If you’ve been paying attention at all to higher ed stories in the past year or so, you’ll recognize that, apart from cutbacks, people are mainly talking about two things: Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs), and Learning Outcomes.
MOOCs weren’t invented to respond to cutbacks, but policymakers sure seem to treat them as if they were. The idea that someone out there is giving away courses for FREE just seems like manna from heaven. Good someones, too: Harvard, MIT, Duke, Toronto, UBC – if they’re prestigious, they’ve either been signed up by Coursera or set up their own platform (like EdX).
Learning Outcomes approaches (which also come up under names like competence-based learning, or Tuning process, etc.), don’t get the same level of attention, because they don’t feed into a techno-fetishist disruption meme. But they’re pretty important all the same. All of this indicates that institutions are taking quality more seriously, and setting actual objectives for courses of study. Some people take that even further, and suggest that setting demonstrable outcomes obviates the need even for classes; as long as you can prove you have the competencies, you should be able to get the degree (South Korea has a system like this for certain courses of study).
The “fad” crowd in education – the ones who advocate management-by-headline, or who think Glen Murray was on to something – tend to view all these things as interconnected, and part of a general “newness” to which higher education must inevitably bow. But the fact is, the move to embrace MOOCs is actually completely incompatible with the idea of a move to a stricter learning outcomes regime. They are opposed, not complementary.
MOOCs, by design, are classes, not programs (otherwise, they would be MOOPs, which would be hilarious). They are designed to be one-offs. Degrees full of MOOCs will inevitably be even more of a mish-mash than the degrees we give out today. Learning outcomes, properly done, are about the exact opposite – they aim to partially reverse the smorgasboard approach, ensuring that knowledge and skills are built upon in a consistent way throughout a student’s course of study.
Learning outcomes matter because, increasingly, the public, employers, and students all need to be reassured that a degree signifies the acquisition of a particular body of knowledge and skills rather than sitting through a particular number of hours of classes. A wider, forced adoption of MOOCs actively hinders that goal because they cannot be co-ordinated with the rest of a program.
So: do we want coherent degrees, or do we want free MOOCs? Time to decide.
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Just as an added piece of information. Last week I updated a small analysis I did on the universities using the 4 major MOOCs (Coursera, edX, Futurelearn and Udacity). As you said, “if they’re prestigious, they’ve either been signed by Coursera or set up their own platform”. Part of the visualization is the AVG world rankings that the partnered universities have.
The visualisation can be found at the following url: http://listedtech.com/content/moocs-coursera-edx-futurelearn-and-udacity-university-profiles
Actually, it would take little time, and little effort, to construct a complete program out of a number of related MOOCs. Mark my words, Coursera will do so as soon as possible, if, as it has already demonstrated, it knows what’s good for students. As many MOOCs are already using learning outcomes at the course-level, it wouldn’t take much effort at all to replicate an entire program currently offered by an existing bricks-and-mortar university, including the learning outcomes of that particular program. Indeed, since MOOCs offer assessment tools whose results are already digitalized, the MOOC-based program is positioned to process assessment data from learning outcomes much more efficiently than any in-person academic program.
My point is this: Learning outcomes are just as amenable to a MOOC-based education as they are to the bricks-and-mortar experience. This fact demonstrates how learning outcomes can never be used to distinguish the MOOC from the non-MOOC. Something more human, and more obvious, needs to be used to distinguish between the university experience and MOOC learning, namely, the irreplaceable value of human wisdom and in-person interaction. The professor who both professes to students and engages in dialogue with them; students who sit next to each other, who work and study together, who inspire one another; the milieu of intellectual engagement within an intellectual community. These are, hands-down, the incomparable advantages of university experience.
The hard pill to swallow for the university is to stand behind these human traits. It’s messy work. And it can’t be described on a spread sheet. So good luck living up to necessity.
Charles Bingham
Simon Fraser University
Canada
I am currently taking a couple of MOOCs (Data Science and Audio Engineering, Smorgasboard indeed) and one thing I’ve found interesting that you don’t even (necessarily) get at a University is some pretty high-value discussion in the forums. Get 70,000 ppl taking a course, and you’d think YouTube level idiocy would result, but actually there are enough really knowledgable people in the mix that you can learn as much there as from the video lectures.
All that said, there’s no continuity. Once class is over, everybody disperses to their own spot on the globe, and that’s that.