The School of Open is offering its second round of free, facilitated, online courses. Through August 4, you can sign up for 7 courses on open science, collaborative workshop design, open educational resources, copyright for educators, Wikipedia, CC licenses, and more. Courses will start after the first week of August and run for 3 to 7 weeks, depending on the course topic and organizer. All courses will offer badges for recognition of skills and/or course completion as part of P2PU’s badges pilot. Here’s a list of the upcoming courses, all of which have been added to our comprehensive list of MOOCs.
Who were the first economic thinkers? What are the very origins of economic thought? What did earlier economists understand but has been lost to the modern world? Why is Adam Smith the greatest economist of all time? How did the economic issues of the 18th and 19th centuries shape the thoughts of the classical economists? This class, which covers the history of economic thought up until the “Marginal Revolution” in the 1870s, will answer all of these questions and many others.
The course starts with Galileo and the theory of value; touches on Montesquieu and Mandeville; offers to an introduction to Mercantilism and the Physiocrats, and then really comes to focus on David Hume and mostly Adam Smith and his classic treatise, The Wealth of Nations (find it in our collection of Free eBooks), before turning to later thinkers and periods.
You can sign up for The Great Economists here. And it will be added to our list of 300 MOOCs from Great Universities.
Here’s something I can get pretty jazzed about. Er, maybe that’s not quite the right verb. But close enough.…
On May 13, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester will launch the first of two MOOCs that will trace the history of rock music. Taught by John Covach, a professor of music theory, The History of Rock, Part One will revisit the 1950s and 1960s, the halcyon days of rock ’n’ roll, which gave us the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and other bands. The course will focus on the music itself, the cultural context from which rock emerged, and how changes in the music business and music technology shaped this new musical form. The second course (scheduled to start on July 8) will move forward to the 1970, 80s and 90s and cover the music of Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Carole King, Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Metallica, Run-DMC, Nirvana, and other artists. Students who successfully complete the course will receive a “Statement of Accomplishment” signed by the instructor.
On Tuesday, we gave you a Visualization of the Big Problem for MOOCs, which comes down to this: low completion rates. To be clear, the completion rates aren’t so much a problem for you; they’re more a problem for the MOOC providers and their business models. But let’s not get bogged down in that. We ended our post by asking you to share your own experience with MOOCs — particularly, to tell us why you started and stopped a MOOC. We got close to 50 thoughtful responses. And below we’ve summarized the 10 most commonly-cited reasons. Here they are:
1.) Takes Too Much Time: Sometimes you enroll in a MOOC, only to discover that it takes way too much time. “Just didn’t have time to do all the work.” “As a full-time working adult, I found it exceedingly difficult to watch hours upon hours of video lectures.” That’s a refrain we heard again and again.
2.) Assumes Too Much Knowledge: Other times you enroll in a MOOC, only to find that it requires too much base knowledge, like a knowledge of advanced mathematics. That makes the course an instant non-starter. So you opt out. Simple as that.
3.) Too Basic, Not Really at the Level of Stanford, Oxford and MIT: On the flip side, some say that their MOOCs weren’t really operating on a serious university level. The coursework was too easy, the workload and assignments weren’t high enough. A literature course felt more like a glorified book club. In short, the courses weren’t the real university deal.
4.) Lecture Fatigue: MOOCs often rely on formal video lectures, which, for many of you, is an“obsolete and inefficient format.” And they’re just sometimes boring. MOOCs would be better served if they relied more heavily on interactive forms of pedagogy. Val put it well when she said, “We should not try to bring a brick and mortar lecture to your living room. Use the resources available and make the learning engaging with shorter segments.… The goal should be to teach and teach better. If one of these online universities can figure that out, then the money will follow.”
5.) Poor Course Design: You signed up for a MOOC and didn’t know how to get going. One student related his experience: “From day one I had no idea what I was supposed to do. There were instructions all over the place. Groups to join with phantom members that never commented or interacted, and a syllabus that was being revised as the course went through it’s first week.”
6.) Clunky Community/Communication Tools: This has been the Achilles’ heel of online learning for years, and so far the MOOCs haven’t quite figured it out. It’s not unusual to hear this kind of comment from students: “I find that the discussion forums aren’t very useful or engaging. They are not a very good substitute for active in-class discussion.”
7.) Bad Peer Review & Trolls: Because MOOCs are so big, you often don’t get feedback from the professor. Instead you get it from algorithms and peers. And sometimes the peers can be less than constructive. One reader writes: “I chose to stop doing the peer response section of the class due to some students being treated rudely [by other students]; in fact, the entire peer response section of the class is done in a way I would NEVER have asked of students in a classroom.… [T]here is no involvement of the professor or TA’s in monitoring the TORRENT of complaints about peer reviews.”
8.) Surprised by Hidden Costs: Sometimes you discover that free MOOCs aren’t exactly free. They have hidden costs. Brooke dropped her MOOC when she realized that the readings were from the professor’s expensive textbook.
9.) You’re Just Shopping Around: You shop for courses, which involves registering for many courses, keeping some, and dropping others. That inflates the low completion rate, but it gives you freedom. As one reader said, “I am very, very happy about being able to be so picky.”
10.) You’re There to Learn, Not for the Credential at the End: Sometimes you do everything (watch the videos, do the readings, etc.) but take the final exam. In a certain way, you’re auditing, which suits many of you just fine. It’s precisely what you want to do. But that, too, makes the low completion rates look worse than they maybe are.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate. We really appreciate it! And if you’re looking for a new MOOC, don’t miss our list, 300 Free MOOCs from Great Universities (Many Offering Certificates).
MOOCs — they’re getting a lot of hype, in part because they promise so much, and in part because you hear about students signing up for these courses in massive numbers. 60,000 signed up for Duke’s Introduction to Astronomy on Coursera. 28,500 registered for Introduction to Solid State Chemistry on edX. Impressive figures, to be sure. But then the shine comes off a little when you consider that 3.5% and 1.7% of students completed these courses respectively. That’s according to a Visualization of MOOC Completion Rates assembled by educational researcher Katy Jordan, using publicly available data. According to her research, MOOCs have generated 50,000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3,700 completions per 50,000 enrollments. If you click the image above, you can see interactive data points for 27 courses.
Right now, universities are producing MOOCs left and right, and it’s a great deal for you, the students. (See our list of 300 MOOCs.) But I’ve been around universities long enough to know one thing — they don’t shell out this much cash lightly. Nor do professors sink 100 hours into creating courses that don’t count toward their required teaching load. We’re in a honeymoon period, and, before it’s over, the raw number of students completing a course will need to go up — way up. Remember, the MOOC is free. But it’s the finishers who will pay for certificates and get placed into jobs for a fee. In short, it’s the finishers who will create the major revenue streams that MOOC creators and providers are currently relying on.
We have our own thoughts on what the MOOC providers need to do. But today we want to hear from those who started a MOOC and opted not to finish. In the comments section below, please tell us what kept you from reaching the end. You’ll get extra points for honesty!
Tina Seelig serves as the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, a center that teaches students entrepreneurial skills needed to solve major world problems. She is also the author of the 2012 book, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, that operates on the assumption that we’re not born being creative and knowing how to solve difficult problems. It’s something that we can cultivate and learn (as John Cleese has also told us before). If you’re intrigued by this idea, and if you want to rev up your own “Innovation Engine,” you can take Seelig’s new course, also called A Crash Course on Creativity, starting on April 22. It’s one of five Stanford MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that will launch in April on the Venture Lab platform. Other courses now open for enrollment include:
In advance of its May 2013 concert series, Carnegie Hall has created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that will teach students how to listen to orchestras. The course, S4MU — short for Spring 4 Music University — is premised on the idea that “listening is an art itself,” and that you won’t overcome a tin ear by studying music theory alone. Starting on April 1, the four-week course will be taught by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop; ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan (seen above); composer Jennifer Higdon; vocalist Storm Large; and conductor Leonard Slatkin. Like all other MOOCs, the course is free. You can reserve your spot in the class right here.
Spring 4 Music University has been added to our complete list of MOOCs, where you will find 45 courses starting in April.
Thanks goes to Maxine for the heads up on this new offering.
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The School of Open is offering its second round of free, facilitated, online courses. Through August 4, you can sign up for 7 courses on open science, collaborative workshop design, open educational resources, copyright for educators, Wikipedia, CC licenses, and more. Courses will start after the first week of August and run for 3 to 7 weeks, depending on the course topic and organizer. All courses will offer badges for recognition of skills and/or course completion as part of P2PU’s badges pilot. Here’s a list of the upcoming courses, all of which have been added to our comprehensive list of MOOCs.
