Early this year, San Jose State announced that it was entering into an agreement with online course provider, Udacity, in which Udacity would provide a number of online courses to SJSU students. The University is now suspending this program because in a spring pilot of the courses, the majority of students failed remedial math, college-level algebra and basic statistics courses. As the LA Times archly reported, "in a somewhat more promising outcome, 83% of students completed the classes." Completed but failed, it would appear. More details in the LA Times article.
Online education - whether free-standing or integrated with live courses - will become increasingly important in the future. But the challenge of providing excellent courses that capture the full attention of students remains difficult. At this point, my sense is that the sizzle continues to be me impressive than the steak. The reason, in my view, is simple: the most effective online education is not inexpensive. Once the driving force behind online ed shifts from cost savings to the twin benefits of flexibility and superior outcomes, online education will begin to take its appropriate place in the educators toolbox.
It would seem that Udacity, offering unsuccessful courses at the low, low price of $150 each, is the wrong idea at the right time.
I'm not terribly surprised. This spring, I signed up with a MOOC on another platform as something of an experiment, to see whether I thought it a good alternative to in-person classes. My experience was okay, but I definitely learned that you get out what you put in. It was extremely easy to ignore everything on a page (including the lecture videos), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click next. In other words, it is even easier than a traditional class to slack off, skip, and then hope to cram for the final (though my class, not being for a grade, did not feature a final).
On the other hand, a lot of the discussion in the online forums was quite good, but, again, you would only know that if you took the time to read through the comments. I suspect, however, that this course was somewhat atypical in that regard - I doubt the comments in most intro level courses would be very helpful. And, it goes without saying that it would be near impossible to do so etching approaching the Socratic method in the online discussion forums.
Posted by: Charles Paul Hoffman | July 19, 2013 at 12:14 PM