Last summer, I took two online courses, HIST 128 and POLI 101, through UNC’s Friday Center. The journalism major requires both classes and some of my friends suggested taking them online in order to avoid the additional recitations in the fall and spring courses. I registered for the courses, paid the fee and began my 12-week classes at the end of May. By the end of June, I was almost positive I wasn’t going to pass.
I quickly found out online courses weren’t for me. It was summer, I was busy searching for internships and I struggled to find the motivation to complete the required assignments. It felt like busy work, and the reading was boring. Of course, the trouble I had with these courses could be partially attributed to the content (I already know everything there is to know about the Civil War). When I ran across this article discussing the effectiveness of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, I immediately related to the author’s story.
Her experience was a little different than mine; my online classes were offered through the university and affected my GPA at UNC, whereas she was enrolled in an Internet course not affiliated with a specific school. The idea, however, was the same. We both took courses online and have nothing to show for it.
This wasn’t my first experience with online education. In the last year, I registered on Codecademy, a site teaching basic coding, and Duolingo, a site offering various language courses. As of now, I don’t actively use either site, but my positive experience with the online education further supported the idea of summer courses. In fact, most of my real classes have an online component. I keep a blog for JOMC 240, I submit online paragraphs for PWAD 490 and I’m a member of several Facebook groups for my courses. Now, I even find it odd when classes don’t use Sakai (sorry, Prof. Robinson). Keep in mind, an online component is different from a course taught solely online. In my opinion, online components are effective in educating students and online courses are not.
Regardless, MOOC’s are appealing for many reasons. For one, you never have to leave your home. Professors can teach thousands of students without any face-to-face communication. This saves time and money, but it has a major downside.
“MOOC professors are teaching thousands of students—hundreds of thousands in some cases—thus eliminating the intimacy of one-on-one interactions that are so beneficial in most offline classroom settings.”
Quizzes are submitted electronically and graded automatically. In many cases, the student won’t receive any feedback on their work. Both of my summer courses required two papers and two exams. I was also expected to write posts about the readings on an online discussion forum, as well as reply to my classmates’ posts. MOOC's are similar in that students are often given multiple attempts for a perfect score on quizzes and the essays are peer-reviewed, but just like most areas of the Internet, anonymity became a problem. I didn’t know the other students in my class, but we were expected to peer-review another paper. I found this task difficult; I couldn’t ask the writer questions about their content, and they couldn’t give me reasons for including certain points in their writing. It was ultimately ineffective. So, I didn’t put very much effort into the peer-review draft. The student on the other side was going to give me whatever grade anyway, so I didn’t take it as seriously as papers I wrote for other classes.
I’ll admit, motivation was a major problem. Although I still had to pay college-level prices for my two courses, the author of the piece said it best.
“When I’m taking a college-level course without paying college-level prices, or getting anything in return besides knowledge or a completion certificate, I simply won’t try as hard.”
Fred Wilson discusses three megatrends that are happening now, one of which is the unbundling of technology. He uses education and the learning process as an example of this trend.
“The classic university model has been around for 600-700 years, but we no longer need to be confined by the walls of a classroom – with a professor up front. We don’t need to build a library and fill it with books (we have eReaders now). The current university model is very expensive.”
We now have the ability to take courses online through sites like the ones I mentioned above, Codecademy and Duolingo. The delivery of content is unbundling; instead of attending UNC, I imagine some students could stay at home in front of their computer screen and learn a specific skill set.
I’ve failed to mention the big issue, though. I didn’t learn anything. I got my credit and went on my merry way, but I retained very little information. Education, whether online or in a classroom, is about learning the material, not just passing the course. In fact, the average retention rate for MOOC’s is only four percent. The programs may be successful in handing out degrees and credits, but what do these really mean if we don’t learn anything?
“MOOCs provide invaluable resources for continuing education and opportunities for students to take courses they might not have otherwise taken. But when I compare my experience, albeit just one course, to the education I received at a traditional university, I wouldn’t trade my in-person college career for a suite of online class credentials, no matter how many university heavyweights stand behind them.”
Moving forward, we must be careful when transforming the online component of a course into the course itself, because frankly, I can’t imagine a generation of students with multiple degrees who really don’t know anything.