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Someone Else, Not Me

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today carries a story about various institutions that are offering MOOCs (massive open online courses).  Some of these courses have been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education.  But the institutions offering the courses say they are for other universities; they won’t give credit for the courses to their own students.  Among these institutions is UC-Irvine. All the courses are in technical fields such as math. 

…No students at Irvine… will be able to take any of these courses for credit, though. Gary Matkin, UC-Irvine’s dean of continuing education, distance learning and summer session…said UC-Irvine does not consider its Coursera courses, as currently constructed, to be worthy of its credit because “we do not control learning environment of these students…. There are 250,000 signups in our six courses, with open enrollment so anybody can sign up, and those anybodies can influence negatively the learning environment of students who are serious about taking it.” …

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/07/ace-deems-5-massive-open-courses-worthy-credit

It’s not clear how the “anybodies” can negatively influence the learning environment of others if each anybody is sitting alone at a computer in a separate location.  But in any case, the message seems to be that when it comes to giving credit, the host institution is saying to the course takers, let credit be given by someone else, not me:

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Jerry Brown Looks for an Online Course that Requires No Human Interaction

Byuclafaculty

At the Regents meeting of January 22, 2014, Gov. Brown seems to be searching for an online course that requires no human interaction.  Such a course, he reasons, could have unlimited enrollment because it is completely self-contained.  He gets some pushback from UC Provost Dorr, who thinks courses should have such interaction.  You can hear this excerpt at the link below.  The entire meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy of the Regents was posted yesterday.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tYFLJvrE3g?feature=player_detailpage]

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Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

Byuclafaculty

As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year.  So we dutifully record the sessions in real time.  Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22.  This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy.  Gov. Brown was in attendance.  We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments.  But for now, we provide a continuous recording. There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope.  The discussion then turned to online ed and…

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MOOCs in the Muck

Byuclafaculty

Good question! Inside Higher Ed today runs an article on MOOC offerings at the U of Texas and Cornell.  At the former, there are the usual extremely low completion rates.  At the latter, resident students are asking the question in the photo at the right: …”A year after UT began rolling out nine Massive Online Open Courses, the results are in,” The Daily Texan wrote in a Jan. 29 editorial… Among the “results” are completion rates ranging from 1 to 13 percent, the lack of credit granting courses and the $150,000 to $300,000 production costs…  (S)tudents at Cornell voiced similar concerns,…

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MOOc

Byuclafaculty

An interesting analysis of MOOCs in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby suggests that heavy dependence on online ed won’t work for what she terms highly selective post-secondary educational institutions.  In essence, such institutions depend in important ways on alumni loyalty which is hard to obtain if students take courses online that come from anywhere. Abstract: I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE)in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in return…