That’s what The New York Times suggested today, drawing on new research from the University of Pennsylvania. But as the Times also acknowledged, in some ways MOOCs (short for massive open online courses) show great promise.
According to the research, conducted by Penn’s Graduate School of Education, only about half of the people who register for MOOCs even look at a single lecture, and an average of just 4% of enrollees complete the courses. In some classes, just 2% of students finish. The Penn research tracked 1 million students of 16 MOOCs offered by Penn professors through a for-profit company called Coursera.
When MOOCs first started, their proponents, like Stanford artificial-intelligence professor Sebastian Thrun, expressed grand hopes. My colleague George Anders wrote a wonderful cover story about Thrun a year and a half ago, describing how Thrun saw MOOCs as the start of a teaching revolution where the world’s best professors would run interactive online classes that would reach hundreds of thousands of students around the world. To attract students, Thrun wanted the earliest classes to be offered for free. His company, Udacity, would make money down the line by charging small fees. He and other MOOC pioneers saw the courses as a democratizing force in higher education, possibly offering, say, a master’s degree for as little as $100. MOOCs would break down economic, geographic, racial and gender barriers to higher education.
Thrun also told George that he saw online courses as more effective than traditional classroom lecture classes. “So many people can be helped right now,” he said. “I see this as a mission.”
But more Penn research, published in the journal Nature last month, shows that some 80% of MOOC users around the world already have an advanced degree, casting some doubt on the democratizing notion. For that study, Penn surveyed 35,000 students in more than 200 countries who took 32 different Penn MOOCs. Around the world, the study found, it was the economic elite who were taking MOOCs. In Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, 80% of MOOC students came from the richest 6% of the population. Of course MOOC students need to have access to computers with fast Internet connections, which automatically throws up a bar to the poor. “Far from realizing the high ideals of their advocates, MOOCs seem to be reinforcing the advantages of the ‘haves’ rather than educating the ‘have nots,’” Ezekiel Emanuel, the study’s author, told The Wall Street Journal.
One of Thrun’s own projects appears to have failed. In a partnership with a public university, San Jose State, Udacity offered three MOOCs for college credit. To enhance the courses, Thrun hired online mentors to interact with students. Though the classes were not massive—they only had around 100 students each—they made a poor showing when compared to equivalent live classes on campus. In one algebra MOOC, fewer than a quarter of the students got a passing grade. Students from a charter high school in Oakland also took the class and only 12% passed. San Jose State halted the program in July
Though Fast Company recently ran a long feature story that described Thrun as wanting to shift his focus from college courses to vocational training, where he would form partnerships with fee-paying corporations, the New York Times quotes him as saying, “I care about education for everyone, not just the elite,” and committing to work with San Jose State to try to revamp the software to improve the courses. “To all those who declared our experiment a failure, you have to understand how innovation works,” the Times quotes from Thrun’s blog. “Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.”
Whatever Thrun says, MOOCs are starting to function as vocational training. According to a piece that ran a few days ago in PC World, an increasing number of IT workers are using MOOCs to advance their skills and employers are accepting MOOC training as valid. Example: Tyler Kresch, 22, who has a bachelor’s in philosophy and technology entrepreneurship from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated before he took advanced computer science courses. But he recently did a MOOC taught by professors at Harvard and MIT that, he told PC World, helped him sell himself as a developer. He also took two U.C. Berkeley MOOCs on software as a service. He has already designed an app that streamlines account management. Each time he completes a course, he gets a certificate which he can show his employer. He’s about to start a job as a junior developer at a Santa Barbara startup.
Another worker in the story, Dan Farnbach, 34, took an eight-week MOOC on social network analysis, which he used to land his fist freelance social media job. That job gave him a line on his résumé that then led to a full-time position at F+W Media, which produces dozens of magazines on everything from cars to crafts.
What is the future of MOOCs? There is no question that online learning is here to stay. Witness huge institutions like the University of Phoenix, where most students watch lectures on their computers and interact with professors and other students via email, and the explosion of online learning across many disciplines and companies. A psychoanalyst friend of mine recently set up a distance learning program through her analytic institute. If shrinks can learn without being in the same room with one another, anyone can.
MOOCs are different, of course, because they are, by definition, massive, and they are still mostly free, but Thrun’s failed experiment at San Jose State was really more like a University of Phoenix class, because it had only 100 students.
The Times describes one potential path for MOOCs that I believe is promising: as a supplement to classroom learning. San Jose State is already using videos from edX, a MOOC company formed last year by MIT and Harvard. Edx also produces videos to use in high school Advanced Placement classes. Also witness the widespread use of Khan Academy, the seven-year-old non-profit website where students can watch instructional videos on everything from third grade math to macroeconomics. My 16-year-old used it last year to survive pre-calculus.
A friend of mine, Pam Halstead, is a longtime science teacher at Fortuna High School in northern California. This fall she is teaching a green technology class for the first time, using an edX MOOC called Energy 101, taught by Michael E. Webber, a professor and deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. Pam takes the course a day ahead of her students and then makes study guides for them to follow. She integrates the MOOC into the rest of her curriculum, including projects like a personal energy audit. Her students aren’t sitting home alone watching videos and doing assignments in isolation, free to quit whenever they feel bored. Instead, under the supervision of an experienced teacher, they’re soaking up the expertise of a top-level energy professor, an opportunity they would never have had before MOOCs came on the scene.
I don’t believe MOOCs have failed. They may not satisfy the grandiose claims of their pioneers, but they are already enhancing education for thousands of students.
