MOOCs Need to Go Back to Their Roots

There’s a dirty little secret at the heart of education: We don’t really know what learning is, how people best do it, or how to measure it.

Photo by William Perugi/Shutterstock

This back-to-school season has also brought a wide range of developments in the online education space known as MOOCs: massively open online courses. While MOOCs vary in the details, most are free, taught by professors, and are solely for the edification of the student—not for credit. In recent weeks, we’ve seen announcements for the Open Education Alliance, a partnership between the state of California, Udacity, and a host of major tech companies, and Google combining its Course Builder software with Ivy League MOOC consortium EdX, making it easier for top notch professors to use the curriculum development equivalent of Gmail or Blogger

But announcements are not results, and MOOCs, hailed as the saviors of higher education when they burst into public awareness in 2012, have had trouble living up to the hype. San Jose State’s experiment with MOOCs for many introductory and remedial classes was suspended after two semesters, with approximately one-half as many students passing the same classes taught traditionally. That sort of retreat is part of the natural lifecycle of new technologies, the trough of disillusionment. But in another way it’s due a deeper weakness in the design of MOOCs—choosing to substitute buzzword-based disruption for an actual model of what an online, open, and user-driven education should be like. To fix MOOCs, we have to go back to the beginning.

There’s a dirty little secret at the heart of education: We don’t really know what learning is, how people best do it, or how to measure it. Many theories have been developed over time, and they can be separated into two major categories. The standard approach is cognitive-behaviorism, which argues that knowledge can be measured by giving students an identically administered test. Cognitive-behaviorist approaches developed with the rise of public schooling and the accompanying challenges of allocating resources efficiently in a diverse and changing industrial economy. The problem with cognitive-behaviorist is that, as anyone who has ever wielded a No. 2 pencil knows, it results in boring drills and anxiety-provoking tests. Perhaps even more worryingly, the design and development of such assessments is far from an exact science. If done poorly, they can lead to irrelevant educational practices in the name of teaching to the test. And finally, to make meaningful rankings of students, this perspective demands failures.

The main alternative is constructivism, which believes that education is essentially ineffable, but is achieved when a student incorporates a new idea into her mental toolbox. Constructivist approaches to education emphasize dialogue, creativity, and independence. It makes an intuitive case for explaining mastery of complex skills and bolsters the experiences of teachers and students. The problem is that constructivist education is inherently individualized and requires painstaking effort from all parties involved, with commensurate financial costs. Finally, the instructor’s word is the only proof that the student has learned anything, making the whole system dependent on trust in the skill and probity of teachers—and impossible to scale up.

All this theoretical incoherence means that there’s plenty of room for experimentation. Online education is one such grand experiment, replacing all the complex infrastructure of classrooms and scheduling with a few inexpensive and reliable servers. Unfortunately, most of today’s MOOCs are poorly conceived from both constructivist and cognitive-behaviorist approaches. Traditional assessments that measure recall or proficiency with clearly defined concepts are irrelevant when students can freely consult books, notes, Google, and their friends while completing homework and tests. MOOC providers can try to lock down their tests, buying space by randomizing questions and setting up proctoring centers in strip malls, but the fact remains that any assignment that can be graded by a computer can also be easily solved by a student with a computer—and it encourages looking for the right search terms rather than working out an original solution.

While great teachers can deliver lectures to tens of thousands of students worldwide via video, there’s no way for them to have a conversation with all those students. And while platforms like Coursera have made it easier for professors to put together online classes, the end result is a hypertextbook, not a virtual classroom that builds discipline. No wonder MOOCs have an average completion rate of just 7 percent. By and large the material is no more compelling than a textbook, and certificates of completion aside, there’s no reward for finishing the class. The virtual classroom has to compete for attention with Facebook, Netflix, and the real world. Interaction between teachers and students in MOOCs is so minimal that two professors from Duke teaching a class on reason and argument using Coursera promised to shave their heads on camera for a pass rate above 25 percent, providing a practical example of an appeal to pity. The cheap tricks of edutainment substitute for the hard work of learning.

