MOOC derangement syndrome.

“My biggest fear, frankly, is not a fear connected to Penn at all…It’s a fear that thinking right now about higher education, and especially public higher education, is driven by logics of efficiencies, concerns about the spiraling costs of education, et cetera. And that, too rapidly, these [MOOCs] will be seen as ways of bending the cost curve. And that efficiencies, real or imagined, will become a device for withdrawal of support from high-quality education, and replacement of that experience with something that’s perhaps adequate, but not outstanding. I’m very, very concerned with the misuse of these technologies in a way that is viewed as a cheap way out.”

[emphasis added]

- University of Pennsylvania Provost Vincent Price in Trey Popp, “MOOC U.,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, March/April 2013.

I was cleaning out my old magazines earlier today and found the article quoted above (which tells you how closely I skim my old alumni magazines). On the one hand, it’s good to know that the chief academic officer of my alma mater shares my concerns about MOOCs. Unfortunately, you can still see hints of full-blown MOOC Derangement Syndrome in the lingering belief that sometime in the future MOOCs might actually equal the quality of face-to-face classes. Unless you offer massive numbers of students the same individual attention that all paying college students at least have the opportunity to receive, they will not be as effective educationally. You can come up with the greatest MOOC since sliced bread – not MOOC 2.0 but MOOC 177.0 – and MOOCs will still have this problem because massiveness is a feature of MOOCs, not a bug.

Take the MOOC I know best, Jeremy Adelman’s World History class. I read last week that the completion rate in that course was 0.8%. My theory for why that class was the lowest of the low is that Jeremy wanted to make his MOOC as close to the Princeton experience as possible. That’s why he assigned MOOC students six essays. Students not only had to write them, they had to peer review other people’s work in order to see their own grades. While this might not equal the load in the Coursera Machine Learning MOOC, it’s still a lot of work for someone who might have signed up just to hear nice lectures about the Mughal Empire. