EdX’s Agarwal even said his group is exploring a kind of rubric of “self-assessment.” Asked if he had faith that, particularly in a course aspiring to credit-worthiness, students could really grade their own essays, he replied: “Faith? Yes. Certainty? No.”
Cheating’s another problem that suddenly matters with credit at stake. EdX is working with a testing company to arrange for proctored exams in centers around the world. Coursera says it will be easier for far-away students to let them wave an ID card and take a test in front of a webcam, proctored from afar. MOOCs won’t offer those things for free. But they could cost much less than, well, the full string quartet.
Broad, of ACE, said MOOCs are promising, but her group will send faculty out to “kick the tires” and research whether online courses enrolling 150,000 can really be credit-worthy. They’ll talk to both students who complete and those who drop out (at edX, 80 to 95 percent who sign up don’t finish the work).
A likely outcome is more blended models like the Massachusetts experiment, where MOOCs provide the backbone and resources local institutions can’t offer, but local institutions still handle the one-on-one and award the credit. Such models could be “the best of both worlds,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. Versions are already in places as varied as San Jose State and the National University of Mongolia.
Struck, the Penn classicist, agrees courses like his will likely work best partnering with local institutions much closer to the students, at least when it comes to credit. Intro-level science classes are one thing, but it’s just not feasible at a scale of 54,000 for a class like his.
Higher education involves both transmitting information and “experiential learning that changes a person,” he said. For the latter, at least in his subject, the technology’s not yet there.
“These characters of Greek and Roman myth are just full of gray, wonderfully instructive, fundamental grays that make us re-examine our own humanity,” he said. “I don’t know how much of that I can do with the MOOC.”
See also:
Next step for MOOCs: Helping with remedial math
New online university seeks ‘many to many’ approach in economics course
Popular video forecasts the end of traditional higher education
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