MOOCs get schoolified: Two reports predict MOOCs will simply be absorbed
July 22, 2014 at 8:47 am 9 comments
Seymour Papert might have predicted this. It doesn’t matter if they’re great or not. It is very hard for educational technology to disrupt school. School fights back, and schoolifies subjects and technologies. I said before: Education is technology’s Afghanistan. Lots of technologies have come in and tried to change everything, and the technologies come out limping.
Massive open online courses will not fundamentally reshape higher education, nor will they disappear altogether. Those are the conclusions of separate reports released this week by Teachers College at Columbia University and Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit advisory group.
Neither report contains any blockbuster news for those who have followed the decline of the MOOC hype over the last year or so. But they support the theory that the tools and techniques Stanford University professors used in 2011 to enroll 160,000 students in a free, online computer-science course will be subsumed by broader, incremental efforts to improve higher education with technology.
MOOCs are like free gyms, says Mr. Kelly. They might enable some people—mostly people who are already healthy and able to work out without much guidance—to exercise more. But they won’t do much for people who need intensive physical therapy or the care of a doctor.
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Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
mgozaydinmuvaffak gozaydin | July 22, 2014 at 10:29 am
Nobody understood what the MOOC is .
It is just popularity.
But out of this popularity came out a wonderful product
EDX set up by MIT and Harvard .
When edx provide degrees and charges only $ 100-200 per course you will see what the diistruption is to higher education .
4,500 or so colleges will be closed, 2 million teachers faculties will be jobless within 10 years .
Columbia University Teachers College is 100 % wrong as mostly teachers are wrong. ( sorry for the sarcasm ) saying
” online will not reshape the higher education ”
It will reshape even distrupt so fiercely that Teachers college will be closed within 10 years too.
Today good MOOCs by top universities do not provide degrees,
see ” what will happen when they provide degrees at low fees ”
EDX has a great future . if they provide degrees. Without degrees they are nothing .
2.
thedarktrumpet | July 22, 2014 at 4:47 pm
I disagree with mogz with this. Yeah, it’s possible that MOOCs will eventually provide degrees – but how low of fees would you expect from the top universities? Running a university is pretty expensive, and the undergraduates and graduate students are benchmarked (of sorts), especially the graduate programs. A college’s ranking goes up or down depending on their programs, which are impacted by the students who go there as well as the professors who work there. I seriously doubt someplace like MIT is going to have degrees where many thousands of people at a time are going for them. It’s going to be hard to control cheating, and ensure that the quality of their graduates is maintained. In the end, this is going to impact their rankings..which then impact who works there, and who goes there, which then impacts the area it resides in (impacted research).
Simply put, I don’t think that your version of what’s going to happen in 10 years. Online education will impact things, but I don’t see this mass closing of educational institutions that you’re starting.
3.
mgozaydinmuvaffak gozaydin | July 23, 2014 at 3:17 am
Please reveal your name and profession . Why do you hide.
You can find me at Google muvaffak gozaydin .
“Mass closing ” will start when edx starts providing degrees and closing will be completed in 10 years not overnight.
There will be still enough demand for MIT and Harvard face to face schools and researches and they will pay $ 50-60,000 per year. MIT and Harvard will be more famous in the World and they will have miillions students GLOBALLY. They will make billion $ excess Money ( for non profits it is the Word for profits )
I AM AN ENGİNEER FOR 50 YEARS and love to hire MITx Harvardx degree holders.
If I want researchers then I hire MIT and Harvard f2f degree holders.
I say MITx and Harvardx holders will be much better educated than graduates of 4,500 colleges of today .
Please rank colleges . Even you can rank them . How many of them are good .That is being done by Obama now . Federal government will not provide any loans to many colleges. That is your Money gentelmen .
You should thank to Obama .
4.
Mark Guzdial | July 23, 2014 at 9:47 am
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/07/22/slightly-more-nuanced-bill-gates-offers-vision-higher-education#ixzz38IbuyQTi
Inside Higher Ed
5.
mgozaydinmuvaffak gozaydin | July 23, 2014 at 3:21 am
The cost of an online course is around $ 1 per student per course if enrollment during 5 years close to 1 million . If less enrollment then cost goes high proportionally .
The important thing is willingness of edx universities to provide their courses online . he value of their knowledge cannot be measured by even $ 50,000 tuition .
So expect fees around $ 100-200 to leave a large margin for school s.
6.
Baker | July 23, 2014 at 7:55 am
Harvard has admissions standards for a reason. Now I realize that they only accept some low percentage of applicants, but let’s say that they still only accept 33% of students who are *actually prepared and qualified* to attend Harvard. That’s 5000 students. That’s also a very long way from 1,000,000.
Looking at the state of K-12 education in America I would suggest that very few students are actually prepared well enough to make it through a Harvard EdX course. So my question is: if you build it, will they come? Or I guess it would be better to ask “will they stay?” …”will they complete the course.”
There is absolutely nothing about our K-12 system that tells me American students are prepared to receive college courses via an online platform – which dynamic as it sounds, is almost by definition a lecture-based, reading, or information transmission type course. It takes a lot of groundwork, experience, and preparation for students to be able to actually benefit, and actually learn, from a course like that.
Yes, some students can and will, and there will be success stories of students who slipped through the cracks and were caught or saved by the possibility of an online course from Harvard. But those students will be exceptions. The masses? I don’t think so. Given the current completion rate of MOOC-like courses, in order for millions of students to actually succeed in those courses, you need what 5 times that? 10 times that number in the pipeline. Scaling education up is a concern, but the supply of students does have limits.
7. The just-in-time professor. | More or Less Bunk | July 23, 2014 at 8:57 am
[…] as yet another way to make the same point. “Education,” writes Mark Guzdial in a post describing two more studies that also seem to me to support this new consensus, “is […]
8.
mgozaydinmuvaffak gozaydin | July 23, 2014 at 10:48 am
Baker
Sorry I cannot comment every wrong statement ( according to me ) you have made. But only I want to say Harvard accepts only 9 % of the applicants and number gets smaller every year. With 35 % Harvard would die of quality..
ONLINE is in the USA for the last 20 years. Now there are 7.5 million out of 20 million students are taking at least 1 online course. And 2 million students are taking 100 % online courses and degrees .
We have to educate ourselves on online a lot .
Online is just a tool.
Important thing is the VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Quality education can be provided by about 300-500 universities .
We would love to send our children all to these good schools. But it is materially impossible . Therefore now there is way to disseminate this GOOD QUALITY education to millions is online by edx . Not by only MIT and Harvard . You should know that not everybody can make MIT and Harvard. They get the smartest students of the World not only US.
Last Word: If you cannot distinguish bad colleges from good ones, your children are at risqe.
That is what Federal Government will do for you .
9. reestheskin: med ed » Education is technology’s Afghanistan | August 6, 2014 at 3:01 am
[…] Mark Guzdial over at Computing Education Blog […]