MOOC Ado about Nothing?

The term “MOOC” stands for Massive Open Online Courses, classes characterized by having enormous enrollments of students from around the world. The courses take place entirely online, and run the gamut of topics, from personal finance to nanotechnology. Stanford University offered the very first MOOC in the United States back in 2012, when Artificial Intelligence, offered for free, garnered 68,000 sign-ups initially (Daniel, 2012). Ultimately, 150,000 people took the course (Reviews.com, 2018). Nowadays, there are a dozen major platforms offering MOOCs. In many cases, the classes can be audited for free or completed for a relatively low-cost certificate.

When MOOCs first emerged, their developers and advocates sang their praises, declaring the MOOC to be the “particle accelerator of learning” (Stokes, 2013). Would the MOOC be the death knell for conventional universities? Would MOOC certificates somehow come to replace university degrees? Would they enhance educational opportunities for those who could not otherwise afford to attend college? Or would they prove to be merely passing fads?

Here is a TED-X talk from 2014, about the future of MOOCs:

Six years later, the dust has settled, and MOOCs are still with us. In fact, I am typing this right now as one of the obligations in a MOOC. I have taken two other MOOC classes for certificates -- one on shark biology and ecology, and one on sustainable development, both offered through edX. The vast majority of all MOOCs are offered through either Coursera or ed X; smaller players include Udacity, FutureLearn, and iversity.

People take MOOCs for a wide variety of reasons. Some opt to take them simply for personal growth, to learn something new. That was the main motivation behind my decision to take my very first MOOC. But as I began to recognize that completing the MOOC was a fair bit of work -- there were videos to watch, readings to view, and quizzes to complete -- the more I appreciated the certificate as evidence of my professional development. In the case of this MOOC, I am hoping to enhance a class that I manage at Ashford University. Similarly, I am enrolled right now in a MOOC that covers a lot of the same territory as my own online class, hoping to gain inspiration by seeing how others cover that content.

What works well about MOOCs, in my experience and research? For those highly self-motivated learners seeking to gain knowledge of innovations in somewhat familiar field, or an overview of an unfamiliar field, a MOOC can meet their needs. MOOCs are low-cost, generally easy to follow, fairly engaging, and asynchronous -- in short, convenient. But completing them takes motivation. I know that in the ones I have taken, my degree of interaction with others, and my overall effort to engage with the course, tended to diminish over time. This is a personal finding that has also been documented in the research literature on MOOCs (Tawfik et al., 2017). While early on in a MOOC I tend to be drawn in by interest and excitement, it is the certificate that gets me to the finish line. I have enrolled in two other MOOCs that I never finished -- both I had opted to audit instead of going for the certificate. MOOCs work well for me, personally, because I see them as vehicles for personal growth and professional development. Indeed, Milligan and Littlejohn found that “MOOC study represents a popular mechanism for professionals to address both current and future learning needs” (2017, para. 1).

What facets of MOOCs still have wrinkles to them? One perennial challenge MOOC designers face is how to promote higher-order thinking, as defined by the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The most common means of measuring learning in a MOOC is with multiple choice quizzes, and these certainly fall short (Bali, 2014). Requiring students to produce written work (such as this) entails having evaluators on hand. The obvious solution is peer grading. To work well, that requires that graders be similarly invested in the course and its tasks. I recently completed a peer-graded assignment in a sustainable development MOOC. While I provided detailed commentary for each part of the scoring rubric, the three students who evaluated my own work did not. While I received a high score, I did not gain any useful feedback, since the feedback was optional.

Class discussions offer opportunities for higher-level learning in a MOOC. However, the same evaluation issue arises. In previous MOOCs I have taken, posting in Discussion was entirely optional. Because of other demands on my time, I posted only a couple of times in one MOOC, and never in the other. How might participants be compelled to discuss class content? One of the MOOCs I did not complete had an intriguing strategy. As part of the course expectations, students were required to affirm that they had participated in a certain amount of discussion. I took this to be a sincere commitment; unfortunately, I also recognized that I did not have time to meet that requirement, and I ultimately stopped participating at all. Had there been no discussion expectation, I might have stuck out the course to the end.

MOOCs offer the promise of new learning without a huge amount of commitment of resources by the student. Time requirements tend to be low -- a few hours a week; and costs tend to be very low. In rigor, they certainly fall short of a university class. But for getting a general sense of a topic, they can fit the bill quite well, without demanding all the personal investment of a university class.

Sources Cited

Bali, M. (2014). MOOC pedagogy: gleaning good practice from existing MOOCs. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 44.

Daniel, J. (2012). Making sense of MOOCs: Musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility. Journal of interactive Media in education, 2012(3).

Milligan, C., & Littlejohn, A. (2017). Why Study on a MOOC? The Motives of Students and Professionals. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(2).

Reviews.com (2018). The best MOOC platforms of 2018. Retrieved from https://www.reviews.com/mooc-platforms/

Stokes, P. (2013, February 22). The particle accelerator of learning. Inside Higher Ed. [website]. Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/02/22/look-inside-edxs-learning-laboratory-essay

Tawfik, A. A., Reeves, T. D., Stich, A. E., Gill, A., Hong, C., McDade, J., ... & Giabbanelli, P. J. (2017). The nature and level of learner–learner interaction in a chemistry massive open online course (MOOC). Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 1-21.