Lion of the Blogosphere

The end of MOOC?

No, not Mookie Wilson from the 1980s New York Mets. Massive Online Open Courses.

“There is no business model for MOOCs that makes sense,” said Professor Elaine Allen of Babson College, who is also the co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group that monitors online education. “They have not been shown to bring more students to a school, and they have incredible attrition.”

I never did believe that MOOCs would go anywhere. I previously wrote that education has been a guy lecturing in front of students for hundreds of years, and I saw no reason why that was going to change all of a sudden.

Libertarians are going to hate to hear this, but only federal government action can force alternative models of education. Otherwise, people want degrees for the prestige and not because they learn anything, and the best schools have absolutely no incentive to change that business model and every incentive to ensure that it remains as is.

* * *

“bob sykes” writes:

Towards the end of my career teaching engineering, I realized I wasn’t actually teaching anybody. I was enabling students to learn by providing structure and discipline and incentives. Almost all students need these things, and MOOC’s don’t provide them. The demise of MOOC’s was predictable.

I agree.

HOWEVER, if college is ever replaced by testing, I predict that there will be independent courses that teach to the test, much like how BAR/BRI teaches bar review courses. You could study for the test all by yourself, but BAR/BRI provides structure and discipline as well as some entertainment and social opportunities.

Written by Lion of the Blogosphere

May 1, 2015 at 12:18 PM

Posted in Education

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42 Responses

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  1. Employers are the real driving force. Individuals may seek a prestige degree, but employers only want validation of qualifications.
    So until bureaucrats get set to further abuse education, as they’ve done with health et al., workers will need to credentialize.
    America has never embraced the German model of pathways, academic versus technical. MOOCs may be the way to bring that about, outside the failed educational system.

    Robert Arvanitis

    May 1, 2015 at 12:36 PM

    • “America has never embraced the German model of pathways, academic versus technical.”

      i have heard some about this, how in germany at 13 they put all their students in three groups based on intelligence, and their career fates are decided. seems so smart to me. can you explain this more? thanks.

      rivelino

      May 1, 2015 at 5:35 PM

      • German students are put in one of three tracks at the end of fourth grade. The vo-tech track only gives you academics up til ninth grade, then you do a two year apprenticeship, then you’re an adult and you go get a job.

        I can’t imagine us ever moving to this system here. For one thing, where are all these high quality apprenticeships going to come from all of a sudden?

        Leah

        May 2, 2015 at 2:20 AM

      • “The vo-tech track only gives you academics up til ninth grade, then you do a two year apprenticeship, then you’re an adult and you go get a job.”

        this is fantastic. so at 15 or 16 you enter the work force, first learning a skill for two years, then actually working and making money. no crazy college debt.

        you make a good point about the apprenticeships, but it seems to me more of a real economic situation, vs community college BS which only gets students into debt.

        rivelino

        May 3, 2015 at 5:56 AM

  2. MOOCs make a big change. But they take other aspects of traditional degrees out of the equation. For example, they take out the social status aspect. People don’t take a MOOC class for status, but they do go to Harvard or any college for status, so that they could just say “I went to college” 🙂

    Well, it turns out that it’s few people that are interested in knowledge for the knowledge sake, and most of those people already went to a traditional college. So, at the end of the day, the MOOCs will be useful for few genuinely curious people to learn about more things, but it will not be providing education for the masses. What I like about MOOCs is that it reduced the money/status advantage some kids have because of their parents. Now everybody with a computer can get more skills, if they are curious and motivated. This is why I’m a big supporter of MOOCs.

    Zack

    May 1, 2015 at 12:45 PM

    • “Now everybody with a computer can get more skills”

      But employers don’t value skills in the absence of a degree and on-the-job experience using that skill. If you haven’t used a skill at a real job working for a corporation, they don’t believe you actually have the skill.

      Lion of the Blogosphere

      May 1, 2015 at 12:55 PM

      • 3 arguments:

        1. It’s not true that all employers don’t value these skills. Take coding for example. A lot of STEM graduates have little or no coding experience. Yet, MOOCs can help up get up to speed. A tech interview actually tests the skills directly. The employer doesn’t need to look at what classes the interviewer takes. The Google/tech industry interview is full of CS/math problems. You either solve them or you don’t. That’s it. (this may not be true to the same degree in other industries)

        2. Employers are not everything. The point of an education is that it can also be seen just for education’s sake. Curious people don’t need an economic reason to take a class.

