No Rich Child Left Behind, and Enriching the Rich: Why MOOCs are not improving education
November 25, 2015 at 8:38 am 23 comments
When I talk to people about MOOCs these days, I keep finding myself turning to two themes.
Theme #1. Our schools aren’t getting worse. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing. We have more poorer kids, and they are doing worse because of everything, not just because of school.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths. The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. … It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
Theme #2: There are definitely tangible effects of MOOCs, as seen in the study linked below. They help rich white men find better jobs. They help educate the rich. They help a small percentage of the poor.
All the money being poured into developing MOOCs fuels the gap between the rich and the poor. If you want to improve education generally, nationally or worldwide, aim at the other 90%. MOOCs aren’t improving education. They enrich those who are already rich.
Using data from MOOCs offered by the University of Pennsylvania, Alcorn, Christensen and Emanuel were some of the first to suggest that MOOC learners were more likely to be employed men in developed countries who had previously earned a degree — countering the early narrative that MOOCs would democratize higher education around the world.
Addendum:
Commenters pointed out that I didn’t make my argument clear. I’m posting one of my comment responses here to make clearer what I was trying to say:
As Alan pointed out, the second article I cited only once says that MOOC learners are “more likely to be employed men in developed countries.” I probably should have supported that point better, since it’s key to my argument. All the evidence I know suggests that MOOC learners are typically well-educated, more affluent from the developed world, and male.
- In the original EdX MOOC, 78% of the attendees had already taken the class before. (See full report here.)
- Tucker Balch released demographics on his MOOC: 91% male, 73.3% from OECD countries, and over 50% had graduate degrees. (See post here.)
- Still the most careful analysis of MOOC demographics that I know is the 2013 Penn study (see article here) which found, “The student population tends to be young, well educated, and employed, with a majority from developed countries. There are significantly more males than females taking MOOCs, especially in developing countries.”
- As you know, Georgia Tech’s Online MS (OMS) in CS is 85% domestic (the opposite of our face-to-face MS, which actually serves more students from the developing world). (See one page report here.)
If your MOOCs have significantly different demographics, I’d be interested in hearing your statistics. However, given the preponderance of evidence, your MOOC may be an outlier if you do have more students from the developing world.
The argument I’m making in this post is that (a) to improve education, we have to provide more to the underprivileged, (b) most MOOC students are affluent, well-educated students from the developing world, and (c) the benefits of MOOCs are thus accruing mostly to people who don’t need more enrichment. Some people are benefitting from MOOCs. My point is that they are people who don’t need the benefit. MOOCs are certainly not “democratizing education” and are mostly not providing opportunities to those who don’t have them anyway.
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Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
alanone1 | November 25, 2015 at 10:19 am
Hi Mark
The second article doesn’t support your claim above your quoting of it. One quote from the article says: “and also that those from less-advantaged backgrounds are most likely to benefit from the courses.”
And there are a few more references to support this opposite claim.
I fear that MOOCs have a much deeper problem in being a kind of token for what it takes to understand important deep developed ideas. I don’t think they get there.
Cheers,
Alan
2.
Mark Guzdial | November 25, 2015 at 10:40 am
Hi Alan,
I think it’s a subtle point that I didn’t do justice to. The full report appears in the Harvard Business Review (see link here) — the study is co-authored by Coursera CEO Daphne Koller. Most participants in MOOCs are affluent and well-educated males in the developed world. They benefit from MOOCs. There are less well-educated and less-affluent people from the developed world in MOOCs — not as many, but they are there. They seem to benefit just as much as the affluent and well-educated. A small percentage of MOOC participants are from the developing world, are not well-educated, and are not-affluent. They get the largest benefit, but there’s not many of them. In the area under the curve of MOOC benefits, the majority of the area goes to affluent, well-educated males in the developed world. There’s a spike upwards for the poor in the developing world, but it’s really narrow. Here’s the relevant paragraph from the full report:
What I said was “They help rich white men find better jobs. They help educate the rich. They help a small percentage of the poor.” I think that’s consistent with the paragraph above.
Cheers,
Mark
3.
enigmisto | November 25, 2015 at 4:04 pm
You acknowledge the Harvard Business Review’s article point that the less affluent participants derive the most benefit, but then you dismiss it as irrelevant because there aren’t very many participants that fall into that category.
