It matters because people are different. As Carol Dweck points out so effectively in Mindset, intrinsic motivation trumps extrinsic motivation … always. Yet, we know that what motivates one person does not necessarily motivate another. While individualized learning is the ultimate goal, in the interim, we need to improve our ability to provide effective instruction that can motivate smaller groups of students. The MOOC conversation highlights the need for this.
People often point to the 5-percent completion rate as a failure of the MOOC, but that is more of a metric of traditional education placed onto a context for which it might not be appropriate. MOOC success actually might be a much higher number. After all, research suggested there were people who found their MOOC experiences to be successful, even if they did not get to the end of the class. Success rates might actually have been 20 to 25 percent. If that reasoning is sound enough, then what is the number that makes this kind of experience worthwhile?
Is one out of four or five students enough to start changing what we do in education? In other words, if we created five different modalities for our students (as opposed to the one modality we typically force all students to use today), would they be more successful?
Chunking
As alluded to above, completion of a MOOC course wasn’t the primary concern for a lot of students. After all, a number of MOOC attendees got exactly what they wanted out of the MOOC via the content in Week Four or Module Three. Then, they went on their merry way. This suggests some real power in chunking materials appropriately, doesn’t it?
Imagine a module or week of content that is so powerful, thousands of students would dedicate their time and energy just to that topic. Of course, this also starts to suggest the need to create 16 weeks of “greatness,” but that isn’t necessarily the point. Chunking materials can start to speak to different students at different times in different ways. We just have to pay attention to the best chunks along the way and ensure they are ultra-consumable in different fashions.
Intensiveness
I’ve seen a debate during my lifetime regarding how to approach time and learning. If we were to express these in terms of an equation, it might look something like this: Learning equals the time necessary to encode, repetition enough to remember, and motivation enough to do both.
To that end, intensity (often used synonymously with rigor, although rigor is likely much broader) has been experimented with throughout education. Think about it: We all know the traditional 16-week semester model. Likewise, we all probably know of a school still using 10-week quarters.
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