Communications of the ACM
Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
"Thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee," wrote the prophet Isaiah. This phrase has been popping into my mind as I have been following the recent raging discussions over the topic of MOOCs.
For those readers who paid no attention to recent developments, a MOOC is massive open online course; it is a tuition-free course taught over the Web to a large number of students. While online education has a long history, the current wave started in the fall of 2011 when about 450,000 students signed up for three computer-science courses offered by Stanford University. Since then, MOOCs have become the hottest topic of discussion in higher education in the U.S. Within months of the Stanford experiments, several start-up companies debuted, including one that immodestly claims to be "the first elite American university to be launched in a century." Many leading U.S. universities now offer MOOCs, either on their own or in partnership with some of these companies, even though no business model has emerged for MOOC-based education. Some describe the current environment as "MOOC panic" or "MOOC mania." John Hennessy, Stanford's president, describes the phenomenon as a "tsunami."
Early rhetoric about the educational value of MOOCs was quite lofty, talking about the goal of reaching the quality of individual tutoring, but it is difficult to reconcile such rhetoric with massiveness as an essential feature of MOOCs. A more honest comment from one of the early MOOC pioneers was: "We were tired of delivering the same lectures year after year, often to a half-empty classroom because our classes were being videotaped." In fact, the absence of serious pedagogy in MOOCs is rather striking, their essential feature being short, unsophisticated video chunks, interleaved with online quizzes, and accompanied by social networking.
The bitter truth, however, is that academic pedagogy has never been very good. It is well established that a professorial soliloquy is an ineffective way of teaching. We do know what works and what does not work when it comes to teaching. Much has been written in the last few years about "active learning," "peer learning," "flipping the lecture," and the like, yet much of academic teaching still consists of professors monologuing to large classes. We could undoubtedly improve our teaching, but MOOCs are not the answer to our pedagogical shortcomings.
To understand the real significance of MOOCs you must consider the financial situation in which U.S. colleges and universities have found themselves in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The financial crisis dealt a severe blow to U.S. higher education. Private institutions saw their endowments take significant hits, while public institutions saw state support, which was already shrinking, decline even faster. While outstanding student debt has exceeded the $1T mark, students are facing a highly constrained job market, challenging their ability to repay their debt. After years of college tuition escalating faster than inflation, the very value of college education is being seriously questioned; an Internet entrepreneur is even offering a skip-college fellowship. In this environment, the prospect of higher education at a dramatically reduced cost is simply irresistible.
It is clear, therefore, that the enormous buzz about MOOCs is not due to the technology's intrinsic educational value, but due to the seductive possibilities of lower costs. The oft-repeated phrase is "technology disruption." This is the context for the dismissal (and later reinstatement) last summer of Theresa A. Sullivan, University of Virginia's president, because she was not moving fast enough with online education. The bigger picture is of education as a large sector of the U.S. economy (over $1T) that has so far not been impacted much by information technology. From the point of view of Silicon Valley, "higher education is a particularly fat target right now." MOOCs may be the battering ram of this attack.
My fear is the financial pressures will dominate educational consideration. In his recent book What Are Universities For?, Stefan Collini, a Cambridge don, describes universities as "perhaps the single most important institutional medium for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific and artistic heritage of mankind....we are merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create, and which is not ours to destroy." If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear, but I am afraid that we have let the genie out of the bottle.
Moshe Y. Vardi, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
©2012 ACM 0001-0782/11/01 $15.00
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Comments
Anonymous
" In fact, the absence of serious pedagogy in MOOCs is rather striking, their essential feature being short, unsophisticated video chunks, interleaved with online quizzes, and accompanied by social networking." Why not make MOOCS more demanding, more challenging? Why not improve them? I believe they are useful and those attending them may have no other opportunity to higher education.
Monica Marcus
"If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear, but I am afraid that we have let the genie out of the bottle." He is a good genie, but still in his childhood. I am no longer a student, but I took one of the courses offered by Stanford, and I enjoyed it very much. I believe MOOCS should improve, become more challenging, and allow students from all over the world to learn from famous professors.
