MOOC U

Who Is Getting the Most Out of Online Education and Why

Jeffrey Selingo

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476783529
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación inclusiva

Contributing editor to The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of College (Un)Bound, Jeffrey J. Selingo follows in real time the stories of all the stake-holders in University of Virginia business professor Ed Hess's popular Grow to Greatness MOOC to distill for MOOC students (seven million and counting) what works, what doesn't, and what to expect next of the phenomenon that is massive open online courses. When professors at top universities first began offering free online classes to the masses in 2012, the promise was that one day their experiment would revolutionize higher education forever by opening the doors to a first-class education for everyone. Since then, more than seven million students have signed up to take a massive open online course, or MOOC. But so far, MOOCs have failed to live up to the initial promises of their founders, with a vast majority of students failing to complete their courses. Lost in the rising chorus of emboldened MOOC critics are the expectations and experiences of the students who, in ever rising numbers, continue to sign up. What does a great MOOC look like, and why? Which MOOC students benefit the most? How do I get the greatest value out of taking a MOOC? To get answers, Jeffrey J. Selingo, contributing editor to The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of College (Un)Bound, embedded himself in University of Virginia business professor Ed Hess's Grow to Greatness MOOC. The result, MOOC U, is the real-time stories of the major players: students, professor, university, and MOOC provider. Written to answer the most pressing questions that MOOC students are asking, MOOC U chronicles how free online courses are changing how students learn, how professors teach, and how universities are rethinking what constitutes face-to-face education in the 21st Century.

CHAPTER ONE

THE STUDENTS

IT was the first full day of spring and Michelle Goodwin had slept through her alarm and was now running late. She sprinted from her house to the green-and-white barn just a few hundred feet away, where she spent the next several hours milking her eighty-one cows. A year ago, the forty-year-old mother of four had quit her job as manager of an optometry office to work on her family farm in Gordonsville, Virginia, sixty-five miles northwest of Richmond. “We faced a choice,” she told me as we walked back toward the house from the barn. “We either had to figure out how to grow this place or sell it.”

Goodwin had worked at the optometry practice for eighteen years, helping it expand from one doctor and one location to two offices with some thirty employees. Her boss recognized that she wanted to see her family farm grow too, but she lacked any formal business training. So he suggested that she take an online course on business growth taught by a professor, Ed Hess, at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. The class, “Grow to Greatness,” focused on a facet of successful start-ups that few entrepreneurs ever consider in their frenzied first years—that is, how to successfully expand for long-term success. The class was one of the earliest massive open online courses (MOOCs) the University of Virginia put online after it signed a partnership agreement with Coursera, one of the leading providers of MOOCs, in 2012. Some 74,000 students had signed up for that class.

At first, Goodwin was skeptical. She worried that a course offered as part of the formal MBA curriculum at one of the nation’s top business schools would be too advanced for a busy working mom with just two years of college under her belt. Between raising four kids, ranging in age from ten to twenty years old, and helping her husband run a farm that had been in his family for four generations, Goodwin knew she would be pressed for time. While she had taken online classes in recent years, they were specific to the medical industry and her office job. She hadn’t been in school since 2005, when she earned an associate’s degree in accounting. But her boss had talked up this particular course. And best of all, it was free, which meant the risk was low. If she dropped out, she wouldn’t lose thousands of dollars, as she would if she stopped attending a night class at one of the local colleges. Goodwin went to the Coursera website, and after providing her name and e-mail address, she was enrolled. A few minutes later she received a welcome message. It was official: she was signed up for her first MOOC, joining millions of others worldwide as part of this educational phenomenon.

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At some point in our lifetime we all have confronted—or will confront—a career change or a new job, or will simply realize that our skills are outdated. In previous generations, knowledge developed so slowly that we could last in a job or career for a lifetime with one set of schooling. But today, knowledge is growing rapidly by the year. Half of what is known today was not known ten years ago, according to the American Society of Training and Documentation. To survive, we need to constantly refresh our knowledge. But traditional colleges have not kept pace with this change in how we need to learn. Their primary venues for lifetime learning, continuing-education programs, are time-intensive and expensive for working adults with busy personal lives.

