By
James Breiner
Mark
Glaser of PBS Mediashift recently pulled together a panel of experts for an
online chat about how massive open online courses (MOOCs) are affecting
universities and professional education. Some excerpts from the fascinating 40-minute exchange are below.
Rosental
Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the
University of Texas, has been running MOOCs on journalism topics since 2012.
One
of the surprising things about these courses is how many non-journalists are
taking them, Alves said. There is a hunger for learning the journalistic skills
of gathering, verifying and presenting information, he said.
(Many
of my 2,000 fellow students were non-journalists when I took the center's
course on data visualization offered by Alberto Cairo.)
Another
surprise, Alves said, was that 75 percent of people in the data visualization
MOOC said the experience was better than face-to-face instruction. He
attributes this to the fact that so many students formed communities in social
media and helped educate each other.
The
Knight Center is now offering its eighth MOOC, this one on "Social Media
for Journalists" with 6,300 people enrolled from 149 countries. In all, 28,000 people have enrolled in the free MOOCs in the first
year.
No
threat to universities
Alves
doesn't see these MOOCs as a threat to university courses since they are
workshops on very specific topics such as data journalism and entrepreneurial
journalism. He is not bothered by the fact that not everyone who signs up for
the courses does not finish them.
"Our
MOOCs are a human experience. This is not a book. It's not a self-directed
course. It has a beginning, middle and an end, and it is led by an instructor.
These aren't college classes. It's a workshop and a community. We don't expect
that everyone who comes will do it. We don't mind if you come, watch a video
and go."
-- Rosental Alves
Daniel
Seaton, an MIT postdoc who co-authored a study of MIT's
and Harvard's MOOC experiences, told how developers of one of the physics
MOOCs expected that it would attract a global audience of students excited
about physics.
To
their surprise, half of the enrollees were physics teachers. So in later
versions of the course, developers shaped the course material with that
audience in mind.
Seaton
said the variety of approaches in MOOCs, from for-credit courses with exams to
informal online communities, makes it difficult to make generalizations.
However, he added that about two-thirds of those taking the courses do not have
a degree, which suggests that MOOCs are a force for the democratization of
information.
The
teachers who prepare MOOCs are often shocked by how much work is required to
prepare them, Seaton said. All of the technology and course material have to be
developed from zero.
Insane
college costs
Reuters
columnist Felix
Salmon hopes that MOOCs might help bring down the "insane" cost
of a university education in the U.S. by allowing students to take courses
outside of the campus setting. He suggested that some second- and third-tier
universities might be able to offer courses by professors of elite universities
via MOOCs and thus improve quality at lower cost.
Universities
have been on a spending binge for amenities like sports facilities that have
little to do with education but drive up its cost, Salmon said.
As
for whether MOOCs threaten the business model of universities, he said,
"I'm worried more about students than about schools. You can't afford to
go to college, and you can't afford to NOT go to college." The two trends,
he suggested, will lead to a greater income gap and socioeconomic divide as
fewer students from families of modest or low income will be able to benefit
from higher education.
"The
real value of MOOCs is making education more available and more
affordable," Salmon said.
For
universities, MOOCs could be valuable through the data that they bring about
the people enrolled in courses. For-profit education organizations should also
be able to find a business model in MOOCs and help bring down the cost of the
traditional university education, he believes.
Technology
in its infancy
Andrew Lih
of American University said that the technology and teaching methods of MOOCs
are relatively unsophisticated now, which makes the experience less than ideal.
He
described his own unhappy experience in the data visualization course mentioned
above that was offered by the Knight Center. He had signed up because he wanted
to experience the teaching of a master in the field of data visualization,
Alberto Cairo.
Instead,
he found himself overwhelmed by the "firehose of commentary" from the
course participants. "Even just the introduction section was too much to
consume. It was tough to make sense of the stream of stuff coming in. It was
hard for me to sift through it." He abandoned the course.
Course
designers should think more like architects or urban planners, he said, because
they design spaces to maximize positive interactions among people.
One
of the advantages of living on a university campus, Lih said, is the
opportunity for students and professors of different departments to rub
shoulders and interact. This serendipity should be part of MOOC design, he
suggested.
This
post originally appeared on the blog News Entrepreneurs. It is published on IJNet with the
author's permission.
James
Breiner is a consultant in online journalism and leadership. He is a former
co-director of the Global Business Journalism Program at Tsinghua University
and a former Knight
International Journalism Fellow who launched and directed the Center for
Digital Journalism at the University
of Guadalajara. He is bilingual in Spanish and English. You can follow him
on Twitter here.
Image
CC-licensed on Flickr via The Next Web.
Source: http://ijnet.org
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