Timothy Zimmerlin
(humor alert)
Come on now! We all intuitively know in our hearts that successful universities will successfully crush all threats to their hegemony. That is the way of the world: large parcels of land, grandiose monuments of architecture, massive utility infrastructures for electricity, water, sewage, steam, several embedded unions, a local economy existing for support, political power locally and state wide, mountains of alumni, sports, sports, sports, scholarships, embedded hospitals, fully funded research centers. Relax, don't worry, breath. A little fresh air is good.
(seriously)
Any thoughtful person knows that learning is the sole responsibility of the student and never doubts that a professor is a student. Any right thinking person is open to knowledge and so a lifelong student. When I was a freshman, all the freshmen were invited to a lecture and told to look to our left, look to our right because one of those freshman would not be coming back as sophomores. When I was an upper class and graduate student, I saw that like medical doctors only one third of the professors were competent. I only took classes from competent professors. I reinforced learning during lectures, while I vetted my knowledge based on reading and discussions. I learned best in brief "ah-hah" encounters with brilliant people including some Nobel laureates and teaching assistants "who really understood". Most of the class time was irrelevant, but one never knew when something useful would happen. A class video could capture the brief relevant interactions while allowing students to skip the rest.
Competent professors and TAs religiously focused on real time comprehension in class. Competent professors and TAs reliably detected failing students and took immediate remedial action to bring them into the fold or get them out of the class. Incompetent professors and TAs were unable to answers questions just a little outside the course syllabus. The longer a professor taught the same class, the worse their behavior.
There are only three general reasons to struggle through formal education: get a diploma in order to get one's dream job, forge professional relationships in order to be successful at one's dream job, and to learn. No, no, no, fraternities are only a means of avoiding a formal education while appearing to succeed.
The deeply involved stewards of formal education have carried on a philosophical debate since American land-grant colleges appeared in the later 1800s. To whit, is the classical Greek style of formal education (small groups, dialogues, constant barrage of questions posed to the students, community of equals, all questions are important, poverty, travel groups, extra projects, follow one's nose) better than the factory model of large public institutions (students are chattel to be bought and sold, professors control curriculum, students learn what they are taught when they are taught, bigger is better, follow the money, play politics, consult to the government, milk the cash cows from tuition, fees, textbooks, consulting, side businesses). The debate carries on; however, any right thinking individual knows two things: the classic Greek style caters to the student while the factory model caters to the professor. Unfortunately, the government has been sold on B. F. Skinner's theories. That is unfortunate for the younger students who idolize their dream university.
Anonymous
People can become educated by their own means. Pickup a book and read it. I'm not saying all information on the internet is true or completely accurate.If you know your sources, you can excel past the conformist education system we have in place. Ever since the internet, the availability of information has become so simple. I think the price of education is a complete "joke". It becomes quite apparent, this society is about paying your "dues". Great!!! I get an awesome education , then you spend your entire life paying it off. Doesn't seem like a good deal to me. Especially when you have invested most of your life toward "success" to wind up finding your choice was a bad one. I think the careers they sell you on have the potential to be eliminated and they know it. My point is we need change, and not our politicians version of it.
Anonymous
MOOC is one format of class offering and there would be a subjacent "business model". The real subject is the fact that we are facing a Software Based Education and Formation Systems, or using another term: Internet Based Learning Management System - IBLMS. MOOC is simply one the manifestations! What is challenging is to analyze how the current education/formation system will deal with the software based "genie" :-)
I guess Vardi does not have the answer, and his text ends with a provocative alert:
"We have let the genie out of the bottle"
Anonymous
The quote from "What Are Universities For?" is so ideological that it's completely ignoring reality. It's all good and well to speak of raising the next generation of intellectuals, but the reality is that the majority of middle-class jobs now require a college degree, even at introductory levels. The only jobs you can get with a high school education are going to leave you well below the poverty line. So, no, today's higher education racket is no longer about raising the next generation of intellectuals - it's about getting people of piece of paper so that they can earn a living salary.