But that’s not a fault of MOOCs, it simply reflects the lack of time, internet access, etc. of lower income people to take advantage of the enormous educational opportunity that MOOCs provide. You imply that we should be disappointed in MOOCs, because they are primarily helping the well-off, but everything about the linked article indicates that MOOCs are working as advertised, and we should, in fact, be putting *more* effort into connecting lower income people with MOOCs, because the advantage they can gain is significant.
4.
Mark Guzdial | November 25, 2015 at 4:10 pm
You are making an assumption that the reason why lower income people are not using MOOCs is “lack of time, internet access, etc.” Do you know of any studies showing that’s true? I have done research on why women aren’t taking MOOCs in CS (not yet published), and those aren’t the reasons we found. There is evidence suggesting that few in the developing world aren’t using MOOCs because the MOOCs are designed poorly for the developing world (for example here). I suspect that the few people from the developing world who do use MOOCs are the outliers, and that we would need a different design to reach the majority of potential learners in the developing world.
5.
Jennifer | December 5, 2015 at 9:36 pm
As a white teacher, I took one MOOC class within my field that was excellent and relevant. Unfortunately, my school district refused to accept the certificate of completion as valuable. Since then I have looked for more traditional professional development to enhance my resume. Any suggestions for how to communicate the value of a MOOC certificate?
6.
Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) | November 25, 2015 at 10:37 am
Well said
7.
Raul Miller | November 25, 2015 at 11:49 am
If I might restate what you have said, in as I have understood it:
(1) The problem is not the rich, the problem is not MOOCs – the problem is lost opportunity, and missing alternatives. MOOCs just cast shadows which highlight the real problems.
(2) However, when talking about resource allocation, we need better options. The rich should be able to take care of themselves, and should not need to be charity sponges.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that.
But how do we make this right?
I suspect it’s going to need a mix of:
(A) Nutrition. This problem keeps coming back for the poor. It’s not an easy problem and has all sorts of implications – not all of them pleasant.
(B) Study skills. A student with good study skills can shine even in mildly horrible environments. Maybe you can treat rich kids like passive sponges and still succeed, but that’s not going to work so well for students who do not know how to learn.
Of course there’s all sorts of other “traditional values” that still have relevance – good study materials, motivated and skilled educators, dedicated parents, etc. etc. But I suspect that all of these will necessarily favor the better prepared rich – perhaps not as much as MOOCs (can this be measured objectively?), but you don’t solve a problem by ignoring it.
But maybe the silver lining on this cloud is that we can ask MOOC evangelists what they are doing about these issues. And, maybe it should be policy that any donations to MOOC efforts must include an equal donation towards setting up nutritional efforts for the poor, and another equal donation towards setting up study skill efforts for new students? Some of this, of course, will be obvious and follow traditional paths – but there will have to be more than that if we are going to actually be solving these sorts of problems.
8.
Nick Feamster | November 25, 2015 at 8:24 pm
Nonsense.
This article tilts at windmills, and selectively quotes. It’s akin to complaining that a screwdriver can’t hit a nail. The lack of rigor in how the article cites and quotes sources is disingenuous.
The article says “MOOCs aren’t improving education.”, but the articles he (selectively) cites don’t support that at all. It’s worth reading the full article he cites. Here’s another part of it.
“About half of the surveyed learners, or 52 percent, said they initially enrolled in a MOOC to advance their careers, compared to only 28 percent who did so for educational purposes. In both groups, nearly 90 percent said they benefited from the MOOCs, though more learners reported tangible career benefits (33 percent) than tangible educational benefits (18 percent).
Among the “career builders,” as the report labels them, 62 percent said they felt better prepared for their jobs after completing a MOOC, and 43 percent said the MOOC helped them become more competitive applicants for a job. Finding a new job was the highest-scoring tangible benefit, with 26 percent reporting that outcome.”
This excerpt is consistent with my experience both as a MOOC instructor (where my demographic is a mixture of “developing world” students *and* mid-career professionals in the developed world who are “career builders”), and as a learner (where I took two machine learning courses as a “career builder”).
Whether MOOCs serve the agenda of broadening participation in computing is certainly arguable, but that’s a general problem, and is orthogonal to MOOCs. The claim that “MOOCs aren’t improving education” is countered by the very research that the article cites.
9.
