A few weeks back, I finally got around to printing out certificates for the MOOC courses I’ve completed so far. I remembered having done this when I found this stack of certificates in a pile of papers on the couch in my office, now dog-eared and crinkled from having other stuff piled on top of them for at least a month.
Now I can always print another set of copies. In fact, I could print a hundred sets and wallpaper my house with them. But it dawned on me that whatever is motivating this quest to learn the equivalent of a BA in twelve months, eagerness for official documentation of achievement is not high on the list.
The discovery of my certificate pile also reminded me that around the same time I did all that printing, I finally noticed a Progress link on the edX system that allowed me to see how I was doing on that Greek Hero class I just completed (and reviewed in yesterday’s Degree of Freedom News). And according to this display, I had already passed the course (since a cumulative total of 50% on all quizzes was the threshold for success – something you could achieve early in the course by doing better than that on a majority of assessments).
This pretty much meant that nothing else I could do would prevent me from achieving a certificate of completion, including (theoretically) skipping all of the remaining reading, lectures and tests.
But the notion of leveling off my commitment to the course just because there was no longer any externally motivating factor seemed (and still seems) alien. In fact, I’ve been dawdling over the last few video lectures just to savor these final few minutes with a teaching team that have come to seem like old friends I hate to say goodbye to.
More importantly, there was additional material to learn by sticking it through to the end, regardless of the fact that continuing no longer meant anything grade-wise. Which seems to indicate that learning is the primary (and internal) reward for taking a MOOC class to completion.
I suspect that I’m not alone (at least within the company of others who make it a point to complete the courses they sign up for) with regard to being more internally than externally motivated. For the majority of MOOC students are still people who already have some kind of degree (meaning success on this or that MOOC will not likely be appearing alongside the name of the college we graduated from on our resumes or next job applications).
And even those who treasure certificates so much that they are willing to do anything to get one (or cut corners once they realized the they’ve already gotten over the low barrier most MOOCs place to being awarded one) will soon realize that these pieces of paper don’t have that much external value (yet) since most employers will have never heard of them.
By the time this project finishes, I’m hoping to determine from my own experience and the experiences of fellow MOOC students what defines a successful independent learner. And, at least so far, it looks like internal motivation directed towards learning vs. external motivation directed towards awards is going to end up high on that final list.
I found certificates a good motivation not because of their practical value – how much is that, I’m sure it’s just too early to say, in few years we’ll really see – rather because of their worth as token of victory. Just like a medal or a cup in some competition, it’s nice and works wonder for your self esteem to see all those symbols of accomplishments and invested time and energies, even if the cup itself is simply some cheap fake-brass plastic sculpture (and, back from my analogy, we still don’t know for sure he material our certificates are made of).
While I’ll start courses that won’t give away them because they’re in the end interesting by what they teach (notably the Princeton ones in Coursera), they will compete for my learning time against certificate-rewarding ones. As my strategy is to join all classes that sound even remotely interesting, and complete those that interests me more while dropping the rest, most of the times it will be those without a certificate to be dropped, interest and usefulness being the same as those I’ll complete.