Over the weekend I was faced with a question in an interview that had to do with MOOCs and how they are affecting higher education. Unfortunately I was completely oblivious to what a MOOC was (on the upside I didn’t actually have to answer that question as there were two others to choose from). So naturally I decided to do a bit of research to inform myself about them. Some of you may already be in tune with the whole MOOCs thing but for those of you who aren’t (like myself) the term MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course.
MOOCs were first developed in 2008 but really started to take off in 2012 when major universities started to provide these massive online courses. There are three different “companies” that provide MOOCs: edX, which is a partnership between Harvard and MIT, Coursera which was developed by Stanford and Udacity, which was privately developed by three men, David Stavens, Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky.
MOOCs are generally free and not for credit. Thousands of students can sign up and they have access to these courses anywhere there is an Internet connection. In general, it seems that only a fraction of the number of people that sign up actually complete the course.
The goal of these Massive Open Online Courses is to extend education to a larger public with students from all over the world. Due to the sheer numbers of students enrolled in MOOCs, there is no true interaction with the professor like there would be in a classroom setting. Thus, MOOCs rely a great deal on the interactivity of the course and the networking between students.
One of the major obstacles of such a course is cheating. There really is not regulation of students and so it is rather easy for them the cheat. Some MOOCs now have proctored exams because of this.
Other challenges faced by MOOCs, as cited in the NY Times article where I got most of this info from, were the grading of assignments and exams and then the benefit of MOOCs if there is no credit available (yet).
At the end the article suggests that in a short period of time students will start getting credit for these classes and this credit will transfer to college credit… A.P. style.
So my question to you guys is, based on your knowledge of MOOCs and what I have written in the paragraphs above, do you think MOOCs have the potential to successfully replace some of the in-class courses in college? Do you think this would be a positive or negative change?
Check out this video if you are still a bit unclear about the whole MOOCs thing.
