Sue has helped me so much over the last few years. She’s perfected the college athletic recruiting process, from start to finish, and was there for me since the very first day.
Sarah L. – University of Michigan Student-Athlete on Full Athletic ScholarshipMOOCs MOVING FORWARD
In my July post I discussed the advent of MOOCs, which stand for Massive Open Online Course, and their debut in the world of higher education. Unfortunately, an early trial has met with less than stellar results.
In January, San Jose State University partnered with Udacity, a for-profit founded by Google employee and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, to offer online versions of three SJSU math classes. The three courses were in remedial and entry-level math and statistics. Half the students were already enrolled at SJSU and the other half came from nearby community colleges and charter high schools. Students were able to seek extra help online from live tutors.
Here are the results:
- 29% passed the Udacity Remedial/Developmental Math course compared to 80% in the regular face-to-face version of the course.
- 44% of the San Jose students passed College Algebra compared to 74% in the face-to-face version.
- 51% passed the toughest class, Statistics, as compared to 74% in the traditional class.
Granted, this is a small sample. Only 100 students per class were accepted into the pilot. Even so, the poor results have led to a lot of hand-wringing by proponents of MOOCs and online learning – not to mention the politicians who have so fervently supported this alternative teaching method as a solution for woefully underfunded education budgets.
Udacity acknowledges that there were kinks in the system relating to the communication of expectations. Two of the classes were deadline-free and students fell behind. Also, professors were still writing curricula when the courses began, hardly a best practice when it comes to teaching.
Many of the students lacked access to computers or the Internet in their homes. More importantly, students in these courses didn’t have face-to-face support from qualified teachers as they would in the classroom.
Despite this poor report, I still feel there is a place for online teaching in colleges and universities. Yes, the economy is rebounding and the corresponding reinvestment in our public higher education, yet additional educational delivery methods providing even greater access for students is still needed. Perhaps, universities should very carefully select which courses are offered in the online format and to whom. Most of the students recruited to take the classes at San Jose State had already failed the entrance exam for college math or had failed remedial math once already. Self-paced learning probably works better when students already possess the required fundamental skills and prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to the next level. And, the first order of business clearly needs to be the basic tools, i.e. a working laptop and an Internet connection.
Hopefully, upcoming collaborations like the one between Udacity and Georgia Tech for a master’s degree in computer science or Coursera’s partnership with 10 state university systems will learn from the San Jose experiment. MOOCs aren’t going away anytime soon, so colleges and universities will need to figure out the best way to implement them.