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Surprising Things About School

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Re: Surprising Things About School

#121

Post by emodendroket »

romaniv wrote: post #120

>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocr…

I think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#122

Post by artimaeis »

tsumnia wrote: post #100
artimaeis wrote: post #79

> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a singl…

Not knocking your own choices, but its more the backlash to the 2013 "MOOCs are the greatest thing ever! KhanAcademy/EdX/Coursera! Wooo!" Personally, I love them and would love to work with those companies. In fact, when I started teaching, I used many of the aspects I saw MOOCs using in my traditional classrooms. However, there is a truth to the statement. Almost no one finishes a MOOC (some never even log in to tak…

> Some people do grab what they want and leave, but that is not the case for everyone.

Are there metrics that have measured this? What percentage of users find a MOOC useful even if it wasn't completed?

What I was trying to get at is that by looking at completion rates we might not be looking at the whole picture. Especially if the question we're revolving around is whether the course is worth the creation/hosting costs.

> some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

[...]

> we are too busy trying to understand why people never log in in the first place

So you have at least 4 classes of 'user':

- did not register

- registered but never logged in again

- logged in at least once

- completed course

It seems to me that there's a different way to categorize the users in measuring course effectiveness:

- did not find the course useful/helpful

- did find the course useful/helpful

So if you are able to craft a course that has magically high engagement, but people don't find it particularly useful - you've still failed.

Maybe the value that course-makers hope to deliver through completion of the course simply isn't high enough?

If a user completes 70% of a course but doesn't see the need for the rest of it, then stopping at that point is the logical move. What sets college/university apart in this is degree which has a very high social impact. The fact remains that MOOC achievements are still widely looked down upon as somehow lesser than their college equivalent.

This whole discourse has encouraged me to revisit those courses I found most effective and complete them. At the very least I can help those courses stats and provide some further narrative of their utility.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#123

Post by ghaff »

tsumnia wrote: post #100
artimaeis wrote: post #79

> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a singl…

Not knocking your own choices, but its more the backlash to the 2013 "MOOCs are the greatest thing ever! KhanAcademy/EdX/Coursera! Wooo!" Personally, I love them and would love to work with those companies. In fact, when I started teaching, I used many of the aspects I saw MOOCs using in my traditional classrooms. However, there is a truth to the statement. Almost no one finishes a MOOC (some never even log in to tak…

Given the nearly non-existent barrier to entry, I'm not sure that completion/engagement percentages mean much. MOOC content can be useful for help learning certain types of things. But so can books, YouTube, etc. Useful resources for (mostly) continuing professional education has to be seen as a very large step back from changing the future of education for underserved populations.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#124

Post by twblalock »

> 1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad

I suppose this is sad for academics, who teach as though they expect all of their students to become academics. But the students are just being realistic -- for almost all of them, an education is preparation for a career. I was in academia for a little while and it was amazing how many professors just didn't understand that.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#125

Post by moosey »

austenallred wrote: post #24
VLM wrote: post #16

The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't kn…

OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100…

What is the purpose of a MOOC? Is it to make training available, or to provide academic success?

If it is the former, then it is definitely a success. If it is the latter, then I think that not only percentage rates of success are important, but also the nominal completion rate itself.

A MOOC supplies the opportunity for someone getting a degree in communications, business, or some other not-entirely-technical degree, that might be wonder what a computer science or high level mathematics course is like to go and find out. Does their failure in such a course mean that the class itself is a failure, or can the fact that they had access and were able to put a toe in the water mark success?

I would suggest the latter.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#126

Post by twblalock »

triplesec wrote: post #3

Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

Why couldn't that student take out a student loan, like most students?

Re: Surprising Things About School

#127

Post by romaniv »

emodendroket wrote: post #121
romaniv wrote: post #120

>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocr…

I think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.

I would be ecstatic if I had an option to replace some of my university classes with MOOCs. The leap in quality of lecturing would be gigantic. MOOCs made me realize that most of the subjects in college I found "complicated" really weren't. I just had horrendous professors and bad books.

I'm currently in the process of "fixing" my college education by watching lectures on fundamental subjects like biology (which I never had in college for some reason), chemistry (which was taught really badly) and linear algebra (taught awfully). It's astounding how many new things I'm picking up.

Plus, there are classes like AI, Cryptography, Model Thinking and so on. Nothing of this sort was available to me in college at all.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#128

Post by jehlakj »

artimaeis wrote: post #79

> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a singl…

Similar experiences here. I get what what I need from a couple of videos and never look back.

I wish that lecturers would move to YouTube and structure each lecture as its own instead of having the burden to fit them into a course. For example, if I don’t have the appropriate prerequisite knowledge to understand what I’m currently watching, I should be able to search for and learn it quickly instead of having to browse through intermediate lectures.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#129

Post by austenallred »

moosey wrote: post #125
austenallred wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100…

What is the purpose of a MOOC? Is it to make training available, or to provide academic success? If it is the former, then it is definitely a success. If it is the latter, then I think that not only percentage rates of success are important, but also the nominal completion rate itself. A MOOC supplies the opportunity for someone getting a degree in communications, business, or some other not-entirely-technical degree…

Right. They're only a failure inasmuch as the initial promise was "these will basically replace college but for free!" which is now clearly not true.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#130

Post by austenallred »

astrodev wrote: post #115
tsumnia wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knocking your own choices, but its more the backlash to the 2013 "MOOCs are the greatest thing ever! KhanAcademy/EdX/Coursera! Wooo!" Personally, I love them and would love to work with those companies. In fact, when I started teaching, I used many of the aspects I saw MOOCs using in my traditional classrooms. However, there is a truth to the statement. Almost no one finishes a MOOC (some never even log in to tak…

> If we then look to justify why bother, its a little hard to warrant hosting costs, etc. if you aren't seeing anything come from it > If I ran a MOOC with a 95% fail rate, how can I label it successful. How is the completion rate a better measure of value added than the absolute number of finishers?

Both are important. There are multiple questions to be asked.

For extremely self motivated people, MOOCS are a win, no doubt. Again, MOOCs are definitely better than no MOOCs.

But the promise was that MOOCs can just replace college to a large degree, because the content you get in college will be online. In that instance the question becomes "do MOOCs work for most people?" For what we'll call the "average" person, studies have shown that just isn't the case. Most people don't learn well from MOOCs, unfortunately.

Therefore what we're learning is that a non-trivial amount of what makes a college education successful is some combination of the following things that MOOCs don't have: external pressure, scheduled courses, due dates, a community of learners, a physical campus, etc.

As such, I view part of the next step to figure out which of those aspects MOOCs are missing that are vital to the mix in order to help average people learn the things they need to know. Traditional education just says all of them are necessary, but I'm not convinced that's the case.

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