[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes: Milking the MOOC

[jilloneill at nfais.org]

NFAIS Enotes, 2012
Written and Compiled by Jill O’Neill
 
Milking the MOOC
 
This past June at the University of Virginia (U.VA.), two powerful women wrestled over the direction of the university with regard to the delivery of education in online environments. U.VA. Board of Visitors Rector, Helen Dragas, had hinted to the Board that the university might be in danger of losing prestige as well as significant philanthropic opportunities due to President Teresa Sullivan’s sedate pace in embracing online learning market initiatives such as EdX ([https://www.edx.org/] https://www.edx.org/) and Coursera ([http://www.coursera.org/] http://www.coursera.org). Over the course of two weeks, university administrators, faculty, and students wrangled, demonstrated, and finally (after the cross-intervention of an embarrassed state governor) reconciled. The conflict was noted by many experts as indicative of significant challenges facing higher education in this country. Funding challenges for facilities, teaching and research, technological shifts, shifting student expectations and heightened demand for STEM curricula were those cited by The New York Times in its numerous stories covering the events.
 
One quote in the Times that caught my eye was from Molly Corbett Broad of the American Council on Education, “…there are rising expectations that universities will transform themselves very quickly, if not overnight. Somehow, they’re supposed to achieve dramatic improvement in learning productivity and at the same time reduce costs by using educational technology.” (see: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/education/public-universities-see-familiar-fight-at-virginia.html] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/education/public-universities-see-familiar-fight-at-virginia.html).
 
The National Research Council issued its report, Research Universities and the Future of America, which largely echoed those concerns, particularly with regard to the need for increased funding and upgrading of the cyber-infrastructure, thereby improving productivity as well as cost-efficiency (see: [http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/bhew/researchuniversities/index.htm] http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/bhew/researchuniversities/index.htm).
 
The Wall Street Journal, with one of the many headlines that fueled the battle at U.VA., stressed that “the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite caliber education.” To its credit, the WSJ did acknowledge that it was still early days yet and that even the likes of Harvard and MIT didn’t know exactly what they were doing in this realm. (The Wall Street Journal, May  31, 2012, Page A17). The paper was speaking most particularly of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses).
 
A short primer on MOOCs. There are two schools of thought about such online learning environments. The older school is considered to be the Connectivist school, currently led by such educators as Dr. George Siemens and Dr. Stephen Downes. These educators introduce their online courses as follows: This is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake and will be different for each person.
 
In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.  We will provide some facilities. But we expect your activities to take place all over the Internet. We will ask you to visit other people’s web pages and even to create some of your own
(see: [http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/open-online-courses-as-new-educative-practice] http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/open-online-courses-as-new-educative-practice). Learners are presented with content, but are largely expected to explore and learn from their experiences in that exploration, exchanging with other students their own discoveries and building collaboratively in a highly decentralized fashion. To borrow from Dr. Siemens’ explanation, learners “are expected to create, grow, expand domain and share personal sense making through artifact creation.” A more detailed formal discussion of the connectivist approach may be found at: [http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/] http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/. What is key to remember is the underlying philosophy that the most effective learning is self-directed, fueled by personal interest and motivation, with an emphasis on social networked learning.
 
The second school of thought is the Stanford or instructivist model. This model tends to be more traditional in the sense of imparting information via video lectures with embedded quizzes and/or exercises for purposes of assessment. It is in assessment that the two approaches actually differ. Ideally, as far as Connectivists are concerned, it is the learner as an individual who assesses the actual level of learning/accomplishment acquired. But as MOOC pioneer Dr. Stephen Downes admits, there are other approaches, specifically the Big Data Learning Analytics approach where automated systems track and measure, and Downes’ own approach to assessment, network clustering. As you might expect, given the emphasis on social networked learning, this is defined as “in a network of interactions in a community, expertise constitutes a cluster of activity and a person’s learning can be assessed as a form of proximity to that cluster.” His network clustering and the learning analytics approach are not mutually exclusive (see:  [http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2012/04/rise-of-moocs.html] http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2012/04/rise-of-moocs.html). The Stanford model tends to favor the learning analytics approach of assessment. By tracking the real achievers who complete the full MOOC offering (MOOCs can experience up to 97% attrition by those who initially enroll), the founder of commercial MOOC platform Udacity ([http://www.udacity.com/] http://www.udacity.com/), Sebastian Thrun, expects that his organization will be funded in large part by connecting the elite with high-paying technology companies seeking talent.
 