        3. Some classes are useful in life in general, but not in a job. For example, a wine class (like the one in the great courses) is useful and fun. Period. But it doesn’t help you land a job (unless you work as a sommelier) The same with a liberal education: a lot of those classes are useful in life but less so in a job.

        Zack

        May 1, 2015 at 1:05 PM

      • A wine class is easy and fun. Not like studying math.

        Lion of the Blogosphere

        May 1, 2015 at 1:28 PM

      • I actually found Calculus to be a very fun subject.

        I once encountered a White female in IT (as rare as an unicorn), who said being a technician is fun. I would disagree with her on that.

        JS

        May 3, 2015 at 11:40 AM

  3. I recommend looking at this post from Bryan Caplan (a libertarian to be sure, but he’s quite on point about education):

    Educational Signaling: A Fad Whose Time Has Come, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

    “I previously wrote that education has been a guy lecturing in front of students for hundreds of years, and I saw no reason why that was going to change all of a sudden.”

    Well it’s not just that. It’s that the pool of people who are able to be college students is, by and large, enrolled (if not overenrolled, some of those exceptions on the margins notwithstanding). Opening up MOOCs wasn’t going to change that.

    JayMan

    May 1, 2015 at 12:57 PM

    • “Well it’s not just that. It’s that the pool of people who are able to be college students is, by and large, enrolled (if not overenrolled,” ————————————

      Agreed. Having come of age in the era where virtually no college was open admission and employers only hired people from competitive schools (at least for jobs requiring significant decision making skills) I never imagined I would experience having to work with someone who was effectively illiterate but possessed two degrees (undergrad and graduate) both from online open admission for profit universities accredited by fringe outfits with said education financed by the federal government as part of a veteran’s benefit package.

      With a big push by the military to ‘hire the vet’ some gullible employers have decided to lower their skepticism and hire these folks for positions that traditionally went to real college grads from real schools. The results, from my observation, have not been good.

      Curle

      May 1, 2015 at 7:31 PM

  4. MOOCs exist logically as a hobby thing. A few people want to take college level courses for their own edification. Most people only want to take a course if it will lead to a credential they can use to make money.

    Education in the Anglosphere is at least as much regarded as a socialization process as a knowledge acquisition process. The long tradition of school literature, starting with “Tom Brown’s School Days” illustrates this. You go to school to be not just socially but spiritually altered by the process, as Tom is by his friendship with George. You obviously can’t experience this online.

    Online education could be a great technology to spread knowledge and skills, and the lack of interest in it shows the lack of interest the system has in knowledge and skills. The system not only wants its subjects to be stupid, it wants the rulers to be stupid.

    thrasymachus33308

    May 1, 2015 at 1:08 PM

  5. MOOC’s are useful for working people (mid-career) to learn new skills. For example, a control system engineer learning to program or configure new robotics systems or a new SCADA/HMI. They are also used by entrepreneurs and other business owners to learn more effective sales management or marketing techniques. These are the kinds of people using MOOC’s.

    However, MOOC’s are a complete flop for high school students earning degrees. The issue here is that kids going for a college degree are not really learning anything that they would use in an actual job. They are earning a credential that gets them through the HR screening process that allows them to get a good job at a large company (or any other company that uses current HR hiring process). In the case of the Ivy League and other elite schools is that the students are essentially buying a rolodex of contacts (the alumni) used to get a good job (investment banking, etc.) in a field that hires primarily Ivy League graduates. It is for these reasons why MOOC’s have a tough, up-hill battle to compete with traditional university education with regards to career placement and advancement.

    Abelard Lindsey

    May 1, 2015 at 1:10 PM

    • “MOOC’s are useful for working people to learn new skills. However, MOOC’s are a complete flop for high school students earning degrees.”

      exactly. well said, abelard.

      rivelino

      May 1, 2015 at 5:43 PM

  6. Internet learning will certainly need a lot more decades to take off, but it is by no mean “the end”.

    Thomas

    May 1, 2015 at 1:17 PM

  7. MOOCs are completely useful awesome tools, but they’ve had near zero impact in terms of replacing traditional universities or degrees or starting mega profitable businesses. Sure, the predictions of the university’s demise were completely wrong, but saying there won’t be structural change without federal government oversight is equally ridiculous. There is real structural change happening on every level. It is the age of the infovore, and the Internet and technology really have changed the world. People are already using skills learned on MOOCs. It’s easier for motivated people to learn many subjects and that is having very real impact. I don’t think anyone is realistically expecting any major universities to shut down due to MOOCs, but the impact of MOOCs is still awesome for what it is.