Mark Guzdial | November 26, 2015 at 12:36 pm
Hi Nick,
It sounds to me like there are two points that we disagree on. The first point may just be because I wasn't explicit in my claim. The second point may be about the purpose of MOOCs.
As Alan pointed out, the article only once says that MOOC learners are "more likely to be employed men in developed countries." I probably should have supported that point better, since it's key to my argument. All the evidence I know suggests that MOOC learners are typically well-educated, more affluent from the developed world, and male.
If your MOOCs have significantly different demographics, I'd be interested in hearing your statistics. However, given the preponderance of evidence, your MOOC may be an outlier if you do have more students from the developing world.
The argument I'm making in this post is that (a) to improve education, we have to provide more to the underprivileged, (b) most MOOC students are affluent, well-educated students from the developing world, and (c) the benefits of MOOCs are thus accruing mostly to people who don't need more enrichment.
Your point that you were a MOOC learner and took "two machine learning courses as a 'career builder'" is a perfect example of my point. You don't say when you took your MOOCs, but it's certainly in 2012 or after. By 2012, you had a PhD from MIT and were a professor at Georgia Tech and won numerous awards (see GT bio.) Perhaps you used your machine learning knowledge to move to your new job at Princeton, in which case you did get a benefit of MOOCs. You're an affluent, well-educated, privileged white man. Giving you a career boost doesn't do much social good and doesn't improve the state of education.
I do see your point that some people are benefitting from MOOCs. My point is that they are people who don't need the benefit. MOOCs are certainly not "democratizing education" and are mostly not providing opportunities to those who don't have them anyway.
Happy Thanksgiving!
10.
enigmisto | November 26, 2015 at 5:02 pm
The fuzzy metric “social good” can be used to defend whatever viewpoint you want. For example, opponents of gifted education say that funding gifted education is a waste of resources towards social good because gifted kids would do well anyway. Proponents of gifted education argue that societal changes are driven by the very brightest, and one of the best expenditures towards social good is to help turn the brightest kids into top, world-class scientists, engineers, artists, etc.
The reality is that everyone deserves to be educated to their fullest potential, and any new form of education that moves us in that direction is an improvement. The ripple effects of any person’s education towards social good is impossible to determine. All we can truly predict is that one life changed by education is one life changed. We know that MOOCs are changing people’s lives; therefore, MOOCs are improving education.
You seem specifically focused on affluence. It seems worth pointing out that right now, the wealthy can easily afford college and need-based financial aid potentially allows the impoverished to attend college for free. Meanwhile, the middle class can’t afford college without taking on crushing debt. So if MOOCs turn out to have the greatest impact by allowing the middle class to bypass or augment college and launch better careers with less debt, that may be exactly the kind of social good we need to complement the role that colleges already fill.
There are other demographic issues to take into account other than affluence. Most colleges are heavily oriented towards serving people in their late teens and early twenties. MOOCs offer educational options to people younger and older than those who can partake in a traditional college experience. If the only thing MOOCs accomplish is to force us to rethink our society’s notion that higher education is something you do from ages 18-22 and then you never need to “top-up” again, that alone is a win for education.
There’s another irony here. If MOOCs don’t lead to tangible career opportunities, and are taken purely for intellectual growth and enjoyment, the MOOC naysayers are quick to denounce MOOCs as unproductive. If MOOCs do lead to tangible career opportunities, the MOOC naysayers are quick to argue that college is about more than just career opportunities, and claim that MOOCs aren’t providing the kind of intellectual enrichment that colleges provide. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.
Just like traditional college, sometimes MOOCs are taken for pleasure and enlightenment, sometimes they are taken as vocational training. Both purposes are okay. And to the extent that MOOCs provide a higher-quality and/or lower-cost alternative to attending college, that’s a win.
It seems clear that MOOCs improve the state of education. All you’ve demonstrated in your post is that you have an exceptionally narrow definition of what it means to improve education.
11.
Nick Feamster | November 27, 2015 at 10:06 am
Hi Mark,
Happy Thanksgiving!
To say that MOOC learners are people who “don’t need the benefit” seems to suggest that the demographic that is taking MOOCs (and, society as a whole) would be better off without these courses.
I think that’s just not the case. Broadening participation is important, but MOOCs serve other purposes for other demographics, too, and broadening participation goes well beyond MOOCs. I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that MOOCs exacerbate (or improve) the problem, versus just preserving status quo.