There are some interested parties still negotiating on the models and shapes for MOOCs (see:
[http://researchity.net/2012/08/14/what-is-and-what-is-not-a-mooc-a-picture-of-family-resemblance-working-undefinition-moocmooc/] http://researchity.net/2012/08/14/what-is-and-what-is-not-a-mooc-a-picture-of-family-resemblance-working-undefinition-moocmooc/
and [http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/] http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/). (Note: Both of these are worth reading).
 
What differentiates MOOCs from open courseware initiatives, such as that launched by MIT ten years ago, is the level of interaction with others during the learning process. For example, I have sampled a course from the Yale Open University catalog where the available instruction consisted of streaming videos of lectures, transcripts of those lectures, and a few course hand-outs. As it turned out, Yale University Press subsequently published the edited transcripts of the lectures in book form. The educational decision in this instance was determining how I wanted to learn, whether by watching videos and skimming the transcripts or by reading the published book. Given that the course was a mix of history, theology and literature, either option was manageable. The upside was that the learning could move ahead according to my schedule and inclination for engagement. The downside was that it was a solitary learning experience. While I might be personally confident that I’d grasped newly-introduced concepts appropriately, there was no one to tell me otherwise.
 
Contrast that with the experience of the Coursera offering, Introduction to Fantasy & Science Fiction, in which I have participated for several weeks. The Coursera platform has numerous technical gremlins permeating its discussion forums and wikis. Editable forms for submitting assignments don’t operate properly; servers aren’t consistently up to handling the load created by 40,000 users.  Syncing sound and picture during the video lectures represents far more of a challenge than it ought.
 
But none of this has been overly disconcerting or unmanageable. What has been challenging is the peer assessment, key to the learning process in any MOOC. How did this work (or not work)?
 
In my experience, the student submitted an essay of 270-320 words by noon of Tuesday. By 12:05, those essays (essentially the length of a single email or blog entry) were made available to four other enrolled students who were asked to give feedback based on form and content, assigning a numerical rating between 1 (low) and 3 (high).  Feedback was due within 48 hours; once that time frame had elapsed (mid-day Thursday), the original author could access the comments provided by others and see where his or her submission might be improved. Those students who had assessed the material were subsequently provided with a table that showed them in turn how their grading compared with others in the course; students had been coached that 1’s and 3’s shouldn’t be assigned to more than 30% of the essays in any given unit.
 
However, this type of process represented a challenge across a student population of more than 10,000 students whose language skills ranged from the most basic grasp of English to those whose vocabulary hinted at a far greater mastery. Eavesdropping in on- and off-site groups indicated general unhappiness with the process, simply because there were such inconsistencies in what one’s so-called peers offered as feedback. (Experiences of five random students taking the same course may be read on this LibraryThing thread: [http://www.librarything.com/topic/140136] http://www.librarything.com/topic/140136; discussion specifically oriented towards assessment begins roughly around posting #71).
 
Another Coursera offering was on the topic of Internet History, Technology and Security by University of Michigan faculty, Dr. Charles Severance. This course depends heavily on video because many of the experts who helped to launch and develop the Internet are still with us. Filmed interviews between Severance and those experts are about as good a textbook on the topic as one might find. The numerous learning resources included both proprietary content from IEEE as well as content from the Open Web. In this course, the instructor inserts no-credit quiz questions during many of the videos with the understanding that the graded mid-term and final exams would determine a participant’s pass/fail status. Note that both of these Coursera offerings are supposed to award instructor-generated certificates or letters of completion. At some later point, Coursera founders suggest that they themselves will issue such certifications, most likely at a cost of “tens of dollars.”
 
Coursera is, as a start-up platform provider, out in front in many respects, having signed contracts with a number of high profile universities. One example of the business agreement offered can be seen in this executed version with the University  of Michigan (see:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/400864/coursera-fully-executed-agreement.pdf] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/400864/coursera-fully-executed-agreement.pdf).
 