Cyberspace plays by different rules than the real world, so we need to start designing online classes from the ground up instead of trying to cut and mangle the internet so that it looks like a 20^th-century classroom. Contrary to popular belief, MOOCs didn’t originate with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s heralded 2011 class on artificial intelligence, which developed into the startup Udacity. Rather, Stephen Downes and George Siemens, a pair of Canadian academics, developed the MOOC in 2008 as a proof of concept of their connectivist theory of education. Drawing from neuroscience and computer networking, connectivism postulates that knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network. Downes and Siemens argue that in the 21^st century, education is the ability to navigate this network, link disparate fields, and contribute to the understanding of other people.

Connectivism is a somewhat flaky utopian idea, a technological metaphor more than a practical method, but it works with the strengths of digital technology, rather than against it—and MOOC designers should try to hew closely to the original model as much as possible. Rather than pouring effort into making thousands of glossy but ultimately stagnant hypertextbook “classes,” MOOC developers should be designing platforms that work for traditional scholarly fields and the new skills of the global economy. Twelve-week courses, video lectures, and mostly empty discussion boards should be replaced with an ongoing discussion that encourages participants to share what they know with each one another than perform for some distant grader. Professors would set the broad terms of the discussion and subtly guide it toward productive and interesting topics, instead of presenting a fixed curriculum. The hardest part of MOOC design, and the one that deserves the most attention, is making a space for engaged education that rewards helping others as a prelude to learning, not one that replicates the most tedious parts of today’s classrooms.

The current strategy of MOOC developers is one of downmarket disruption, using technology to replace the costly capital and labor of education. This is the standard Silicon Valley game plan, and historically it works even when the product is markedly inferior. Half of a traditional education at 10 percent of the cost would be a bargain, albeit one at the expense of an educated society. A representative argument of college faculty against MOOCs is that “real” constructivist-style learning is impossible in an online environment. To which I can only be remind of Clarke’s First Law, that “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” 

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

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MOOCs Need to Go Back to Their Roots

Forget MOOCs

Harvard University students.

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For a year or two there, free online classes seemed like they just might be the future of higher education. Why, some influential computer scientists wondered, should there be thousands of colleges and universities around the country all teaching the same classes to small groups of students, when you could get one brilliant professor to teach the material to the whole world at once via the Internet? In a March 2012 Wired cover story about the phenomenon, Udacity founder and Stanford artificial-intelligence whiz Sebastian Thrun predicted that within 50 years there would be only 10 institutions of higher learning left in the world. Udacity, he reckoned, might be one of them.

As of this month, that prediction is looking overblown. After a year in which almost every big-name university in the United States rushed to get in on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the backlash is in full force. And no wonder: The idea of free online video lectures replacing traditional classrooms not only offends many educators’ core values, but it threatens their jobs. Worse, the early evidence suggests the model may not work very well: A partnership between San Jose State and Udacity this spring ended with more than half the students failing. In the same spaces where advocates not long ago trumpeted the MOOC revolution, critics now warn of the “MOOC delusion.”

As much as everyone wants to see college costs reined in, replacing thousands of professors and classrooms with a handful of websites populated by remote talking heads cannot be the answer. But before we throw the whole idea out the window, it’s worth asking: Mightn’t there be a way that online lectures could complement the traditional higher-education experience rather than replace it?

Anant Agarwal, president of EdX, believes there is. Like Coursera and Udacity, EdX began by offering full-service online classes for free, taught by professors at Harvard and MIT, the initial partners in the venture. Unlike Coursera and Udacity, though, EdX is a nonprofit, which frees it from the expectations of venture capitalists bent on reaping millions from the concept. As a result, EdX has appeared less focused on getting big quickly and more open to experimentation in terms of how it can best serve professors and students. One of those experiments is what UC–Berkeley professor Armando Fox calls SPOCs—“small private online classes,” as opposed to massive open ones. The approach is also known, less acronymically, as “hybrid” or “blended learning.”

