You don’t need to be a teacher to be assaulted by the unbridled enthusiasm that abounds for educational technology these days. Among the biggest recipients of such enthusiasm are Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which made a splash so big that the acronym became a finalist for Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year.
Don’t get me wrong, MOOCs are fun. I can’t recommend enough Robert Sapolsky's course on human behavioral biology – I got access to a great professor and subject matter that I likely wouldn’t have otherwise.
The problem with all the enthusiasm about MOOCs, though, is that it confuses the excitement of an awesome thing that is being given away with the thrill of watching a genuinely disruptive piece of technology come to market. MOOCs are certainly the former; as for the latter, though, a few recent articles confirm my intuition that the many predictions about the end of education as we know it are more smoke than fire.
The problem with all the enthusiasm about MOOCs, though, is that it confuses the excitement of an awesome thing that is being given away with the thrill of watching a genuinely disruptive piece of technology come to market. MOOCs are certainly the former; as for the latter, though, a few recent articles confirm my intuition that the many predictions about the end of education as we know it are more smoke than fire.
First, a post at Open Culture, drawing from research from Katy Jordan, provided some important context: Despite the eye-popping enrollment numbers for these free online courses, completion rates remain very low. “MOOCs have generated 50,000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%,” Dan Colman writes.
This information throws a fair amount of cold water on the notion that there is anything particularly disruptive about MOOCs. And Dan Ariely, Duke University professor and newly-minted MOOC lecturer, provides some important insight as to where online courses fall short:
This information throws a fair amount of cold water on the notion that there is anything particularly disruptive about MOOCs. And Dan Ariely, Duke University professor and newly-minted MOOC lecturer, provides some important insight as to where online courses fall short:
First, having a scheduled class with obligations, deadlines, exams, real consequences and real rewards is incredibly important for human motivation and getting people to spend the necessary time and effort to really understand the material. The second reason is that the model of many universities, in which students study and live together, is a particularly helpful model for creating the environment that people need to take their education seriously. It is not just about the particular classes, but about being immersed in an academic environment for a substantial period of time.
The real insight that Ariely has here is that education has an essential social component. Being in front of a classroom shows you this very quickly. The only way to get content to students is through managing and understanding relationships, personalities, and behavior in a way that is impossible to replicate online. Indeed, social interaction is not just an irreplaceable pedagogical tool; it is a huge part of what we’re teaching in schools.
Missing this point is what so many educational technology start-ups fail to grasp, and this mistake isn’t limited to MOOCs. At the Teach For America 20th Anniversary Summit, I remember hearing a great deal of buzz about the game-changing possibilities of the Rocketship charter school model. However, a recent report from PBS NewsHour shows that they, too, have discovered some serious limitations to their key innovation of learning labs, despite doing what seems like plenty of other amazing stuff at their schools.
All this is just to say that the enthusiasm of innovation can be a blinding thing. It is better to understand the modest but real benefits technological advances stand to bring us in the classroom than to get lost in grand visions of disruption.
CJ Libassi is a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Madrid, Spain. He can be reached at clibassi(at)hotmail(dot)com.
Missing this point is what so many educational technology start-ups fail to grasp, and this mistake isn’t limited to MOOCs. At the Teach For America 20th Anniversary Summit, I remember hearing a great deal of buzz about the game-changing possibilities of the Rocketship charter school model. However, a recent report from PBS NewsHour shows that they, too, have discovered some serious limitations to their key innovation of learning labs, despite doing what seems like plenty of other amazing stuff at their schools.
All this is just to say that the enthusiasm of innovation can be a blinding thing. It is better to understand the modest but real benefits technological advances stand to bring us in the classroom than to get lost in grand visions of disruption.
CJ Libassi is a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Madrid, Spain. He can be reached at clibassi(at)hotmail(dot)com.
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