The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” 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.
It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 24 Jul 14Very interesting transcript of interviews with two Wharton professors on impact of MOOCs on their MBA programs. "So, in the last year, when I've taught product design, I've posed to myself the challenge: What can we do in the classroom that can only be done when 60 people are together sharing the same time and location? I have them watch the video offline, and then when we get together, we do a simulation or an exercise or presentations or group work - things that can only be done in that location when we're all together." Excerpt on completion rate: Knowledge@Wharton: Despite the evident advantages, one of the challenges that all MOOCs face is that the completion rate typically tends to be pretty low. I wonder both as teachers and as researchers, what you have learned through your experience that might be relevant to business schools? Ulrich: The completion rate statistic is a red herring. People like to trot it out, but it doesn't seem terribly relevant to me. If you think about what the barrier is to registering for a MOOC, it's literally one click in a Coursera environment. So many people enroll to check it out, to watch a few videos, to see what it's all about. Sponsored Content: My MOOC requires hundreds of hours of effort to complete a substantial design project. Very, very few people are willing to put in hundreds of hours, but many people are interested in learning a little bit about customer needs or aesthetics in design or prototyping, so they watch a few videos. We think pretty carefully in MOOCs about three categories of learners. Those who are just browsing; those who want to view the material but won't do the work; and then those who will do all of the work. So as I say, that narrow completion statistic is not meaningful in terms of evaluating the success of the MOOCs.
