic reason they have to be.
College debt is getting out of control. I could see MOOCs cannibalizing some lower tier options, like University of Phoenix, which IMO would be a good thing. But I don’t think Harvard’s going anywhere. To become more popular, MOOCs need to do a better job of marketing to employers that their credentials are just as good as some lower or mid-tier state university. Some MOOCs are already doing this, like Udacity with their plans for offline proctoring. For now, most MOOCs are basically TIVO for lectures.
For the most part though, the Moocs' credentials aren't the same as from some on-campus course, and there is not one bachelor program that is fully available from Moocs. Udacity seems to aim at such a credential, but they are at least 75% shy of that.
I'd be more worried about MOOCs as a teaching-led institution than a research-led institution.
"Learn from the best people in your field" is just as good a pitch with MOOCs as without. But it becomes much harder to see what justifies the fees at a mostly teaching (or mediocre research) university unless the quality of tuition is excellent.
I doubt it. Most people go to a university to get a piece of piece of paper that says they made it through. For most people, unis are just modern-day trade schools. Unless MOOCs can offer something that people will take seriously (i.e., a degree), little will change.
So we get ever-rising tuition driven by state cutbacks, ever-rising student debt, ever-tightening research funding, and MOOCs. A reasonably good institution (research academia) is destroyed because nobody really believes in its original mission (uniting teaching with research) anymore, and just want its members to specialize in one aspect or the other.