I do agree that it’s worth figuring out whether and how MOOCs could be a better tool for broadening participation, as they certainly aren’t doing that. (Though I would argue that that doesn’t eliminate their value.)
For example, many mid-career folks in the networking industry, both here and abroad, are getting a leg up on the rest by learning about the fast-moving industry from experts. I have done the same thing by taking some machine learning courses.
Does the fact that I am a white male mean that I “don’t need the benefit” of a MOOC? To the contrary, I had plenty of ML knowledge before, and taking the courses had nothing to do with my own career advancement. It had nothing to do with a “career boost” for me, as I’d already moved jobs before taking these course, so that point doesn’t really apply.
For me, taking a few extra courses was about enrichment and the opportunity to pass on knowledge to students, I took extra courses last summer to strengthen my knowledge, so that I could _teach_ other students about it. Many of them are minorities and women who have indirectly benefitted from me taking these courses. The same can be said for the books I read. Are books bad news too, simply because more men than women read machine learning textbooks?
What about the other students (regardless of race) who are taking these courses, gaining new skills, and getting access to a wider array of jobs as a result (I know several minority women for which this is the case, too, by the way).
Coursera doesn’t release the demographics of my students to me, otherwise I’d be happy to share. I’ll be happy to poll demographics when I offer the course next (I have polled on profession before, and most have 5+ years of industry experience already.). I would guess that they are disproportionately male, and there are certainly many (most?) students from the developed world. That said, I have a *lot* of students from India and abroad as well. Even if that proportion were only 10%, that’s still 5,000 students from the developing world who wouldn’t have otherwise had this opportunity at all. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.
Yes, we need to broaden participation in computing, but that’s a CS problem (and perhaps even a broader problem than that, as Shriram Krishnamurthi points out). That problem is not specific to MOOCs, and even the numbers we have don’t suggest that MOOCs are any worse/different than, say, books, computers, or high-quality education in general.
(For what it’s worth, Princeton’s Class of 2017 CS majors are 37% women. My MOOC is nowhere near that, but even my on-campus class has a way to go… I think it was no more than 20% women…not that much different than the MOOC, I might gather.)
12.
alanone1 | November 27, 2015 at 11:55 am
I think the comparison to the book is a good one — and should be done on a number of dimensions.
For example, the cognitive changes from just learning to read fluently (compared to the kinds of thinking in traditional oral societies) have been measured and noticed (though as far as I can tell not recently — needs to be done again). It would be interesting and important to see to what extent the mix of oral and literate content in MOOCs makes a difference — if any — and if so, in what directions. (Are most of them really too much like TV?)
Another thing that we looked at a lot back in the 70s was the trade off between visual angle and resolution. Up to an important point, a wider visual angle with coarse resolution is more important and useful than a small V.A. with lots of resolution — this is especially true for children.
This is especially critical in a era — and especially in the 3rd world — where cell phones are the predominant technology, whether “smart” or not. Simply put, cheap magnifiers with cell phones could allow a lot of things to be done — especially in the 3rd world — that don’t currently fit on phones with narrow visual angles.
(This came home again very strongly recently when Dave Smith started producing a variety of very wide angle short focal length lenses and mirrors for VR (and now has a company — Wearality — which is worth looking at). One of the most interesting is a Fresnel lens which works on a smartphone — using the same pixels, the experience and what can be presented is qualitatively different, and for most content-laden media, much better.)
Some movies wind up being “commercials” for “reading the book”, and if MOOCs are only that, I agree with Nick that this might be good enough.
On the other hand, I don’t think there is any rule that prevents doing a really effective MOOC (the generally weak ones around are a problem of too limited imaginations and perhaps too much haste and expedience on the part of the creators, but there is no inherent weakness in what computer media can be made to do by thinking things through).
For example, if MOOC builders actually got interested in the deeper problems, they might decide to choose an easier but still important content area, and try to see just how effective they can be. This would be a better learning curve to get on.
I would nominate musical instrument learning for a lot of reasons — including the level of understanding of good pedagogy, the tradeoffs between “receiving wisdom” and “doing” (a little each week for the first, and a lot each week for the second), how private learning and experience is mixed with public learning and experience (e.g. playing in “the woodshed” vs. playing in a band), and because both sensing, semi-cognitive, and general computing technologies are now up to the task of understanding what learners are doing in this area, and how to help them.
