The best quality of Massive Open Online Courses just became the worst for HigherEd.
‘MOOCs’ (Massive Open Online Courses) kickstarted a desperately needed evolution in making high-quality instructors and professors accessible to everyone. In Spring 2012, Andrew Ng & Daphne Koller co-founded Coursera, instantly providing unprecedented access into the realm of cutting edge topics like Machine Learning and Databases. Coursera emerged as the market leader, quickly followed by a healthy slew of competitors such as Udacity, edX, and UDemy.
2012 was dubbed as ‘The Year of the MOOC’ by The New York Times, and suddenly it appeared as if HigherEd was disrupted forever. With Stanford professors creating Coursera and Udacity, and Harvard + MIT partnering to invest heavily into edX, the future seemed inevitable. Online learning platforms would logically become the ideal and affordable destination for eager learners of all kinds to gain certificates in classes such as Supply Chain Management by MIT or domain-focused classes like Harvard’s Online Business Analytics Program powered by 2U.
Yet, as is our human tendency to oversell in the short term and underwhelm in the long run, it became evident that MOOCs aren’t replacing traditional education systems anytime soon.
They simply offer a digital way of consuming conventional educational content from the mobile device of your choice. That’s it.
Once COVID-19 hit, we felt the revitalized energy around MOOCs for the first time in a considerable while: online class providers became the productive/curious person’s go-to option for learning quality content at a reasonable (or even free) price point.
Dhawal Shah’s ClassCentral became the primary hub of aggregation for MOOCs; consistently creating and updating lists for the most popular classes available in various subject lines.
ClassCentral received more traffic between March 15 and April 15 (7.4 million) than all of 2019 (6.9 million). Astounding.
Whether it was ‘An Intro to Python’ 9-week course delivered by MIT or a ‘Moralities of Everyday Life’ class taught by Yale across 6 weeks, class offerings had as much variety and variance as an aisle of chips has at Walmart.
Hard skills or soft skills, longer duration or shorter, a course is now readily available in… just about anything. From top-tier universities and companies across the globe.
As someone who prides myself on being curious and broadening my horizons, I definitely enjoyed staying sharp and taking online courses that satisfied my thirst for high-quality knowledge gain. But as I came closer to wrapping up the final course of four on Coursera, I asked myself the question — am I doing this out of the love of learning, or am I forcing myself to get to the finish line for a reward?
My enjoyment definitely dwindled as I dragged through my Model Thinkingonline course this past May, and I recalled the disappointed feeling I sometimes had in university as a lecture dragged on while my interest waned. The feeling of simply wanting the clock to tick away so I could get on with my next task of the day.
How could this have happened in a class I took totally out of my initiative?
New method of learning consumption, same style of traditional educational delivery.
Therein lies the predictable irony. New method of consumption, same style of traditional delivery. Nothing changed in how I was being instructed aside from having the comforts of my home and being able to go at my pace.
With infinitely expanding needs growing across the higher education landscape currently, accelerated experimentation must take place now on how learning processes can go beyond the tired and tried system of lecture, study, assignment/quiz, and exam. If we’re truly committed to online delivery being the sole option for students across the globe, new styles of delivery need to take shape.
Online learning in its current format isn’t sustainable.
MOOCs are ONE option out of many to learn a subject of interest in a very accessible and convenient manner, but as we’ve heard the onslaught of complaints voiced by students in K-12 or HigherEd, it’s apparent that the in-person experience of learning still reigns king.
MOOCs represent an opportunity to be taught by prestigious faculty from the world’s best universities in a superbly cheap and affordable way; I greatly valued my time of learning from UPenn, UIllinois, and UToronto professors. But simultaneously, my excitement faded as I realized how much I missed having my fellow peers around me or even having the ability to ask professors a question mid-lecture to provide clarity.
Peer to peer learning is instrumental in allowing students to discover differing viewpoints in a classroom. When student A asks a question no one else in the class ever thought about, students B — Z consider and gain an entirely different lens to observe the content through.
Having the ability to ask a classmate next to you to explain a topic in laymen’s terms is crucial — not every student moves at the same pace. This too is lost in self-paced online classes.
Lastly, required discussion boards and other online substitutes are ineffective at maintaining the critical flow that a normal classroom discussion provides in having conversations about the content in real-time. We’ve all been there before: post the minimal required input on a discussion board, have a few students comment, and forget the exchange ever happened.
