Among the myriad battles that comprise the existential wars
over the fate of higher education in the 21st century, the
controversy over Massive Open Online Courses—or MOOCs—seems to have all the
elements of a Tolkienesque epic. Like the protagonists ensconced in the mighty
fortress of Helm’s Deep, many traditional universities view their educational
way of life under assault from massive hordes of the untraditional, unadmitted,
undegreed, and un-sold on the trappings of higher education as it has
previously existed. Instead, these “students” opt in and out of vast online
courses designed by professors and other specialists, but piloted by armies of
teaching assistants and adjuncts. They engage in the learning process until
they acquire the competencies they need, freed from Byzantine admissions
processes, majors of dubious value, years’ worth of tuitions, and the seemingly
unending parade of fees that often finance services that these students neither
want nor need. Indeed, advocates of MOOCs may very well argue that their
approach is truly “one format to rule them all.”
But, bad Lord of the Rings
parallels aside, the arguments against MOOCs are numerous and
well-publicized. As Justin Pope noted
in The MIT Technology Review, efforts
to establish and sustain MOOCs have encountered faculty resistance, suffered
from low completion rates, high dropout rates, and the general inability to
make MOOCs a financially viable concept. Equally problematic, studies have
indicated that males, younger students, students of color, and students with
lower grade point averages were particularly at-risk of failure in MOOC environments. No wonder, then, that many in higher
education began to consider MOOCs to be an idea whose guaranteed demise had yet
to come, relegating the idea to the proverbial dust-heap of failed educational concepts.
Perhaps, however, critics may have been too hasty in heralding
the MOOC’s demise. While there are arguably issues with which MOOC designers
and students must contend, MOOCs have great potential in terms of the capacity
of such courses to individualize learning to meet the particular needs of the
students enrolled, their competency-based orientation, their scalability, and
their potential for cost effectiveness.
Ironically, one need only look at educator preparation and educator professional
development as an example of what the future may hold for MOOCs. The Friday Institute for
Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University has engaged in
initiatives with university faculty, as well as local and state educational
authorities, to create “MOOC-Eds” that are designed to enable P-12 teachers to
obtain the professional development needed to master the curricular,
pedagogical, and technological skills required for effective teaching and
learning. Far from the “mega-course” environment where students work in
isolation from the faculty who designed the courses, the MOOC-Eds are much
smaller, “niche MOOCS,” designed to meet the needs of a particular audience of
students. Such is the value of these more personalized MOOCs that the Friday
Institute has received interest and support from organizations as diverse as
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Harvard. In addition to the immediate
benefits for the educators engaged in MOOC-Eds, the courses also demonstrate
how MOOCs can enable education preparation programs to meet the technology
standards embedded in the Council for the
Accreditation of Educator Preparation and other accreditation and
regulatory bodies. Thus, the concept of flexibility and nimbleness may be added
to the potential benefits of MOOC education.
Finally, through partnerships such as the one between MIT
and Harvard, MOOCs are entering into the K-12
environment. Under this joint program, high school students who are preparing
for Advance Placement exams will have access to 26 MOOC courses offered by 14
institutions of higher learning, including MIT, Rice, and the University of
California, Berkeley. As is the case in
higher education, K-12 education finds particular potential in MOOCS that
engage in competency-based learning which embed interactive experiences for
students that they may not otherwise have in traditional
classroom settings. Although the spread of K-12 MOOCs has been slow, the
course offerings are expanding, and organizations such as edX appear to be
committed to facilitating the growth of MOOCs into the primary and secondary
educational environments.
It would be naïve to argue that MOOCs will spell the end of
the university as we know it. Helm’s Deep will not fall. It would be equally
naïve, however, to dismiss the potential that MOOCs have to make education
broader, deeper, more democratic, and more accessible-all the while providing
students a more personalized, optimized, and intimate learning experience. Over
time and with continued dedication to improving how MOOCs are developed and
delivered, these courses can provide an innovative way to ensure that higher
education and the institutions that provide it stay relevant for the near and
distant future.
The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education
1 comment:
I agree! MOOC discourse seems to have been dominated by hyperbole. Critics were often afraid, I guess, and proponents were perhaps over-exuberant. In spite of all that, when the smoke clears, we still have something with great potential. Good job.
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