    Massimo

    May 1, 2015 at 1:25 PM

  8. Until indebted students start to default en masse, the system will remain the same. IBR payment programs have only hid the likely 50% default rate that would exist otherwise. Average student loan debt was $34k in 2014 and is climbing every year. This madness will not end well.

    Augustus

    May 1, 2015 at 1:42 PM

  9. Yep. It’s like the Wizard telling the scarecrow that he’s always had the power to think, but what he doesn’t have that the powerful do have is a diploma.

    Jason Roberts

    May 1, 2015 at 2:33 PM

  10. Towards the end of my career teaching engineering, I realized I wasn’t actually teaching anybody. I was enabling students to learn by providing structure and discipline and incentives. Almost all students need these things, and MOOC’s don’t provide them. The demise of MOOC’s was predictable.

    During my early career, there were also fads like self-pacing and distant learning (small scale, not MOOC) that also went away.

    bob sykes

    May 1, 2015 at 2:52 PM

    • It took you till the end of your career? I realizedthat when I was in the 10th grade, and have regarded teachers as criminals ever sense. I never needed any discipline or structure or motivation let alone pay for it.

      Thanks for my genome BGI guys. Sometimes it pays to be stupid.

      selecao

      May 1, 2015 at 3:38 PM

  11. I read that places like the University of Phoenix cost about the same as a state university. If that’s true, its a big problem. When places like that charge $500 per semester for a full load THEN they might have some success

    CamelCaseRob

    May 1, 2015 at 3:47 PM

  12. MOOC’s are like a technocrats panacea. Imagine, Ivy League quality lectures on the internet for free! All the poor people will now be as smart as the rich white ones. This is basically their thought process. But. 80% of people are below average. The number who have the self discipline and intelligence to get anything out of this is vanishingly small. These courses are useful if you need to brush up on an area for your job, but otherwise it’s a huge waste of time.

    Also, what the hell is your resume going to say?

    2014-2015 Harvard Extension MOOC (Physics) ?? It is to laugh.

    ASF

    May 1, 2015 at 4:58 PM

    • The best lectures I ever had were (1) BAR/BRI; (2) Law professor Michael Berch; (3) High school teacher Frank McCourt.

      Lion of the Blogosphere

      May 1, 2015 at 5:54 PM

    • What is your resume going to say?

      Govt intervention is required to break the monopoly of formal educationists, institute uniform testing, and prohibit discrimination based on institution attended if any.

      Formal education has been an anachronism since the printing press and the reintroduction of paper into Europe…and doubly, triply, quadruply after recorded sound, video, and the internet.

      selecao

      May 1, 2015 at 6:27 PM

  13. i found a nytimes article on MOOCs from 2013:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

    “Several of my Coursera courses begin by warning students not to e-mail the professor. We are told not to ‘friend’ the professor on Facebook. If you happen to see the professor on the street, avoid all eye contact (well, that last one is more implied than stated).”

    “The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews. It creates a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. “

    rivelino

    May 1, 2015 at 5:51 PM

    • As if any college professor is really approachable out in the World. See them out shopping somewhere, see the dread when they realized you recognize them..”oh dear, it must be one of my grad students….”

      Mrs Stitch

      May 1, 2015 at 7:33 PM

  14. I know that there are some people who try to learn about subjects through audio recordings of college courses. I tried doing that, but I ultimately found that the majority of a college lecture is actually buzz and buffer. An hour long lecture might have 20 minutes of useful information, and even that is just a summary of the course materials. Usually, a professor needs to spend 2/3rds of his lecture focusing on grades, telling people about the upcoming schedule, what readings they will have, etc.

    On the other hand, I think that some series like “Modern Scholar” are an excellent way to acquire information, as are Podcasts like “Hardcore History.” They tend to be dense with information and are worth listening to, though they aren’t a substitute for reading a book or three about the topic.

    Sid

    May 1, 2015 at 6:23 PM

  15. Related:

    “What is most significant about the Trump dust-up is that the conduct alleged — false promises, high prices, weak educational programs, and terrible outcomes for many students — has been playing out for decades all across America at a wide range of for-profit colleges. Indeed, victims of these other schools are often left much worse off than the students at Trump University: Many start poorer — veterans, single parents, students of color, immigrants, people struggling to support themselves; many fall prey to misleading ads and high-pressure sales tactics; and many graduate or drop out owing much more than the Trump students, sometimes over $100,000. And for-profit colleges students often find that their degrees do nothing to help them get good jobs.”

    http://www.republicreport.org/2013/students-across-america-report-deceptions-for-profit-colleges/

    Curle

    May 1, 2015 at 6:57 PM

  16. HOWEVER, if college is ever replaced by testing, I predict that there will be independent courses that teach to the test, much like how BAR/BRI teaches bar review courses.

    That’s already the case with the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

    The other potential model is MOOCs as the test/recruitment tool itself – like the video game in The Last Starfighter. Codecademy may be a play on that.

    Dave Pinsen

    May 1, 2015 at 7:27 PM

  17. online delivered education seems to be a big hit in australia. there are universities here which are nearly entirely online in their student base these days. a good example is the university of new england, a big university located in a rural town called armidale. armidale might have been the only town in australia close to what americans would call a college town. while it boasts about 23,000 students (out of a total of 25,000 people or so in all of armidale) only about 2000 of them these days are on campus students. other largely online universities have popped up all over the country, such as charles sturt university which has multiple very small campuses in over five different towns.

    these are all pretty bad schools with entrance requirements below the average HSC (high school certificate) test taker.

    james n.s.w

    May 1, 2015 at 8:03 PM

  18. I make my living teaching college students. I got worried about my career being vaporized by MOOCs only after I took a MOOC, completed it, and enjoyed the experience.

    Super-prestigious colleges and degrees aren’t going anywhere, but most of higher ed is geared toward people who just want a credential that will get them started in the world. Once certifications are based on adequately rigorous standards and employers begin to accept them, then things might get interesting.

    Kittitas

    May 1, 2015 at 11:08 PM

    • Certifications are more valuable than degrees (this is of course is true, in our vocational, money based society). They would be more exciting and interesting if America isn’t a rotting wasteland, being sucked dry by value transference parasites and liberal degenerate dictum. We’ve basically lost the pioneering spirit that defined much of our nation, and became sedentary petty materialists.

      JS

      May 3, 2015 at 11:46 AM

      • Lion – Regarding my trip to Park Slope, visiting a friend and meeting some of his neighbors, it was quite surprising to me, that a lot of the people living there, came as far as unlikely places such as Kansas City and Minnesota. It would make sense that a lot of transplants from these areas with means would want to live in NYC, away from their boring bumblef*ck doldrums. Much of America is a rotting wasteland, insipid, unkempt, and remains mired in the past.

        JS

        May 3, 2015 at 11:53 AM

  19. As noted above, the point of college is not skills or knowledge (except for those engineering morlocks perhaps, ugh), but credentials. Some ideas:

    1. Alternate credentials, like IQ testing and personality testing (though does the latter really say anything?). You also have professional licenses, perhaps those should be emphasized and reintroduced to a greater extent? (The world’s five remaining Libertarians cried out in horror.) Tech workers in particular should push for professional licensing to stem the tide of H1B. All of this runs a risk of introducing skill and ability as desired elements however.

    2. Credentials are needed by HR for keyword filtering, a negative-productivity gatekeeper role which could well be abolished. A $50 application fee would be more efficient in cleaning up such resume spam.

    3. Credentials are required by the company itself, e.g., Harvard men requiring Harvard men to do consulting, BIGLAW, and other New York parasitical roles. A Mad Max world is needed to rebalance this, hulking PSU graduates crushing effete Harvard nancy boys who take jobs at the wrong firms and have no spike-wheeled cars. The Warriors may serve as some inspiration too, “this time it’s inside the skyscrapers!”.

    Glengarry

    May 2, 2015 at 6:17 AM

    • What America really needs is to expand its frontiers. What does everyone need hug around the Northeast and other liberal areas to full capacity, just because we’ve become lazy, unmotivated and want the immediate conveniences and phony status worship. But this is all fluff talk.

      JS

      May 3, 2015 at 12:03 PM

  20. Lecture is horribly inefficient format and very few lecturers are any good. I never understood the point of replicating lectures with online video. Buying the absolute best textbook ever made on the subject is the way to go. Read it. Do the exercises.

    sammysamsam

    May 2, 2015 at 10:26 AM

  21. “best schools have absolutely no incentive to change that business model ”

    If this is true then why are they creating MOOC courses? I think they are doing it because they want to have future students take their MOOC courses who would otherwise go to a lower ranked school.

    I think prestige MOOCs will succeed if employers start to to treat a prestige MOOC credential as being equal in value to a lower ranked college degree.

    Mercer

    May 3, 2015 at 8:50 PM


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