Cheers and Jeers for MOOCs!

Just about everyone I know sent me a copy of this piece that appeared in the most recent New York Times Sunday Week in Review.

The fellow who wrote the piece (A.J. Jacobs, Editor at Large for Esquire Magazine) shares my journalistic passion for reporting from the inside.  (Perhaps he also grew up reading Black Like Me and Gentlemen’s Agreement.)   In his case, he signed up for 11 different massive online courses to get a flavor of what the whole MOOC thing was all about.

At first, I marveled at the ability of someone to juggle such a number (having documented my struggle to keep up with 6-7 classes at a time).  But it looks like his high enrollment level was designed to expose him to a wide variety of classes and professors (he only took two of those 11 classes to completion) in order to inform his evaluation of where the MOOC experiment stands today.

His observations come in a series of letter grades assigned to different class elements that somewhat parallel the breakdown of course components I discussed during the second week of this blog.  Jacobs breaks down his categories slightly differently (grading Professors, Convenience, Teacher-Student and Student-Student Interaction and Assignments), and demonstrates how taking the role of a student provides important perspective you don’t always read about when the mainstream or educational press turns to the subject of massive online classes.

Some of his keenest observations include:

• Speculation that MOOCs might create a new breed of celebrity professors who may end up with what he calls “lopsided sway over the landscape of ideas”
• The benefits of being able to control the speed of lectures (speeding up a slow-talking professor or slowing down a prof with a shotgun speaking style)
• The tendency of online discussion groups to get cluttered with gossip and trivia (making already crowded online spaces every more difficult to navigate)

All of these points are worth looking at in more depth (which is why they’ve already been added to the Degree of Freedom editorial calendar). And while I can’t disagree with any of the letter grades Jacobs assigns to what he analyzed (especially the B grade he assigns to the overall experience); if he continues his own experiment, I would recommend that he arrange his schedule to allow him to take more courses to completion.

For, as I have been discovering, when you dedicate yourself to learning everything an online course has to offer, issues such as cheating on tests or getting rattled over comments that accompany peer-graded essays become not-so-important, especially once you realize that grades take a back seat to learning in a self-motivated MOOC where anyone who has really learned the material is likely to pass.

As I mentioned previously, I know there have been examples of cheating, plagiarism and other forms of corner cutting and grade-grubbing associated with MOOCs.  But if such behavior is dishonest in a competitive classroom environment with multiple levels of grading, it’s both dishonest and completely idiotic in an independent learning situation where the only genuine reward for the time put into a class is the learning you achieve (not the work skipped or the time put into avoiding learning by cheating).

Even limitations in peer interaction (which Jacobs correctly identifies as challenging to set up and maintain on a consistent basis) can probably be solved before the advent of avatar-based meet-ups since technology (including public transport) allows people to create smaller communities of learners today.

While I have not had any better luck putting these together than did Jacobs, I would chalk this up to the unnaturalness of juggling far more courses than the average student would (or should), a choice that limits the time available to create manageable communities for each of the classes I’m enrolled in.  For anyone taking a more normal course load, finding (or creating) a peer group measured in the dozens vs. the thousands should be a priority.

In fact, as the list of recommendations I’m making to fellow MOOCers begins to grow, I’m beginning to think that one’s choice of how many classes to take should be determined by the amount of interest and bandwidth you have to create a small cohort of learners who can travel with you from the beginning to the end of a class.

So three cheers for Jacobs for bringing these student-focused issues to the surface, and three cheers for anyone he inspires to learn what they can from the new, intriguing (and free) teaching resources.