For the first three weeks of teaching a massive open online course (MOOC) about comic books and graphic novels, William Kuskin felt as disconnected from his thousands of students as David Bowie’s floating astronaut, Major Tom.
But in the fourth week, the University of Colorado (CU) English professor began to feel more globally connected than he’d ever felt before. Every day from that point on, his “students” from around the world flooded his inbox with thoughts about his MOOC on Coursera, the platform that offers free online courses around the world.
After CU’s first semester offering MOOCs to the world last fall, the resounding feeling among faculty who participated was that it was a worthwhile experience and one that they’ll spend the spring assessing and discussing.
In all, 125,399 people enrolled in the four MOOCs CU offered through Coursera. Of those who enrolled, 2,720 completed the four courses.
Kuskin, who chairs the CU-Boulder MOOC working group, said he was both surprised and challenged when teaching his MOOC, “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.”
“This turned out to be among the greatest teaching experiences I’ve ever had,” Kuskin said. “It forced me to think about who I am as a teacher. Anytime you reflect on your own practice is great. This made me think about what I do.”
Physical campus still necessary for many students
CU physics professor Mike Dubson taught his MOOC “Introduction to Physics” while also teaching a class by the same name on the CU campus, a “brick and mortar” version of the online course, he said.
He tried to make the courses identical so he could compare their outcomes, much like an experiment, he said.
As expected, the brick-and-mortar course was made up of mostly 18- and 19-year-olds who were pursuing a four-year degree.
Dubson’s online students were generally older and most already had a bachelor’s degree — they were “lifelong learners” taking the course to gain knowledge.
Though only about two percent of the online students completed the course, those who did had an almost identical exam score distribution to the on-campus students.
The 2 percent who finished the online course had something the other online learners didn’t, Dubson said — grit.
“My conclusion is that online education works for about 2 percent of students, namely those who have this extraordinarily strong sense of dedication and self-discipline,” he said. “For them, online education works. For the vast majority, no.”
What the results also told Dubson was that students in the brick-and-mortar class needed the social constructs of the physical campus such as professors, other students and the library to finish their course.
“Education isn’t just delivering content,” he said. “It’s putting the student in a learning environment where they get messages from all different directions in their social environment that their job is to educate themselves. And that sort of social support structure provides the external discipline that almost all students need to put in the intellectual effort and time to do well in their courses. Most people don’t have that discipline when they’re removed from the university environment and just plunked down.”
Because of his findings, Dubson said he’s “extremely skeptical” that online education will some day replace physical universities and colleges. Campuses are still important because online learning doesn’t provide the same kind of social support or environment many people need to succeed, he said.
“As far as I can tell, it’s not a competitor to degree-granting institutions,” he said. “It’s just a new avenue of providing education for free to anyone who’s interested. It does not democratize diplomas. It democratizes education.”
‘What else could I teach them?’
Kuskin’s comic book MOOC gave him more anecdotal evidence of the success of online courses.
The amount of human emotion and depth that he got from his students, some on the other side of the world, was proof to Kuskin that while MOOCs don’t threaten physical, degree-granting institutions, they are equally as powerful at asking people to reflect and be creative.
Kuskin asked his students to create a virtual comic book, which was then peer-graded using online forums.
One student titled his comic “Four Weeks Ago When Amber Died.” In it, the student described how his unborn daughter had died from of a heart condition.
“It’s literally the story of his daughter’s death,” Kuskin said. “It’s meaningful and important and what else could I teach them? They did it. That is the worst thing that can happen to you, however, he is able to to somehow transform that into a communicative statement. The emails that I get report to me that many people experienced (this MOOC) as a life-changing event.”
The MOOC also reinforced to Kuskin the idea of integrating online education components as regular tools for on-campus teaching.
Video lectures, online discussion forums, interactive quizzes and activities and other MOOC tools could be useful to CU professors in their brick-and-mortar courses, he said.
“The MOOCs are like the Corvette in the window,” Kuskin said. “Very few people drive or buy them, but the technology for making the Corvette teaches GM a lot about how to make the cruise control, it teaches them about, I don’t know, engine temperatures and functionality.”
In that same way, CU can take components from MOOCs into the classroom, Kuskin said.
Professor Michael Lightner, who acted as the faculty link between CU and Coursera last semester, said the MOOCs gave him ideas for how the university can shape education in the future.
He wondered if someday the school might consider looking into how many CU-taught MOOCs incoming students have completed. Based on their completion of CU MOOCs, the university could offer them transfer credit or place them in higher-level courses based on material they’ve mastered.
The university might also consider pioneering new degrees based on interest in subject matter taught as a MOOC, Lightner said. As a hypothetical example, Lightner said, CU could consider offering an arts degree in comic books and graphic novels.
“You could actually think of testing ideas in a MOOC setting that would later become degree programs on campus, and (Kuskin’s) is the perfect example,” Lightner said.
Video lectures, institutional support needed for next round of MOOCs
While a working group this spring evaluates the four MOOCs taught this fall, many faculty members can already see a few changes that need to be made going forward.
It took Kuskin and CU’s Office of Information Technology between four and 15 hours to film and edit each 40-minute video lecture for his MOOC, which was exhausting and time-consuming.
“When you have an audience of 37,000 students, they’re all out there,” he said. “If you make a mistake with a date, you can’t come back. The pressure of doing a good job takes forever.”
Dubson said even once the videos were done, the MOOC itself was time-intensive itself. He wondered if the university might incorporate MOOCs into a professor’s regular duties, rather than on top of them.
“All the professors agreed that they needed some institutional support in the form of teaching relief of some kind,” he said. “I want CU to be represented (on Coursera), but this is a huge amount of work for the professors so we need some kind of institutional assistance to proceed forward.”
©2014 the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.). Visit the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.) at www.dailycamera.com. Distributed by MCT Information Services.
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