MOOCs are ideal for learning on the fly, and Goodwin and the other students you’ll meet in this chapter are the ideal students for Hess’s MOOC. Because of their age, limited time, focused interest on business, and immediate education needs, they are motivated to finish. Were Goodwin two decades younger, in college, and not in the middle of building a business, she’d be much more likely to quit the MOOC halfway through. She represents the sweet spot for MOOCs: education when it’s needed. And for now, that is the success story for massive open online courses, even if the big MOOC providers, Coursera, edX, and Udacity, don’t want to hear it.

Much of the hope—and what fueled most of the early hype—around MOOCs was the promise that they would democratize education. The narrative was compelling and inspirational: MOOCs would provide courses from the best universities to students in out-of-the-way towns who had natural talent and intelligence but had never dreamed or perhaps even heard of the Harvards, Princetons, and Stanfords of the world. MOOCs would turn education into a commodity easily consumed around the world, as universal as water and electricity. In the United States, especially, free online courses were touted as the answer to runaway tuition prices.

Reality is more complicated, however. The prototypical MOOC student is not a villager in Turkey or a college dropout in the United States looking for a second chance. Rather, the average MOOC student is a young, white, employed American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job. Eight out of every ten students who enrolled in the more than two dozen MOOCs offered by the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, had already earned a degree of some kind. The educational attainment of MOOC students has been most pronounced in countries where the courses were supposed to have the biggest impact. In Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa, some 80 percent of MOOC students have a college degree, while in the overall population only 5 percent do.

MOOCs can’t extend the ideals of an elite education as long as they are taught by faculty members at top universities who design online courses only for the bright students they are accustomed to teaching in their physical classrooms. While the professors usually rework that content for an online world, they don’t necessarily know what to change to assist those with varying academic abilities.

MOOCs also demand a minimum level of knowledge about a particular subject that most people simply don’t have (let alone the broadband Internet connection required to watch lecture videos). After all, you can’t really take an algebra class without first taking a basic math course. Such rudimentary skills challenge even students who go through the gauntlet of the college admissions process. Nearly 40 percent of freshmen in the United States arrive on campus unprepared for college-level work, so expecting the rest of the world to possess basic skills seems absurd. “We haven’t thought enough about how to reach the underserved,” said Laura Perna, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied MOOCs. “Not enough attention has been given to the types of learners we’re trying to reach and the most effective educational practices to reach them.”

Students are motivated to finish a course for different reasons. At a traditional college, the biggest influence is often the ultimate end point, the degree. MOOCs are not right for you if you are largely motivated by the rewards—that is, the credentials. There are few rewards from a MOOC beyond passing an exam or two and perhaps a certificate that right now has no value.

What seems mostly to drive students to take a MOOC (and finish it) is their interest in the subject matter. But when universities offer a MOOC, they don’t take a survey to gauge student interest. Rather, they just provide what their best professors want to teach, whether students want it or not. When students in one MOOC at Columbia University were asked what motivated them to take a course on education data, most said they wanted to extend their current knowledge of the topic and gain a job-related skill. At the bottom of their list were the reasons most aligned to the high ideals of MOOC advocates: concerns about the cost of traditional education and being geographically isolated from education. For MOOCs to serve their ideals, they need a formal curriculum where the content of each course builds on the one before it. Although Coursera offers a sequence of classes for a certificate in data science from Johns Hopkins University, most MOOCs are individual courses. Students might take multiple courses on their own, but the random collection they put together doesn’t necessarily equal a formal curriculum.

