The Future of Education goes MOOOOC!

MOOCs seem to be grabbing all the post-secondary headlines lately. Universities trumpet their introduction of Massive Online Open Courses and then, at the end of the course, excuse the poor attendance and completion statistics as being technological growing pains. I can hear the interview: "Well sure, only 5-percent of the students who signed up for the course completed the course, and only a fraction of those actually earned a passing grade, but this, my fellow citizens, is the future of education."

Please.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a academic troglodyte raging against online courses. I have been using BlackBoard, our school's online platform, to supplement face-to-face classes for the last five years. So, yes, I do believe that online platforms are as important as week-three class assessments, diffuse grade segments, and chunking lessons into little digestible bits (and students love the online GradeBook feature). At some point MOOCs might make sense. I'm not sure they do now.

I just don't see how an instructor can effectively engage, instruct, and assess a class of 40,000, which was the number of students who signed up in January for Georgia Tech's MOOC, Fundamentals of Online Education. Imagine trying to memorize that class list. If any traditional class had the same poor attendance and success ratios, it would be yanked from the schedule, no questions asked. Today's MOOC fad is what happens when populists try to direct education: stick an iPad (another shiny, promising tool) in every student's backpack, and call it a degree.

Not surprisingly, and ironically given the subject of the Georgia Tech MOOC, that course was suspended when the college's IT infra-structure could not support a really, really massive, Massive Online Open Course. The hardware, assessment strategy, and competencies for student success need to be firmly in place otherwise we are wasting everyone's time. We need to plan, not chase 60-point headlines.

Bigger is not necessarily better. Newer is not necessarily better. Tech is not necessarily better. We need to evaluate our tools, including MOOCs, against the measure of the stuff we teach and against our own resources. If our goal is not student success, then why are we spending all this time in meetings? As I said, the massive platform is a tool, a very powerful tool, but still just a tool. If the tool works, use it. If it doesn't, modify it or pick up another tool. Whether we are teaching in a tent, or teaching online, our goal is still to provide effective education to all our students.