The basic idea is to use MOOC-style video lectures and other online features as course materials in actual, normal-size college classes. By assigning the lectures as homework, the instructors are free to spend the actual class period answering students’ questions, gauging what they have and haven’t absorbed, and then working with them on projects and assignments. In some cases the instructors also use some MOOC-style online assessments or even automated grading features. But in general they’re free to tailor the curriculum, pace, and grading system to their own liking and their own students’ needs.

The notion isn’t entirely novel. A similar approach has been popularized at the high-school level in recent years by Salman Khan, who encourages teachers to use his free online lessons to “flip the classroom”: Students watch lectures at home and then do their “homework” in class. Freed from the need to prepare a lecture for each class session, instructors can focus their time on the rest of the educational experience—the individualized, hands-on instruction and collaboration that no MOOC can provide. In this model, as I’ve noted in the past, the online lecture starts to look less like a poor substitute for traditional classes and more like a 21^st-century twist on the traditional textbook.

The early results are promising. At San Jose State—the same college where so many students failed the Udacity course taught entirely online—a SPOC partnership with EdX has gone much better. There, professor Khosrow Ghadiri used an online circuits and electronics course taught by Agarwal, the EdX president, as part of a flipped-classroom model for two of the three sections of his required engineering class. At home, students would watch Agarwal’s lecture, then fill out a survey designed to gauge which parts they understood and which gave them trouble. Ghadiri spent the first part of each class reviewing the parts that proved most problematic. Then they’d break into groups of three and work on solving problems together, after which each student would be quizzed individually on the day’s material. Ghadiri told me the students were skeptical at first. But as the semester progressed, they consistently outperformed their peers in the nonflipped classroom on the quizzes. And in the end, 91 percent passed Ghadiri’s course—a huge improvement, Ghadiri says, over the 65 percent average pass rate over the past seven years.

In other cases the approach has allowed instructors and students to tackle high-level material that they might not have attempted otherwise. Jaime L’Heureux, an information technology professor at Bunker Hill Community College near Boston, told me that she signed on to co-teach an experimental SPOC using online materials from an EdX class on the Python computer programming language. It was a daunting assignment: Neither she nor her co-professor were fluent in Python. And although the online course was billed as introductory, it was taught by an MIT professor and geared to MIT students. But L’Heureux said EdX worked with her to adapt the material to a slower-paced syllabus, and the flipped-classroom model allowed her to learn along with her students. Even then, half the students ended up dropping out. But those who stuck with it all earned a B-minus or above.

Asked whether she was worried that the MOOC material made her replaceable, L’Heureux laughed. Her students would never have made it through the course, she says, without both the instructors’ hands-on help and the persistent motivation of having to come to class and work through the difficulties alongside their classmates and the people who would be assigning their grades.

EdX isn’t the only MOOC provider experimenting with hybrid classes. In fact, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng has been enthusiastic about the model from the outset, and several of Coursera’s university partners have adopted it in one form or another, including Duke and Vanderbilt. “We’re not interested in replacing professors,” Coursera’s partnerships manager, Connor Diemand-Yauman, told me. “When it comes down to it we understand the instructors’ place in an on-campus educational experience.”

Key questions remain, the biggest of which is whether a flipped classroom using video lectures is really any better than one that uses good old textbooks. Ghadiri believes students find the videos more engaging and are more likely to actually watch them than they are to complete their assigned readings. Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech computer science professor and acute MOOC critic, acknowledges that replacing textbooks with MOOCs might make the material more accessible to some otherwise unmotivated pupils. But in an essay last year, he asked, “If the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?”

Whether or not SPOCs amount to some sort of pedagogical revolution, it seems clear that they hold more promise than pure MOOCs when it comes to delivering students a full educational experience—not to mention saving academics’ jobs.

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Forget MOOCs