A short article in the New York Observer, “Are MOOCs Making the Grade,” by Jack Smith IV, yields some useful judgments on the much hyped potential of Massive Open Online Courses.
The article presents a bit of interesting history at the outset, that the ancestor of MOOCs was “Sunrise Semester,” the quaint title of a television show that aired from 1957 to 1982, in which NYU professors lectured on different subjects, and which offered the opportunity to earn college credit for a small fee.
On to the present day, critics of MOOCs argue that students are merely passive recipients of the screen experience, cannot interact with the professor, and have no give and take with classmates. MOOC supporters have counter-argued that large lecture classes also result in bored, disengaged, and passive students. Smith maintains that that is precisely the point. MOOCs are doing nothing more than replicating the least desirable aspects of the lecture experience. “The lecture-in-person is just an on-campus MOOC,” says Robert Ubell, vice dean of Online Learning at New York University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering . “They’re both ancient in style.”
Not surprisingly, the biggest headache for MOOCs is holding onto students. One composition course enrolled 15,000 but awarded only 238 certificates of completion. Some would-be students balk at the complexities of downloads and on-line grading. In general MOOCs have a 5 percent completion rate.
Granted, it can be a great advantage for an interested person to hear lectures from world-famous professors, but that has little to do with formal education or working toward a degree. Moreover, the performance aspect of such online lectures evidently leads some professors to dubious antics in order to attract and hold attention. Smith cites the example of MIT’s physicist Walter Lewin, whose stunts include “swinging on a wrecking ball to demonstrate conservation of energy.” The tendency to sensationalism in dramatic presentations is described and explained by Plato, who, in this as in many other matters, turns out to be right.
For the future, one expert told Smith, “Faculty have to rethink the material so that content deliberately is interwoven with interactivity.”
For now, the biggest advantage of MOOCs seems to lie in the hype that surrounds them. They “give a university visibility,” writes Smith, “allowing their most TED-friendly professors to stage an elaborate song-and-dance to prove to prospective students that their university can prepare them for a digital-first world, simply by dint of throwing courses on the Internet.” Udell adds, “MOOCs are great for marketing. But that’s just capitalism, and a convenient, easy way of doing things—just not for actual education.”
The truth is, nothing substitutes for the give-and-take that occurs in normal size classes and the opportunity they present to interact with professor and peers inside and outside the classroom. Education, real education, cannot be mass produced.