Online Schooling

Published January 15, 2013; reformatted 9.17.2015
Cornell's effort to make money from its MOOC offering by offering students a second course (for a fee) that would result in a certificate of completion. The second course costs $1200, which is said to be low, considering it's Cornell.

Massively Online Open Classes (MOOCs) is one of the hot topics in education, especially at the university level. MOOCs are (as of this writing) typically free, unless you want some sort of evidence of taking and passing the class, at which point there is a fee involved.

There are a lot of issues with MOOCs:

Many student sign up, fewer show up and fewer still actually finish.

Employers have no way to verify performance in the class.

Faculty don't like online courses.

Open Source Curriculum

MIT's Open Source initiative is not really a MOOC, it's more of a data dump of parts of the curriculum. It's a fabulously rich resource, but it doesn't really count as a class, and that's why MIT makes it available. The LEAST part of what is an MIT education is sitting in a lecture taking notes. Almost no one notes this.

I know that MOOCs are working to change this, and I actually think their interactive technology will eventually get around this. Computers after all can log every sign in, every test attempt (submitted or not) and can create a picture of the students efforts. Whether or not that picture will accurately reflect the students potential is a different question. But existing testing and certification processes are hardly perfect, so I think demanding perfection from technology is senseless.

And I'm not talking about parties, etc. I am talking about being in a lab with others and working to solve a problem or discover the answer to a question. That doesn't happen in a lecture hall, and it won't happen on an internet discussion board either— at least not an engineering or science problem. This NPR story link about MOOCs was put up on the PBA blog, but I'm going to link to it here as well.

At the very end of the story they talk about how these programs could become very lucrative for colleges, even if the fees for the courses are only nominal. They also mention the difficulty of grading essay questions, or any question that can't be a multiple choice question.

Which suggests a new (lesser) career for people who can read and write well, they could be trained as graders. But it's also obvious that this wouldn't necessarily be a very lucrative job. On the other hand, it's something that could be done from home, and probably needs to be done by people with an excellent comprehension of the language and the topic involved. My guess is that India is probably where a lot of it would be outsourced.

This might suggest that some classes would have to have a limited enrollment, suggesting that the market might be big enough to support more than just the big boys. (meaning the top schools). At some point, it might be better to take a course from a smaller operation and get more one on one attention than be one of 30,000 taking the course. Greater personal attention has always been one of the arguments for going to a smaller school.