MOOCs Don't Work for Academically Underprepared Students by Udacity Founder

Much has been written about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as an important advance for making college accessible and inexpensive for students worldwide. Frankly, I have never seen an instructional technology drawn such high visibility from popular and professional media, embraced so quickly, and universal claims made about its efficacy, with little to no evidence. As a technology geek, I would be happy to read of MOOC success with students. But the walls are being to crack in this success story. The following report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (based on interview through another publication), reveals that even one of the founders of the MOOC movement admitting that MOOCs may not work for academically underprepared students. MOOCs may favor the better prepared and also the more affluent. Does this mean that MOOCs would not be effective with TRiO students? No, there are many TRiO students that may be low-income or first-generation for college that might benefit from MOOCs. But for those that are academically underprepared, caustion is warranted. Watch for more reports on the efficacy of MOOCs. carefully read the reports to see for whom the MOOCs are effective. Time will tell.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Sebastian Thrun, the Udacity founder calls his company’s massive open online courses a “lousy product” to use for educating underprepared college students. Mr. Thrun reflected on the discouraging results of an experiment at San Jose State University in which instructors used Udacity’s online platform to teach mathematics. Some of the students were enrolled at the university, and some at a local high school. “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product,” Mr. Thrun told the reporter, Max Chafkin. “It was a painful moment.”

But academics who have studied online education for longer than a few years were not surprised by the Udacity founder’s humbling. “Well, there it is folks,” wrote George Siemens, a researcher and strategist at Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, on his blog. “After two years of hype, breathless proclamations about how Udacity will transform higher education, Silicon Valley blindness to existing learning research, and numerous articles/interviews featuring Sebastian Thrun, Udacity has failed.” “Thrun seems to have ‘discovered’ that open-access, distance-education students struggle to complete,” wrote Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University, in Britain. “I don’t want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years.”

Beyond schadenfreude, Mr. Thrun’s humbling has left some academics wondering who MOOCs are good for, if not underprivileged students in California. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently noted that the students taking MOOCs from Penn on Coursera, another major MOOC platform, tend to be well educated already. “The individuals the MOOC revolution is supposed to help the most—those without access to higher education in developing countries—are underrepresented among the early adopters,” wrote the researchers.

In a blog post this week, Mr. Thrun responded to the fallout from the Fast Company profile by citing data from Udacity’s summer pilot with San Jose State, whose pass rates compared more favorably to the traditional versions offered on the campus. But he neglected to mention that Udacity had, by then, stopped focusing on underprivileged students. More than half of the students in the summer trial already had a college degree. “Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education,” wrote Rebecca Schuman, a Slate columnist and adjunct professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

Apple's 94% Dominance in the Education Market

I was reading an online article,  "Educators Weigh iPad's Dominance of Tablet Market" in Education Week.  From the article:  "From Los Angeles to Illinois to Maine—where Apple products far outpaced Hewlett-Packard in districts’ choices through the state’s bulk-purchasing program earlier this year— iPads are hot. In fact, they command nearly 94 percent of the tablet market in K-12 schools, according to Tom Mainelli, the research director focusing on the tablet market for IDC Research, a San Mateo, Calif.-based firm that provides market analysis of technology.  By the end of this calendar year, total shipments for tablet computing devices in the U.S. education marketplace are expected to exceed 3.5 million units—a 46 percent increase over 2012, indicated Mr. Mainelli, who explained that the research is proprietary and declined to name the runners-up in the tablet race. The figure covers tablets in higher education and K-12, but colleges and universities account for a much smaller proportion because, at that level, most are personal devices."

Our College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota issues an iPad to all incoming students.  As a faculty member in the college, we have integrated use of the iPads into all our first-year courses.  I bought an iPad for personal use about a week after the first ones were available for sale.  Why do I prefer the iPad, even at its expense?  Like the old saying, I think you get what you pay for.  I wanted a slate computer that did it all and had the largest number of apps.  When I think about how much money I spend throughout the year, paying a premium for the iPad seems insignificant.  I am not a snob.  Most of the clothes I buy come from WalMart and JC Penny.  I buy my jeans at Goodwill (jeans never wear out and the price is pennies on the dollar).  I drive a 1997 Ford Explorer with some dings and dents in it.  But I want the best technology.  I am a value shopper, not a low cost shopper for technology (everything else falls into the low cost category).  Anyway, that my story why Apple products are my choice.  Plus, I think Google is evil. 

