Presentation Scales In Massive Online Courses; Does Interaction? 63
lpress writes "Coursera has demonstrated that they can scale presentations in massive, open, online courses — they have reached over 1.3 million students in 195 countries since they were funded in April. But can they scale student interaction? As of this morning, 7,839 Coursera students had formed 1,119 communities on Meetup.com in 1,014 cities — many outside the U.S." On the whole, isn't that a positive outcome?
Peer instruction (Score:4, Informative)
So no amount of students thrashing around with no closure will help if at the end of the day the instructor-team doesn't produce the right answer.
That "thrashing around" as you put it is extremely educational. If you are the asker you have to think carefully and logically about the problem in order to phrase exactly what it is that you do not understand and for those answering they have to do the same to be able to make a rational argument as to why they are correct. This has been shown to lead to better understanding for everyone involved. In fact it is a recognised teaching technique called "peer instruction".
You do still need an instructor to provide the correct answers and explanation at the end to ensure that everyone knows what the correct answer is but it is not necessary for them to be involved all the time in the discussion. Essentially it boils down to the fact that you learn a lot more if you can reason out for yourself your own answers. The instructor acts more like training wheels to stop you falling over. Eventually, if you become a scientist, you use the same technique - thrashing it out in journals - but since nobody knows the answer there is no instructor to come it and tell you the answer at the end...which is what makes it so much more fun!
Re:Isn't that good... (Score:5, Informative)
They're staffed by the instructors and their assistants, and in my experience give quick and quality spoiler-free guidance and answers. The nice thing about a forum is that you're not getting off-the-cuff responses from one random assistant; they've got a chance to run it around the room and up the chain to give a better formed response than if you were to sit down with them one-on-one.
And yes, it does scale. Any question that I desired to ask was already asked in the forums, with great answers and discussion around it, even sometimes ending up in new errata added to the video. By keeping this "interaction" persistent, it coalesces a ton of human redundancy out of the learning pipeline, effectively broadcasting the most effective parts of the interactions in a similar fashion as the videos, from a very conversational and relatable perspective.
Re:Isn't that good... (Score:5, Informative)
Having followed about a dozen courses at Coursera and one at MITx. I believe there is still much room to improvement on Coursera's forum. The quality isn't equal. Some teaching assistants and Professors are outstanding. Others are so, so. The main point is that professors aren't paid to put their courses on-line. So, in some cases, the time commitment is just not there. Same thing apply to teaching assistants.
The forum could be easier and more user-friendly searching isn't always easy. There is no performant search engine and classification with tags is depends on the students. Provided the number of students from many different locations and culture, it is easy to imagine not everyone is taking care about the tags.
Beside that, you can usually find good help on the forum if you are up-to-date with the course material and not lagging to much behind, otherwise, you are reduced often to dig into the already existing threads to find your answers. There is not always a great willing to help those lagging behind. And, as I said, since there is no search engine, you may endup reading more pages on the forum than the actual course material to find the help and information you are seeking for. This can really be a time consuming task. At my sense, it should be a top priority in the list of the improvements to implement on the forum.
For disabled students, the material isn't always available on time and isn't always accurate. That can be a concern for those needing it since they may at the end have much less time than others to complete the lessons, assignments, homeworks before the deadlines. This is a problem Coursera can easily fix by better planning the lauch of each course making sure a professor do not start a course without having already a given number of videos already adapted for disabled students. This is really just a planning issue. And, it is sad to say that disabled students may be penalized in a course by this lack of planning.
For many teachers, this is the first experience at this scale, they need some guidance from Coursera which should be the primary ressource and should ensure the quality of the material by supervising the preparation and lauching of the new courses.
I strongly believe in MOOC and despite my comments I believe Coursera did a great job. On the side of the on-line help on the forum, my experience with MITx is the forum environment at MITx was a little bit superior to Coursera's environment. Now, let see what edX will offer. Starting a new course today with them.