A few weeks ago in London, the UK’s Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, stood up to address a conference on robotics and automation. MOOCs, he declared, were a significant part of the drive toward a new age of technology-driven learning.
‘The crucial feature of the MOOC,’ Willetts told his audience, ‘is the capacity that the owners of those systems have to analyse every key stroke.’ In other words, the technology associated with MOOCs not only allows for greater participation (some courses have hundreds of thousands of students), but also specific tailoring of courses to meet student needs and abilities through the use of advanced data analytics.
It was the perfect pitch for the MOOC vision: a way of teaching students that’s in tune with the digital age; that eschews bricks-and-mortar lecture halls in favour of online tutorials; that offers portability of education and a massive reach, unrestricted by geography.
MOOCs are a potentially radical business model, and I think that a lot of people who were promoting them were actually business people, not necessarily educators.
Pioneered by top US universities like Harvard and MIT, MOOCs continue to be the talk of the tertiary sector—‘democratising’ education, it’s often said, and broadening its global reach.
Two years ago, the New York Times went so far as to declare 2012 ‘the year of the MOOC’ and since that time MOOC platforms like Udacity, edX and Coursera have continued to sign-up more and more universities—institutions keen to be seen at the cutting edge of education.
But in mid-2014, it’s clear some of the gloss is beginning to fade, as new research indicates that MOOCs aren’t yet living up to their ‘revolutionary’ reputation.
‘This is experimental in nature. These platforms, at the level that we are talking about, have never been built before,’ concedes edX Chief Executive Anant Agarwal.
EdX was jointly founded by Harvard and MIT and lists among its participating partners the Australian National University and the University of Queensland. Although it now offers more than 180 courses to around 2.3 million people, it’s still very much a work in progress, according to Argawal, who is surprisingly frank about the difficulties involved in living up to initial expectations of the technology.
‘I think some of the very early rhetoric for MOOCs may have scared professors and other universities. Certainly some of the early MOOC purveyors made some very bold claims about how many universities would be left standing and so on, which frankly hurt everybody. I think if we had been a lot more circumspect in how we had gone about this, I think a lot more people would have been involved.’
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David White, a highly respected specialist in technology-assisted lifelong learning, believes the pulling power of the original universities involved was a major factor in the phenomenal growth of MOOCs.
People rush to register for MOOCs not because they’re attracted to the format, he suggests, but because they want to be associated with top-tier institutions like Berkeley, Stanford or Harvard. It’s more about branding, White argues, than it is about educational outcomes.
‘MOOCs are a potentially radical business model, and I think that a lot of people who were promoting them were actually business people, not necessarily educators.’
‘What's intriguing to me, having worked in online distance learning for over a decade, is that they were hailed as radical, and in some senses the fact that they are free and open-access is radical. But from a pedagogical point of view they are very old-fashioned generally, because they involve starting on module one, reading some content, watching a video of a lecture, having a think about it, maybe talking to fellow students, and then doing a quiz or some kind of fairly automated assessment. Now, that is not radical pedagogy. If anything, in the world of online learning, that is a step backwards.’
Research conducted by the Global Initiatives unit at the University of Pennsylvania has also cast doubt on the ability of MOOCs to promote equality and greater global access to education.
Executive Director Gayle Christensen and her team studied 32 MOOCs, analysing the specifics of more than 400,000 registered users in order to get a clearer profile of the sorts of people attracted to a MOOCs education and, more specifically, just how many of them were from poor nations.
What the team found, according to Christensen, was that the vast majority of participants, around 75 per cent, were either from the United States or another wealthy OECD country, and only around a third were from the developing world.
Christensen also found that 83 per cent of the participants studied were already highly educated by world standards, holding either a degree or at least a diploma.
While those results tend to pour cold water on the idea of MOOCs as a revolutionary global education force benefitting the poor, Christensen says they shouldn’t come as a surprise given what we already know about technology adoption trends: ‘What we know is that new technologies tend to attract those who are highly educated and have access to resources, and so that's exactly what we saw in the results here.’
‘So even in countries where less than 10 per cent of the population has a college degree, you are still seeing that the majority of people who are taking these courses are college educated, close to 80 per cent. The other finding is that this is heavily skewed male, and that's also typical of new technologies, that men tend to take up new technologies first.’
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Then there’s the question of student retention rates.
Late last year, US researchers from Boston University, MIT and Microsoft examined the behaviour of over 100,000 MOOC students, looking specifically at their levels of engagement.
They concluded that the online participation of students registered for MOOCs falls dramatically almost from day one; with around half of registered students, for example, never posting more than twice to an online MOOCs discussion forum.
One of the suggested reasons for this is a sense of disconnect that students can feel in taking an online course where physical social contact with lecturers and other students is either limited or non-existent.
For edX, at least, recognition of that need for engagement has helped reshape the company’s rhetoric—CEO Anant Agarwal now talks about MOOCs as part of a ‘blended’ educational experience; one that combines online lectures with traditional face-face interactions.
And according to Agarwal, improving and strengthening those social connections is now a major priority.
‘From the very first course we had some social components,’ he says. ‘We had simulation-based laboratories, we had video, we had a discussion forum, we had a wiki where students could collaborate, we had a grades dashboard where they could watch their grades. What we didn't know when we started out was the relative importance of these components.’
‘As researchers have done studies, and as we get feedback from students, we are finding that the social component is extremely important for engagement. What might be less important is the actual production quality of the video. So the engagement of the professor and the enthusiasm of the professor might be more important than just whether the video is super high-quality HD or less high quality. We are learning all of these things, and based on that we are iterating on the platform and putting more focus on areas where we think we can get the most improvement, not just in student engagement, but also in the quality of learning.’
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However, at least one of the world’s leading tertiary institutions remains far from convinced. Oxford University Pro-Vice Chancellor of Education Sally Mapstone describes the MOOC approach as the ‘antithesis’ of her university’s vision of pedagogical excellence. While they continue to keep watch on the MOOCs phenomenon, Mapstone says the university has no intention of adopting the model anytime soon.
‘So much of the education that we deliver is very individual, very personalised for the tutorial system,’ says Mapstone, ‘two people sitting in a room with a tutor, teaching them on a regular basis, there are eight-week terms, getting to know their work and them really well. That's a very long way away from a massive open online course distributed across the world to global learners.’
‘There are all sorts of subjects which it would be very difficult to deliver with the depth and breadth that we associate with an Oxford education in a MOOC. When you are studying a degree course at university you have to do a tremendous amount of reading around, hunter-gathering, research, all sorts of different forms of interaction, and the notion that an online course—albeit supported by peer-grading, a certain amount of interaction and so forth—could ever substitute for the in-depth experience of going to university for three or four years, and studying directly with others and with tutors is something that, I think, needs to be knocked on the head.’
‘MOOCs are a supplement potentially to university education, they shouldn't be seen as a substitute for it.’
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