Are massive open online courses a “flop”?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8022
With a front-page article on 11 December, the New York Times joined other publications in reconsidering general enthusiasm about massive open online courses, or MOOCs .
A year ago, the Times published a 2600-word overview with the headline “The year of the MOOC .” The courses “have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events,” it said, “but this is the year everyone wants in.” Near the end the article enthused, “The line between online and on campus is already blurring.”
By early 2013, the Times was energetically affirming that blurring, including in a front-page article . Tom Friedman predicted in his Times column , “Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems.”
But two days after that column appeared, the Times published a set of five letters , all from academics. H. Kim Bottomly, president of Wellesley College, called Friedman’s optimism “well founded” and predicted that MOOCs “will improve the world in many ways.” But the four others argued that drawbacks limit MOOCs’ promise.
Now the Times front page has focused on those drawbacks in the 11 December piece “After setbacks, online courses are rethought .” It begins this way:
Two years after a Stanford professor drew 160,000 students from around the globe to a free online course on artificial intelligence, starting what was widely viewed as a revolution in higher education, early results for such large-scale courses are disappointing, forcing a rethinking of how college instruction can best use the Internet.
The professor is Sebastian Thrun. The article also includes this paragraph:
And perhaps the most publicized MOOC experiment , at San Jose State University, has turned into a flop. It was a partnership announced with great fanfare at a January news conference featuring Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a strong backer of online education. San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley company co-founded by a Stanford artificial-intelligence professor, Sebastian Thrun, would work together to offer three low-cost online introductory courses for college credit.
Thanks to dismal results, the Times says, the program was suspended in July. The university reportedly declined to comment for the article.
The Times discusses a new University of Pennsylvania study that found that engagement with MOOCs “falls off dramatically” after the first week or two, and that few students persist to a course’s end. A slightly earlier study from Penn, the Times reports, found that far from serving students in poor countries lacking access to higher education, “about 80 percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a degree of some kind.”
Citing a profile of Thrun in Fast Company—and mentioning that Thrun “took issue” with it—the Times declares him “emblematic of a reset in the thinking about MOOCs.” The Times quotes something he posted in his blog :
To all those people who declared our experiment a failure, you have to understand how innovation works. Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation. We are seeing significant improvement in learning outcomes and student engagement.
Thrun’s Fast Company profile declares, “The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype.” That new skepticism is appearing elsewhere in the media as well. The authors of one of the Penn studies published a letter to the editor in Nature and saw their work reported in a Wall Street Journal article . At Forbes.com, the Times piece directly inspired “Are MOOCs really a failure? ” Science has just published “Open learning at a distance: Lessons for struggling MOOCs .”
In response to the front-page Times article, three letters appeared on 17 December under the headline “Online courses: High hopes, trimmed .” One praises MOOCs for what they do manage to achieve. Another, from a user of MOOCs, expresses gratitude for them.
A third, however, indicts MOOCs as “something only a venture capitalist could dream up” and calls for recognition that what’s really needed is a sensible balance between web and classroom. “Every effective teacher,” wrote Alan Robbins, a professor of design at Kean University, “knows that coursework is not just about imparting information; it is about motivating our students to want to learn about the material and giving them the skills to do so. This requires adapting to their differences, not treating them all identically.”
Still, “even the loudest critics of MOOCs do not expect them to fade away,” the Times piece reports. “More likely, they will morph into many different shapes.” The article offers examples in which MOOC materials supplement traditional classes.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.