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Surprising Things About School

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Re: Surprising Things About School

#131

Post by andrewprock »

akvadrako wrote: post #56
bartedinburgh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?

I can't see how either choice could be always correct. A small pond can have great rewards, but also great risk. Like if it dries up totally.

I've been in both ponds, and I can honestly say that the small pond was more interesting and personally satisfying. That was, until the pond did in fact dry up.

The big pond on the other hand, pays a bit more but is much less interesting. The big pond is almost certainly never going to dry up though.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#132

Post by georgeecollins »

> "Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail."

I don't know the facts-- and none are presented in the tweet-- but I do have a friend whose very job is to run studies on the effectiveness of programs at a University. I am sure this person is not alone.

Even if "most" (asserted) universities don't have a way to measure their effectiveness, the fact is that many of the best do and they all tend to benchmark each other. I would be really curious what the author is basing his assertion on because I think it is likely schools research a lot of things (like their effectiveness) but don't release that information publicly for many reasons.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#133

Post by [deleted] »

twblalock wrote: post #118
dqpb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some never even log in to take MOOCs they register fo So what? How is this at all relevant? If we look at how many people have walked into a bookstore or library, have browsed through a book but never bothered to actually buy and read it, would we say books are a failure? Would you say books have a 95% fail rate? This is such a pointless train of thought.

Why did you decide that MOOCs should be held to the same standard as libraries or bookstores? MOOCs are marketed as courses, and sometimes as an alternative form of higher education. Furthermore, I doubt the people who go to the trouble of designing curricula for MOOCs expect students to drop out partway through. Comparing MOOCs to college courses seems like a better match to the image the MOOC companies themselves h…

[deleted]

Re: Surprising Things About School

#134

Post by SilasX »

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…

Maybe the problem is in measuring them as sort of an all-or-nothing experience, like nothing happened if you didn't see it all the way through. Perhaps we should be judging progress on the basis of individual modules: did you master the material in this one? Or equivalently, the courses should be smaller and better linked with each other: "this course requires you to have passed one of these other courses...".

I think what stops us from using that model is that each course might define its terms differently and assume slightly different pre-requisites such that it's infeasible to teach just one small thing in a way that it can be directly applied to someone else's minicourse.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#135

Post by noobhacker »

austenallred wrote: post #130
astrodev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, s…

Could you cite the studies that say "MOOCs don't work for the average person"? While it is certainly an intuitive statement, I find it hard to empirically verify because the population of people who take MOOCs are very different from those who attend colleges.

For example, those who take MOOCs are probably working full / part-time, trying to pick up some knowledge on the side. They will obviously have less time for learning than full-time students.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#136

Post by Chathamization »

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 never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

I've done this many times. Why? On some platforms (like Coursera) you retain access to the content of a course you have registered for, but that content isn't available for people who didn't register once the class is over. If I think I might ever want to view that content, my best bet is to register (there's no cost) and then have that content available when I want it.

I've also done this on platforms like Udacity where that's not the issue, because by registering I can create a curated list of courses I'm interested in possibly looking at in the future.

In my experience, the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time. Many people don't find lectures to be useful at all, but the vast majority of MOOCs focus on them. After the fifth time I'm stuck waiting for the teacher to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook.

I don't think I've ever seen a MOOC that had written content anywhere close to the quality of Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way.

Also, MOOC efforts for community building are (at least were) focused on a particular class rather than a particular subject. This doesn't lend itself well to long-term community building, especially when people are going through these courses and very different paces.

There seems to be lots of discussion about how MOOCs can be improved, but not much effort into actually trying different approaches.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#137

Post by austenallred »

noobhacker wrote: post #135
austenallred wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

Could you cite the studies that say "MOOCs don't work for the average person"? While it is certainly an intuitive statement, I find it hard to empirically verify because the population of people who take MOOCs are very different from those who attend colleges. For example, those who take MOOCs are probably working full / part-time, trying to pick up some knowledge on the side. They will obviously have less time for l…

Many are behind paywalls, but... let's just say there are ways around those.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12131/full

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aehe.20018/full

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2835842

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2112

https://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/sites/default/files/legac...

http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2014/uploads/procs20...

Re: Surprising Things About School

#138

Post by tsumnia »

noobhacker wrote: post #135
austenallred wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

Could you cite the studies that say "MOOCs don't work for the average person"? While it is certainly an intuitive statement, I find it hard to empirically verify because the population of people who take MOOCs are very different from those who attend colleges. For example, those who take MOOCs are probably working full / part-time, trying to pick up some knowledge on the side. They will obviously have less time for l…

While "average person" is not the term I'd use, the question you're asking is a bit loaded. What measure is used to say a MOOC "works"? If we are saying completion, then high drop out rates are an issue. If we say high interactivity among those that don't drop out, this is where the current field of research in MOOCs is at. While I do not study it, colleagues in my lab are.

My point is that quantifying the effectiveness of a MOOC is an ill-defined domain. Instead, we acknowledge the attrition rate and do analysis on those that pursue the course. Current research looks at system interactions, the social networks of MOOC forums, etc. to identify student behaviors that show higher "gains", be it course completion or grade.

If a student leaves a MOOC, there is no way to identify why they leave. Likewise, unless asked, it is hard to identify why a student joins a MOOC. Students enrolled in a MOOC can come from a variety of culture, geographical, sociological, motivation, etc. backgrounds. As such, assuming traditional student behaviors is ill advised. However, in the process of learning, access to material is not enough to learning the material and additional effort is needed by the student to build the necessary mental models in their head. If a student drops out of a MOOC, it is hard for the runners/analysts of the MOOC to appropriately say the student learned the material.

As austenallred mentions, current education research is looking at the motivation of learning, as well as what constitutes motivation (and learning for that matter).

Re: Surprising Things About School

#139

Post by tsumnia »

artimaeis wrote: post #122
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…

> 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 co…

A major issue with using "useful/helpful-ness" as our metric for success is quantifying the term. A self-report Likert scale is susceptible to users just rating 1 or 7, or saying its useful even when it was not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study#Disadvantage..., not the greatest citation, but I am short for time).

The issue then looks at what is "success" in a MOOC. If the goal is to just have videos online, I'll just watch YouTube (as I have my own lecture series there). However, observing is considered one of the lower level of learning and things like Bloom's taxonomy point out there needs to be some type of interaction for better learning gains. These interactions require the student to have a more active role in the learning process. If they are not interacting with the system (logging in, watching videos, completing exercises, etc.), then they are not taking this needed active role. This is where "drop out" begins to be quantified and where then we can measure what worked, what didn't.

To address you example, if the user stops at 70%, researchers will ask "why?" From there, analysis of student behaviors, effectiveness of interface/instruction/material, etc. will arise. If the ability to study these things is confounded by the fact that the vast majority quit before completion, it makes it harder to answer the "Why" and "How do we fix it" questions.

Again, what we quantify as "successful" is still up for debate; but if a student drops out, it becomes harder to tell if they learned from the course and if it was student or material that drove that decision.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#140

Post by astrodev »

austenallred wrote: post #130
astrodev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, s…

Do most people learn well from traditional methods though?

If dropping out of a MOOC involved a big financial hit, social humiliation, and the loss of a great deal of personal freedom, the completion rates would skyrocket. Completely different incentives.

The reasoning that traditional education is successful because it has high completion rates because of external pressures is a bit circular, isn't it?

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