Best Education Practice: Podcasting Academic and Career Counseling for Post 9/11 Veterans

Podcasting Academic and Career Counseling for Post 9/11 Veterans.  Wichita State Unviersity (KS)  (approved Promising Practice 10/15/13)  Adding audio podcasting to the Upward Bound Veterans program allows our students to listen to important information when and where they want.  Podcasting is a simple way to provide information through the human voice some students prefer rather than reading a handout.  Listening to audio and video podcasts has rapidly grown recently due to widespread ownership of iPods, smartphones, and desk/laptop computers.  Podcasting can be as simple or complex as you want.  The most important element is the quality of information and its direct relevancy to the listeners.  [Click on this web link to download the education practice.]  

ECAR 2013 National Study of Student Technology Use

From the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jason Jones

The Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) has released the latest version of its annual report, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013.  First, students have lots of devices, but relatively little incentive or freedom to use them in class:

Students did seem to indicate an interest in having their phones and/or tablets be more directly incorporated into academics.

Second, two-thirds of students report that their faculty “use technology effectively”:

It’s a little unclear what the students’ judgment is based on here: stuff not crashing? Faculty finding their comfort zone and sticking with it? Regardless, it is useful to know that students respect the faculty’s technology use.

Third, the report asserts that “60% of students prefer to keep their academic and social lives separate,” although there wasn’t a lot of followup about student interest in social networking and academic work in general. (For example, since a lot of Twitter clients support multiple accounts, it’s not terribly difficult to keep one’s academic and social life separate.)

And finally, the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech.

There are also interesting results about how students want to use LMSes, and more. As always, Educause interprets the data in light of its understanding of of the institional/corporate world of information technology, rather than a faculty-centered one. (As I’ve already joked on Twitter, no one but Educause would characterize the fact that “Students expressed only moderate interest in learner analytics” as a “surprising” finding, unless what was surprising was that their interest was as high as “moderate.”) Nevertheless, it is certainly helpful to understand how students talk about their use of information technology, especially as one considers incorporating social media, or thinking about an electronic device policy.

At the ECAR site, you can download the full report, an infographic drawn from it, and the survey instrument.

New Studies on Use of iPads to Increase Student Outcomes

Therer was a nice article that linked to eight others on the effectiveness of iPads for improving academic outcomes for students.  Most of the stuides were from elementary and secondary school.  http://www.securedgenetworks.com/secure-edge-networks-blog/bid/86775/8-Studies-Show-iPads-in-the-Classroom-Improve-Education

Two Year Colleges Experiment with MOOCs to Replace Developmental-Level Courses.

The lead story in Inside HigherEd focused on several community colleges that were experimenting with MOOCs to replace the need for offering traditional face-to-face developmental-level courses.  [Click here for link to article]  While experimentation with online delivery of developmntal-level courses dates back several decades, the stories features stories of community colleges developing MOOCs.  Most of the attention about MOOCs has focused on large colleges and universities developing alliances with Courseara and others.

The surpirse to me is the modest funds being placed into the development of these MOOCs.  There also seems pride in developing courses for the least cost.  Several of the features colleges are using open educational resoucres such as Khan Academy to build their courses.  Some of the courses have been developed by the instrituion, others received modest $50,000 grants from the Gates Foundation.  I am old enough to remember when the Anneberg Foundation funded online courses development for PBS in the 1980s.  Development costs for a single course might exceed $10 million or more.

Experimentation is a good thing.  While I have great doubts about the efficacy of MOOCs (or any online instruction) to serve the needs of the least prepared students, I am even more worried to see the paucity of funding for their development.  I hope the experiment does not turn into a disaster and results in lack of success for the most vulnerable of college students.

Disruptive Innovation: Embedding Learning Technology into the Classroom (Kellogg Institute Workshop)

On July  15 and 16 I presented a workshop at the Kellogg Institute on embeding learning technology within the classroom and campus learning center.  Click on this link to connect with a special web page that contains all the handouts, PP slides, and web links to other resources.  Most of the technologies shared are those I actually use with my gobal history course at the University of Minnesota.  Others are ones that I plan to pilot text over the upcoming years.

One basic principle to remember when contemplating use of a new learning technology is a basic one, why?  How will the technology help achieve student outocmes better than what is currently used?  How difficult will it be for the instructor and the students to use the technology?  Students have told me repeatedly that they like learning technology in the classroom as long as it is meaningful.  Never make the assumtion that it is easy for students to use without tutorials and support.  It is a learning curve for both the instructor and the students.

I am geeky by nature, but make a point to conduct focus groups with students before I introduce new technologies into the classroom.  These focus groups often give me insights into new emerging technologies that they are using that could be adapated for use within the classroom.  It has taken me a decade to add the learning technolgoies into my class, generally no more than one new thing during an academi semester.  I hope you find one or two ideas to experiment with from all the materials provided through this web site.  Best wishes with your work.