This is, ultimately, the problem. Companies started making a degree a requirement. As soon as universities realized that a degree was a necessity for a decent wage they got greedy and decided to game the system - raising costs across the board at an extreme rate. Costs and student debt are so high now that this needs to be normalized. We've gone past the tipping point. Now some companies (largely tech companies) no longer see any value in a degree, but rather on the skills you have (because a degree does not equal skill or knowledge anymore). Since all they need are the skills, many people are turning to these free MOOCs to give them said skills. Eventually this will all balance itself out - with college attendance dropping and subsequent decreases in university costs. However, the MOOC is needed to help balance the scales.
Anonymous
The indicativie line of this article is this one: "2012 ACM 0001-0782/11/01 $15.00"
You really are "custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create". Gate-keepers and rent-seekers, limiting and preventing the distribution of this intellectual inheritance, instead of facilitating it.
We don't need an *institutional medium* for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific and artistic heritage of mankind - we can do it better without you. For free. For everyone.
Anonymous
Will MOOC's destry Academia seems to infer that MOOCs and are not part of Academia. Very narrow minded view. I see strong parallels between MOOCs and traditional higher education and the Open Source software movement in the 80's and "professional software companies". One did not destroy the other en-mass but many of the "professional companies" who failed to embrace change fell by the way side. And to be fair, many (a huge number infact) of open source projects once started have died. I expect we will see many traditional higher ed companies (lets just call a spade a spade ok - they are companies whether private or public) will fail, and many more MOOCs will fail, but the new force will cause great changes in the survivors on both sides.
As far as the fear that financial pressures will dominate ... maybe it is about time to force higher ed to be competative and offer real value (as only real value can be measured - by your customers who vote with their dollars). The lack of accountabiity in higher ed, the culture of hubris and entitlement and concepts like tenure are completely antiquated.
Eric Haines
Your fear is that "the financial pressures will dominate educational consideration". People normally use economics to determine their choices. There are some exceptions, it's a popular field of writing to point out where human psychology differs from purely economic reasoning, but for the most part economics is the critical factor. You know as well as I that rich people's children are more likely to go to expensive institutions. Asking parents to pay more to maintain a "complex intellectual inheritance" along with getting an education is placing an undue burden on one particular group of people.
I think MOOCs will enhance colleges that take advantage of them. Think about textbooks: we don't consider them a danger to academia, that each textbook author is destroying a teacher's competitive advantage. I expect if we lived in a world where each professor was, by tradition, made to write his or her own textbook, the cost savings of selling textbooks would be considered extremely disruptive to the system.
MOOCs are about education; colleges are about getting a degree, education, development of young adults, clubs, sports, and parties, among much else. These elements are of interest to students and any parents helping with the bills, though not always in the same order. Colleges of various sorts have had online courses for many years, with the same elements as MOOCs. These are usually not as well-produced, but have other advantages, such as the potential for a closer teacher-student relationship.
I just finished helping to create a MOOC through Udacity. It's extremely fulfilling to see posts on the forum such as, "in my country I think we dont have schools making this kind of Course". 71% of the 22K students in our course are from outside the U.S. MOOCs reach those who can't afford the cost or don't otherwise have the ability to be full-time students.
I was happy to see the recent CACM article "Reflections on Stanford's MOOCs", which gives a much more positive view of how educators are creatively integrating new technologies into their classes.
Robert Wilkens
I have a bachelors in computer science, never took a biology or chemistry class since maybe high school.. Took a course on drugs and the brain on a MOOC, and scored something like 97%, which in some circles would be considered a high 'a' which would make you think i was expert in the subject matter... I didn't cheat once for the quizzes, and I never referred to other students for answers.. But... in the end, it's now 2-3 months later, and i'm not sure i really remember or could explain all that much that i allegedly "learned" in the online course... Ultimately, i decided for me it was a complete waste of time, and for others, just remember that a high score on a MOOC really says nothing other than your ability to memorize information and spit it back over a short period.
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