The courses offered by Coursera, edX, and other MOOC providers tend to fall into three broad categories: college preparation (a calculus course, for example), occupational (the type of business course Goodwin is taking), and enrichment (classes on poetry or science fiction). Right now, most of the courses available are in two of the three categories—occupational and enrichment—and so they tend to attract students who already have some sort of college education. As a result, more than 90 percent of MOOC students in one survey by the University of Pennsylvania said they enrolled in the courses out of curiosity or for advancing in a current job. “Far from realizing the high ideals of their advocates, MOOCs seem to be reinforcing the advantages of the ‘haves’ rather than educating the ‘have-nots,’ ” Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the authors of the study, wrote in the journal Nature. “Better access to technology and improved basic education are needed worldwide before MOOCs can genuinely live up to their promise.”

The current menu of MOOCs is perfect for those who need to learn a skill for their job or are fascinated by the world and want to learn more about it. But MOOCs fall far short for those students who need to form the building blocks of a college education. The question going forward is: How interested are Silicon Valley investors in those aspiring students? They represent a far larger market around the world, but they are less affluent and might prove much more challenging and expensive to reach than the college educated.

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“Grow to Greatness” started on a Monday in late January. In Norwalk, Connecticut, Leo Cochrane glanced at the course syllabus, downloaded the first batch of readings to Dropbox, and then fired up his iPad. It was around 9 p.m., and, with his two kids already in bed, he was eager to get started. Each class in the five-week course followed the same sequence: one reading, usually a compilation of materials from the professor’s books; a case study, a short descriptive analysis of issues facing a real business that are commonly used in business school courses; and a collection of a half-dozen short video lectures, ranging from two to twenty-five minutes each, many accompanied by PowerPoint slides that could be downloaded.

Cochrane turned first to the readings: a 21-page brief that challenged some of the commonly held myths about growth, followed by a 14-page case study about Eyebobs Eyewear, a Minneapolis-based company that specializes in hip, ready-to-wear reading glasses. He quickly looked at a list of six questions on the syllabus that he was supposed to answer as he read. But he isn’t much of a note taker. “I tend to listen, watch, and read,” he told me. “I’m always absorbing. My wife marvels at how few notes I take.” More than an hour had passed since he started the assignments. The lectures would have to wait for another day.

The next night, stretched out on a chair in his living room, Cochrane streamed the first few course videos through the television. Peering into the camera was the professor, Ed Hess, in a sport jacket and open-collar shirt, standing in front of a stylized blue background, almost like a set on the television news. “Consistent above-average growth is rare,” Hess reminded the nearly 14,000 students who showed up for the first lecture, about two-thirds of those who initially signed up.

Hess rattled off a bunch of statistics: there was less than a 10 percent chance that companies would grow above average for four years running, and the odds grew worse over time. “Wow,” Hess said in his southern twang. “This growth stuff is hard. Why is growth hard? Because growth is change.” This was Cochrane’s sixth MOOC. He liked Hess’s casual approach and his slow cadence, perfect for the playback function on Coursera’s website that allows users to speed up the video. “His method of teaching makes you talk to the TV,” Cochrane told me. “My wife sits in the next room and thinks I’m nuts.”

Over the next several weeks, it was tough for Cochrane to follow any regular routine. He fit in the readings and lectures whenever he had a few free moments in the day, even if it meant watching the videos on his iPhone while on a treadmill. He finally figured out how to download the videos, so he no longer needed a live Internet connection to watch them. In doing so, however, he lost the ability to take the quizzes embedded in the videos. The class was eating up about three hours a week. Consuming it in chunks, he admitted, was not the most effective learning experience. But Cochrane needed flexibility in his schedule. A year and a half ago, he’d lost his job at a technology company when the firm collapsed. Cochrane, who has small, rectangular glasses and a crop of gray hair, was unemployed at fifty. Given his age and experience, he knew finding work would be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Students
• Chapter Two: The Professor
• Chapter Three: Coursera
• Chapter Four: The University
• Conclusion
• Sources
• Copyright