Surprising Things About School

> 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

We are still trying to understand what makes for better "learning". If I practice the piano everyday, I will no doubt have a better ability to play, but I may not understand music theory. As a shameless plug, I am trying to add practice to be a core part of learning Computer Science and a link to my research platform is in my profile.

This is the same separate of vocational schools and coding bootcamps to graduate schools. The traditional 4-year school sits in the middle ground between application and theory and is probably why we have such difficulty deciding "success".

> to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook

This is ultimately student preference. Some students like a more affable teacher, some don't want a social-able instructor (so long as its not interfering). I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

I will argue larger-scope community building is difficult and MOOCs struggle with it; I would say because of its availability. It is harder to build community when the individuals come from such diverse backgrounds. Many factors can make it difficult to build bounds (social, cultural, temporal, etc.). Furthermore, you cannot control why the student wants to take a MOOC. They may not want to give that additional effort to community building for a subject they do not perceive as having higher priority to other life decisions.

I would disagree with "actually trying different approaches". This is being done and academic journals are trying to study them (the deadline for the Journal for Education Data Mining just passed). There are also non-academic approaches like Duolingo and Khan Academy, and they are trying different techniques as well.

Ultimately, there is no panacea for learning. We know engagement can lead to learning and therefore if we can maintain engagement, we might be able to teach. Community-building can be that engagement. Self motivation can be. At that point we need to research these things more to know for sure.

I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time.

#1 school for this metric.

In the Top 10 for some other metric.

Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.

> This is ultimately student preference.

Sure. But the last time I checked, almost all MOOCs were lecture focused. Like I said, I've yet to find any with a text component as good as Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way or other free online textbooks. Perhaps there's are a few out there, but every time I've browsed MOOCs I've found just about everyone to be lecture focused. Out of the dozens I've looked at (on multiple platforms) I can only think of one that wasn't, and that was eventually removed.

Plenty of people use the internet to learn plenty of things. I think it's time to consider how much of the "failure" of MOOCs is due to the failure of online learning, and how much of it is due to the fact that university classes aren't a great way to teach people things (at least for a large chunk of the population).

> I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

Instructor anecdotes were an example of why I don't like lectures. With a book you can scan over content that is superfluous and get to the information you need. You can re-read or take slowly the parts you have trouble with, and quickly skip over the parts you already know. All of this is much, much harder to do with lectures.

I'm confused as to why you think professor anecdotes are related to large-scope community building? They're quite different things, and if people view them as serving the same purpose then there's even more of a misunderstanding when it comes to education than I had previously believed.

As for the difficulty of community building, I think you should broaden your horizons a bit. For instance, if you're a bit late on a Coursera course the forums are pretty much dead, and you're better off discussing things or asking questions on another site. Likewise with Udacity - the course might still be active, but everyone that has completed the course has moved on and won't see your message. This isn't because of a difficulty in community building, but because of a conscious decision that most MOOCs take to segregate their forums by class.

It also works the other way. It's socially/professionally acceptable to stop working for 3/4 years to go to university, somewhat less so to stop working to take a bunch of MOOCs. Therefore, most people taking MOOCs are also working full time/studying/looking for a job, and they're also likely to be older and have more life commitments than most students. So MOOCs are naturally going to take a back seat to everything else going on in a person's life. They also don't carry the same recognition as having a degree.

MOOCs also come with a number of unique advantages compared to traditional universities:

- They widen access to education to people that aren't able to attend university

- People can take courses they know they might struggle with without fear of flunking them and harming their academic record

- Mature students don't need to make life sacrifices in order to take a MOOC. They don't have the dilemma of whether to up roots and move to attend a prestigious university