policy & reform
Teachers without
Borders
How much will MOOCs transform education? By Leigh Wood and Sherman Young
Massive Open Online Courses are free university-level courses that are open to students around the globe. While they have a longer history built around a pedagogy of participant collaboration, the term has been captured more recently by institutions that have emphasised their Massive and Open nature.
The starting point for this most recent form of MOOCs was Peter Norvig’ s free 2012 Stanford class in artificial intelligence, which attracted more than 100,000 enrolments.
Since then, several universities worldwide have created a number of MOOCs, with their key selling points being the institutional brand and charismatic, and often celebrity, lecturers. The number of MOOCs available is rising exponentially – every day seems to bring a new one.
Over the past year, a number of companies have sprung up with platforms to support MOOCs, the biggest being Udacity, Coursera and edX. Each of these has partnered with prominent universities to deliver courses in topics which traverse the range of disciplines.
Although courses are mushrooming, at present the majority are UK- and UScentric and presented in English but their students appear to come from around the world.
The MOOC format encourages students to engage with the material in their own way – setting up forums in different languages; organising location-specific meet-ups; and crowd-sourcing the production of subtitles
18 | March 2013 in other languages.
Despite the investment and the institutional reputations involved, production values are variable.
Some courses provide videos of existing face-to-face lectures, while others provide more broadcast quality content; the course may be a direct copy of one taught on campus or a course designed specifically for the MOOC.
Much of the teaching activity revolves around the building of communities of learning using discussion forums. These are sometimes supported by the teaching staff, but from a learning perspective a positive feature of MOOC learning is that students have tended to take over the forums and answer each other’ s questions.
Assessment requirements vary as well, although many of the tasks are quizzes where marking can be automated.
Others, particularly in the humanities, are assessed by peer review and participants are required to mark submissions in order to have their own papers marked.
In some courses, a certificate is available for those who complete the required assessment tasks.
The opportunity, or threat, is clearly in the Massive descriptor. Enrolment numbers in MOOCs to date have been vast, commonly in the tens of thousands and sometimes more than 100,000.
As an example of the scale we are talking about, Coursera( https:// www. coursera. org /) has around 2.5 million students with 215 courses from 33 universities.
While enrolments have been huge, completions have not been as substantial.
The courses clearly state the expectations, typically about 10 hours engagement per week, and the prior knowledge required to engage with the course.
Herein lies one of the problems with education: learning takes time and effort and, like a New Year’ s resolution, is hard to follow through. Many people sign up for MOOCs and few complete. There is no penalty for not completing, there is no filtering of participants and rewards are nebulous.
Despite the low completion rates, there are still thousands of students participating in MOOCs which previously would have been available to only a few hundred on campus.
But before MOOCs can be heralded as a panacea for more open global learning, there are concerns that need to be addressed.
For example, some argue that it is impossible to authenticate the identity of participants – how do we know that Max Smart is actually doing the work? For us, this is not a new question – even in face-toface courses, issues of identity have been problematic – and it is an unresolved one. MOOCs are no different.
Also, teaching at this scale is not easy. Not only are there concerns about the capacity of infrastructure – it is little wonder that many of the new MOOC companies have close ties with Silicon Valley – but there is nowhere for a teacher to hide when you have 10,000 students.
Good teaching is good teaching, however it is delivered, and while it may be a small cost to deliver per student, it is