Academics have been raising serious objections to MOOCs as educational delivery vehicles, particularly in the wake of Coursera’s July announcement that it had recruited twelve additional institutions of note to its roster of courses (including Duke University, Rice University, Princeton and the University  of Illinois – Urbana Champaign). Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech had a field day in his blog entry, entitled MOOCs are Marketing, saying “Coursera is marketing. Buying in associates an institution with a vague signal of futurism and reinvention, associates a purportedly "elite" institution with its elite brethren, and buys some time while the whole thing shakes out. Facebook page? Check. Twitter account? Check. Coursera courses? Check.” (see: [http://www.bogost.com/blog/moocs_are_marketing.shtml] http://www.bogost.com/blog/moocs_are_marketing.shtml). Another excellent point made later in his essay returns to that The Wall Street Journal headline referenced earlier about replacing expensive labor with cheap automation. Says Bogost: This is the biggest and most insidious misconception, the one that pervades every conversation about online education. The fundamental problem isn't one of cost containment, it's one of funding - of understanding why the cost-containment solution appeared in the first place. We collectively "decided" not to fund education in America. Now we're living with the consequences. Lost on those who mount such defenses is the fact that running these online courses costs more rather than less money in the short term (Georgia Tech's Coursera faculty are taking on the task on top of their normal work), and doesn't produce any direct revenue for anyone, not even Coursera.”
 
It’s hard to fault that logic. It’s hard to see this burst of activity surrounding MOOCs as anything more than the marketing signal Bogost has flagged. Coursera is using these courses as a beta-test for its platform while institutions are using these courses as a beta-test for alternate approaches to attracting and retaining students. This is not about education. It’s about big data -- the massive data sets revealing cross-cultural student behavior and usage that may be aggregated through these online learning environments.
 
The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interview (see: [http://chronicle.com/article/A-Conversation-With-2/132953/] http://chronicle.com/article/A-Conversation-With-2/132953/) with two academics who developed the personalized learning software, Knewton. When asked what data Knewton collected, one of the academics replied “Knewton's capturing in the hundreds of thousands of data per user per day. We're capturing what you're getting right, what you're getting wrong, what answers you're falling for if you get something wrong, what concepts are in that answer choice that you're falling for. We're also capturing when you log into the system; how much you do; what tasks you do; what you don't do; what was recommended that you do that you didn't do, and vice versa. Your time on task for every little task, whether it's reading something or doing a practice question or watching something. Your click rate—how fast you're clicking on stuff.”  What makes Knewton of real interest is that once data-mined, the system builds a profile for each student and delivers recommendations as to the next learning activity to which that student should be directed for purposes of maximum retention. According to the Chronicle, this software is already being used by Pearson. More detail on how data-gathering is impacting on the entire student learning process in higher education is offered up in an expanded version of the Chronicle piece for the New York Times (see” [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/education/edlife/colleges-awakening-to-the-opportunities-of-data-mining.html] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/education/edlife/colleges-awakening-to-the-opportunities-of-data-mining.html). Well worth a read!
 
Robert F. Bruner, the Dean of the Darnden  Business School at the University of Virginia, acknowledged (after the dust had settled somewhat) that his graduate school would be delivering a course in January of 2013 through the Coursera platform. The longest part of his blog entry is devoted to the question uppermost in the minds of many, “Is this sustainable?” Echoing Ian Bogost’s concerns, he wrote, “In my previous blog post, I argued, “online is more likely to spawn losses for the traditional not-for-profit colleges and universities - this stems from the cost of creating digital content and reinventing programs.” The operative phrase is “more likely…Who bears the cost of this? The universities, not the aggregators. These developments promise tremendous value to the world and to students everywhere. The outcome could be a very positive paradigm shift for access to quality education and lifelong learning. But, for that value to be realized, many losses will be incurred and no one is going to go down without a fight.”
(see: [http://blogs.darden.virginia.edu/deansblog/2012/07/course-courser-coursant-cours/] http://blogs.darden.virginia.edu/deansblog/2012/07/course-courser-coursant-cours/).
 
Big Data is nearly as much of a buzzword currently as MOOC. But the surge of interest in both indicates significant changes ahead in the academic marketplace served by NFAIS members. Whatever long-standing irritations currently exist between the academic community and the organizations that serve and support the information needs of that community will have to be tabled or resolved if we’re to ensure that scholarship and learning successfully transition to a more sophisticated plain of existence.
 
 
2012 NFAIS Supporters
 
Access Innovations, Inc.
Accessible Archives, Inc.
American Psychological Association/PsycINFO
CAS
CrossRef
Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.
Defense Technical Information Center
EBSCO Publishing
Getty Research Institute
The H. W. Wilson Foundation
Information Today, Inc.
IFIS
OCLC
Philosopher’s Information Center
ProQuest
RSI Content Solutions
Silverchair Information Systems
TEMIS, Inc.
Thomson Reuters IP & Science
Thomson Reuters IP Solutions
Unlimited Priorities LLC
 
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