Understanding your classmate’s perspective is every bit as important and essential as listening to your instructor. Photo from Emory University.
The fact of the matter is, recording lectures and having lifeless multiple choice exams is easy. It makes sense after all, right?
That’s how lectures have been conducted at school since the beginning of time. Professor speaks, students listen, and the cycle endlessly continues. Formal schooling pedagogy largely hasn’t changed much around the globe in the last 100 years.
In-person or online.
Online learning was supposed to change that, or at least offer creative technological solutions which would enable stimulating and enhanced learning experiences. Digital learning was supposed to promote compelling ways of collaboration with people across the globe.
However, in its current format, MOOCs are simply mirroring an experience that students across all generations have reluctantly accepted because it’s the only choice.
MOOCs have increased supply and accessibility, but they have copied and pasted the learning experience.
As an avid consumer and thinker in the education technology space, this is good and bad. The global EdTech industry has rapidly grown into an elephant-sized $252 billion market. But there’s been little disruption in scaling courses to become what consumers, learners, and investors have all longed for: students having ground-breaking ways of consuming new information and fundamentally being immersed in their learning.
It’s proven undeniably hard to pull off, and we’re noticing how a one-size-fits-all solution will probably never arise. Learning styles are too complex, and people have wide-ranging, dynamic needs that need to be adequately catered towards.
Zoom only classes? F. (as graded by students)
For many, myself included, university provided a beehive of ideas and opportunities thanks to professors with practical application of their teachings in industry or research, student organizations/competitions across every spectrum, a network of alumni who are potentially an entry-point for internships and jobs, and of course, the relationship-building between students that spark new ideas + catalyze life-long friendships.
Self-paced classes and online lectures aren’t exactly checking any one of those boxes. They’re simply a means to an end of delivering the bare minimum. A survey done by Top Hat concluded that 7 out of 10 students felt their exclusively online education was worse than in-person instruction once remote learning via Zoom became a permanent reality last spring.
Students resoundingly found the online experience to be “unengaging,” missed the “small talk before, during, and after classes,” and overall felt “disillusioned” by the online class structures. As much as universities attempted to fill the void, their efforts fell flat and criticism was loudly echoed by students across the globe.
This sentiment addresses a growing issue we’ve all known yet educational institutions and online class providers have all collectively failed to address.
If all the social aspects of learning environments are stripped away and we’re left with a bare-bones version of only offering online lectures + assignments and assessments, the cost of $10K a semester doesn’t justify the value.
End of story.
In that vein, the present solution of online lectures presented by HigherEd is no different than the MOOC experience, except that classes are live and students are visible to one another in a Zoom conference.
Where MOOCs are voluntary out of self-interest, universities teaching classes via Zoom are mandatory. Remarkably, both share the same pain points and shortcomings.
They both need to iterate before their consumer base scrambles to find different avenues of obtaining an education.
MOOCs & HigherEd have the same pain points. What’s going to disrupt learning delivery which resonates with the masses?
MOOCs and other densely formatted courses are excellent for refreshing skills, gaining insights from a seasoned expert in the subject matter, and having as a durable and inexpensive option to learn the material in a self-paced manner.
But when HigherEd becomes nothing more than a live MOOC to students, all the good about MOOCs becomes the bad for online-only learning.
MOOCs flatlined in course completion rate because they are by no means the final frontier, and will never fully replace in-person academia.
Delivery matters. How content is expressed and is discussed, how ideas are shared, matters.
This challenge for the upcoming academic year falls onto all stakeholders: how will universities, technology firms, and educators create a learning first experience that catapults society into the next generation of successful educational environments?
Innovation is going to be necessary if higher education wants to retain its advantage in being viewed as the transition between high school and the workforce.
Is it truly possible to create an immersive learning atmosphere digitally that’s scaled to fulfill the needs of various types of students? So far, the answer is no.
“Everyone gets socialized at academic intuitions, even at the slightest. Not everyone becomes smarter at school.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya, The All-In Podcast
If the value proposition for universities truly is contingent upon the social atmosphere created as students have pointed to, how that’s adapted by virtual learning environments is the million-dollar question. A huge shift is on the horizon if solutions aren’t introduced soon enough.
As we move into the COVID-19 era of fully embracing remote learning, higher education will be the one getting tested for once, not the other way around.