Don’t dream of doing a mooc on your own. You need video and IT help. Most of all, you need pedagogical help, people who keep up with the fast-evolving art of how to successfully port classes on moocs. I had that help at the University of Chicago, and it saved me from horrible beginner blunders. Example: I wanted to tape my live classes. No, Emily, who was in charge of my class, insisted that we do it months ahead of time in 5-8 minute segments.
In fact, it takes considerable time and effort to come up with an effective, compelling short video. A typical lecture is way too long and way too boring to translate into the online world. One of the leading MOOC suppliers offered a statistics course in which the professor opened up with a 20-minute lecture on histograms. I have to assume that the course was a total failure. As Cochrane puts it,
no question about it, the deadly boring hour and a half lecture in a hall with 100 people by a mediocre professor teaching utterly standard material is just dead, RIP. And universities and classes which offer nothing more to their campus students will indeed be pressed.
One of Cochrane’s main points is that online education really underscores the fixed cost in lesson preparation. Consider that it probably takes much more work to create an effective online lesson than it does to put a lesson in the form of a textbook. Yet anyone who has ever written a textbook can tell you that it is difficult and painstaking, so imagine what it would take to do an entire online course as well as you possibly could.
I believe that it is unlikely that any one person can create an entire course as a MOOC using today’s tools and make anywhere close to the best use of the online medium. Perhaps the tools will get much better. But meanwhile, I would recommend that would-be online instructors focus on producing really good lessons, as opposed to entire courses.
Suppose you can produce ten high-quality lessons of 8 minutes or less. This may take hours and hours of planning, scripting, editing, and so on. It will not cover an entire course. But if you then combine it with other lessons that are available on line, you can cobble together a high-caliber course. That is one scenario for how online education might develop over the next few years.
I won’t directly dispute the idea that merely taping live lectures won’t likely produce a good MOOC. However, one counterexample I can point to is the EdX MIT Introduction to Biology course, which used the recorded live lectures of the actual MIT course, and it was superb. There was, of course, supplemental material like readings and lab videos, interactive problem sets, etc. that fleshed out the course, but the lectures were the backbone. I suppose it helps when the lecturer, Erik Lander, is a gifted pedagogical communicator.
Why should the “unbundling” of university only happen at the larger collegiate level? Why not “unbundle” the courses themselves.
I can imagine future content aggregators, bundling their own lesson plans:
“Watch Econ 101 from MIT, classes 2, 3 and 6. Then write this essay from Kyoto University. Then take Python 201 from Berkeley.”
The inferred point, it seems, is to create a “learning experience,” not a “pedagocic” technique.
However, like creating a text book, that effort involves “organizing” the learning experience. That is a next major step toward more effective “online” learning – guidance in an effective (or least dysfunctional) learning process (course organization?). Once again -learning how to learn a specific subject matter (and that can be highly individuated).
I’d say that lectures are boring, period, and exceptionally so on-line. But it seems to me that this will eventually be an advantage to on-line education, in that well done presentations will prove themselves superior to traditional lectures as well. And one well done session could be used to instruct millions.
“I believe that it is unlikely that any one person can create an entire course as a MOOC using today’s tools and make anywhere close to the best use of the online medium.”
How many courses did Salman Khan create all by himself in his spare time using yesterday’s tools?
If that wasn’t the “best use of the online medium”, surely it was a pretty good one, no?
I can only conclude university education is not what it is cracked up to be. There is probably some truth to this. It is impossible to devote full attention to anything for an extended period so a lot of time filling goes on allowing the audience to collect their thoughts.
5 minute course
Quiz
Repeat minutes 3-4
Etc
I wonder if we won’t see MOOCs start being produced like movies. A producer brings together the talent. The prof provides content (writer), a script advisor punches it up, a director plans the presentation, voice-over or actor does the on screen. Tech experts fill the gaps.
No need to do one man shows when it’s not live.