Wooster Horizon Group

More reaction to Friedman's most recent Times article

"Thomas Friedman has MOOCs in his sights and that should worry all sides of the debate because Thomas Friedman operates a very large megaphone that helps shape public opinion, and also he is almost always wrong about everything."

"Thomas Friedman's latest column "The Professors' Big Stage" is a case in point. His piece on "the MOOCs revolution" is riddled with contradictions, shallow thinking -- and an error in basic arithmetic."

Many academics are saying this piece is totally off base. I'll include a couple of posts from Inside Higher Ed that challenge Friedman.

"Professors might be surprised by what the data tell them. Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard, drew murmurs from the crowd-which mostly consisted of Harvard and MIT faculty members-when he showed research indicating that students at a lecture have brain activity roughly equivalent to when they watch television." - this doesn't seem to surprising. There are some other interesting ideas mentioned like "Maybe we could have 100 people register for a seminar," Mr. Rabkin said. The students could work through the first 12 weeks independently and online, "and that teacher can finish the seminar five different times in the course of a 15-week semester, spending the last three weeks with each of those groups of 20."

I agree with this brain activity finding. Students constantly come to me and say "I understand what you are saying in class but when you ask me questions outside of class I do not know what to do." They are not paying attention. Even when I teach to the test, the results from online questions are equivalent (I need to check this formally). This has forced me to rely more on solving open ended problems in groups and getting students to write their own answers. So my principles class is turning into a first year problem solving seminar!

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before." - this was something that administrators from Stanford mentioned in the Educause Learning Initiatives conference when discussing the biggest benefits they had seen from developing MOOCs

"Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy, including the state schools. In the end, I am excited to see that happen." Clayton Christensen makes some interesting observations, but I'm just not sure about the timeframe he puts on the death of universities.

Students are very comfortable consumers of technology but are not comfortable creating with new technologies. "It's almost as if they know how to read, but can't write."

Can you stitch together a collection of MOOCs into a degree? University of Wisconsin says you can.