Communications of the ACM

R Oldehoeft

Quite a cheerleading article for MOOCs, which have almost universally failed so far in getting even 10% of enrollees to finish a single course. The author has an investment in this, of course.

Undergraduate students, not yet adults, learn a great deal by interacting with their classroom peers, from the academic environment (sometimes way different than whence they came), and even the social peer environments around them (for better or worse). It's a hurry-up step to beginning to grow up.

The author's alternative is for unformed kids, in their jammies, to sit at computers and learn all that they might otherwise on campus. What a naive idea.

There is a better case to be made in post-graduate programs, maybe MS, maybe certificate, maybe just a specialized noodle on how to make a framisch from a gramlich. Just don't disregard the undergraduate experience, which also includes the core curricula that keep the nerds from being even more so.

Henry Lucas

Mr. or Ms. Oldehoeft

Thank you for your comments. It is difficult to provide a lot of evidence or compelling arguments in a short article. I am currently working on a book about technologically-enhanced teaching and learning. I agree completely with you that the best experience is for an undergraduate to attend a four-year college and live on campus. Unfortunately, the majority of American college students do not have this luxury. What if the option is to spend less time on campus or not attend college at all?

I do not advocate a fully online undergraduate degree unless it is one's only hope of attending college. I do think that a few online courses might help a student reduce some of the cost of college by living at home for a few semesters, getting a part-time job, and taking online courses.

I agree with you about graduate education as being extremely promising for online education. In our new online MBA program we have students from across the U.S. who are not able to attend a program at any institution largely due to job or family issues. The program has two three-day residency periods at the beginning and end of their classes, and students meet weekly in a synchronous online session with course instructors.

I am very enthusiastic about blended courses in which students study lecture material asynchronously that the instructor has prepared in advance. A blended course meets physically with all students -- in my teaching the physical classes have been about 75% as long as a traditional course meeting to offset the time students spend watching video lectures. The research on recall from traditional lectures is pretty discouraging. By including short quizzes in the videos, and with students having the opportunity to replay material they did not understand, we hope that asynchronous material will be more effective than the lecture. My physical classes in blended courses have been more interactive and I hope more stimulating to students. The idea here is to move from passive learning (lecture) to more active learning on the part of the student (discussion in class).

I am unconcerned by drop out rates with MOOCs. The idea is that participants take what interests them -- they are not for credit and they are free unless you pay for a certificate track. As an experiment, the second time my MOOC ran on Coursera I used it as the core of an MBA two-credit elective. Sixteen students from three of our campuses registered for the course. I supplemented the MOOC with more readings and written assignments, and we met weekly in a synchronous video class using Adobe Connect. Sixteen students completed the course and received credit for it.

I think we are moving toward a new paradigm for teaching and learning, one which I hope will be better than current practice. Time will tell.

HL