Via IEEE Spectrum
By Robert Ubell
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In 2011, when Stanford computer scientists Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig came up with the bright idea of streaming their robotics lectures over the Internet,
they knew it was an inventive departure from the usual college course.
For hundreds of years, professors had lectured to groups of no more than
a few hundred students. But MOOCs—massive open online courses—made it
possible to reach many thousands at once. Through the extraordinary
reach of the Internet, learners could log on to lectures streamed to
wherever they happened to be. To date, about 58 million people have signed up for a MOOC.
Familiar with the technical elements required for a MOOC—video
streaming, IT infrastructure, the Internet—MOOC developers put code
together to send their lectures into cyberspace. When more than 160,000
enrolled in Thrun and Norvig’s introduction to artificial intelligence
MOOC, the professors thought they held a tiger by the tail. Not long
after, Thrun cofounded Udacity to commercialize MOOCs. He predicted that in 50 years, streaming lectures would so subvert face-to-face education that only 10 higher-education institutions would remain.
Our quaint campuses would become obsolete, replaced by star faculty
streaming lectures on computer screens all over the world. Thrun and
other MOOC evangelists imagined they had inspired a revolution,
overthrowing a thousand years of classroom teaching.
These MOOC pioneers were therefore stunned when their online courses
didn’t perform anything like they had expected. At first, the average
completion rate for MOOCs was less than 7 percent. Completion rates have since gone up a bit, to a median of about 12.6 percent, although there’s considerable variation from course to course. While
a number of factors contribute to the completion rate, my own
observation is that students who have to pay a fee to enroll tend to be
more committed to finishing the course.
Looking closer at students’ MOOC habits, researchers found that some
people quit watching within the first few minutes. Many others were
merely “grazing,” taking advantage of the technology to quickly log in,
absorb just the morsel they were hunting for, and then log off as soon
as their appetite was satisfied. Most of those who did finish a MOOC
were accomplished learners, many with advanced degrees.
What accounts for MOOCs’ modest performance? While the technological
solution they devised was novel, most MOOC innovators were unfamiliar
with key trends in education. That is, they knew a lot about computers
and networks, but they hadn’t really thought through how people learn.
It’s unsurprising then that the first MOOCs merely replicated the
standard lecture, an uninspiring teaching style but one with which the
computer scientists were most familiar. As the education technology consultant Phil Hill recently observed in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
“The big MOOCs mostly employed smooth-functioning but basic video
recording of lectures, multiple-choice quizzes, and unruly discussion
forums. They were big, but they did not break new ground in pedagogy.”
Indeed, most MOOC founders were unaware that a pedagogical revolution
was already under way at the nation’s universities: The traditional
lecture was being rejected by many scholars, practitioners, and, most
tellingly, tech-savvy students. MOOC advocates also failed to appreciate
the existing body of knowledge about learning online, built over the
last couple of decades by adventurous faculty who were attracted to
online teaching for its innovative potential, such as peer-to-peer
learning, virtual teamwork, and interactive exercises. These modes of
instruction, known collectively as “active” learning, encourage student
engagement, in stark contrast to passive listening in lectures. Indeed,
even as the first MOOCs were being unveiled, traditional lectures were
on their way out.
The impact of active learning can be significant. In a 2014 meta-analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
[PDF], researchers looked at 225 studies in which standard lectures
were compared with active learning for undergraduate science, math, and
engineering. The results were unambiguous: Average test scores went up
about 6 percent in active-learning sections, while students in
traditional lecture classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail than
their peers in active-learning classes.
Even lectures by “star” faculty were no match for active-learning
sections taught by novice instructors: Students still performed better
in active classes. “We’ve yet to see any evidence that celebrated
lecturers can help students more than even first-generation active
learning does,” Scott Freeman, the lead author of the study, told Wired.
Unfortunately, early MOOCs failed to incorporate active learning
approaches or any of the other innovations in teaching and learning
common in other online courses. The three principal MOOC
providers—Coursera, Udacity, and edX—wandered into a territory they
thought was uninhabited. Yet it was a place that was already well
occupied by accomplished practitioners who had thought deeply and
productively over the last couple of decades about how students learn
online. Like poor, baffled Columbus, MOOC makers believed they had
“discovered” a new world. It’s telling that in their latest offerings,
these vendors have introduced a number of active-learning innovations.
To be sure, MOOCs have been wildly successful in giving millions of
people all over the world access to a wide range of subjects presented
by eminent scholars at the world’s elite schools. Some courses attract
so many students that a 7 percent completion rate still translates into
several thousand students finishing—greater than the total enrollment of
many colleges.
But MOOC pioneers were presumptuous to imagine they could not only
topple the university—an institution that has successfully withstood
revolutions far more devastating than the Web—but also ignore common
experience. They erroneously assumed they could open the minds of
millions who were unprepared to tackle sophisticated curriculum. MOOCs
will never sweep away face-to-face classrooms, nor can they take the
place of more intensive and intimate online degree programs. The real
contribution of MOOCs is likely to be much more modest, as yet another
digital education option.