Cheers
Alan
13.
VanessaVaile | November 28, 2015 at 1:50 am
Reblogged this on MOOC Madness and commented:
via Downes @OLDaily. See commentary at http://www.downes.ca/post/64739/
14. Hack Education Weekly News | Co-Opt-Ed | November 28, 2015 at 8:41 am
[…] “No Rich Child Left Behind, and Enriching the Rich: Why MOOCs are not improving education” by Mark Guzdial. […]
15.
Justin Reich (@bjfr) | November 28, 2015 at 8:53 pm
Hi Mark,
A few quick thoughts.
1) I have a paper coming out in Science on Friday that adds to some of this discussion. We find that U.S. HarvardX and MITx registrants live in more affluent neighborhoods than typical Americans (by about 1/2 S.D.) and high SES students are more likely to earn certificates–interestingly though, this is mostly true for younger registrants in their teens and college age. So, more data coming this week.
2) The Coursera study had a response rate of ~7%. We should treat any MOOC study based on post-course surveys with real caution. I think there are good reasons to believe that the findings of this study don’t generalize well to even the whole population of certificate earners.
3) I hope you add the two harvardX/MITx reports to your list of MOOC studies with detailed demographic data: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2381263 and http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2586847
Justin Reich
16.
Mark Guzdial | November 29, 2015 at 3:24 pm
Thanks, Justin! I’m looking forward to seeing the paper. I was familiar with the first paper, but not the second. I look forward to reviewing it!
17.
Mark Guzdial | November 29, 2015 at 3:32 pm
Justin, I had read a paper that referenced your second report. I realized it when I got to the section on teachers. I’d be interested in seeing those results teased out a bit more: K-12 teachers vs. higher-ed teachers. I’ve seen this report referenced as arguing for more teacher-ed MOOCs (see http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-secret-power-of-moocs/396608/), when the statistics I’ve seen specifically on teacher-ed MOOCs suggest the same low-completion rates as other MOOCs.
18.
Mark Guzdial | December 7, 2015 at 10:45 am
Interesting and relevant article in the NYTimes from last Friday: Online Classes Appeal More to the Affluent. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/science/online-classes-appeal-more-to-the-affluent.html?_r=0.
This is the article in Science that Justin was referring to: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6265/1245.
The abstract:
19.
alanone1 | December 7, 2015 at 12:08 pm
Back to the book again. Won’t we get most of the same findings? Is there a good alternative to trying to teach people to read? Shouldn’t the real questions be about the benefits (or not) of a particular kind of literacy and associated fluencies?
20.
Mark Guzdial | December 7, 2015 at 1:07 pm
I suspect that the book is better than a MOOC as a generative medium and as an object to think with. Rather than figure out how to grow MOOCs, we should be figuring out how to help people to read. At my school, MOOCs are like chemical rockets. We’re investing heavily in MOOCs, and the argument has been made (quite explicitly) that our MOOCs are helping to further the goals of education. MOOCs help some people, not many and not those who most need it, but I’m not having much luck convincing people that we should be exploring alternatives.
21.
The Inverse Lake Wobegon Effect in Learning Analytics and SIGCSE Polls | Computing Education Blog | January 18, 2016 at 8:04 am
[…] and failure of those who sign up for the MOOC. As we have already discussed in this blog (see post here), people who take MOOCs are a biased sample — well-educated and rich. We can’t use […]
22.
MOOCs don’t serve to decrease income inequality | Computing Education Blog | May 1, 2017 at 7:01 am
[…] The gray line is the average income for US citizens at various ages. As you would expect, that number generally increases up until retirement. The black line is the average income for students in Harvard and MIT’s MOOC participants. The MOOC participants are not only richer, but as they get older, they diverge more. These are highly-privileged people, the kind with many advantages. MOOCs are mostly helping the rich. […]
23.
What I learned from taking a MOOC: Live Object Programming in Pharo | Computing Education Research Blog | February 23, 2020 at 8:45 pm
[…] to get a bit more knowledge. That’s where the Georgia Tech OMSCS works. But I still they that they are a terrible way to help people who need initial knowledge, and they don’t help to broaden participation in […]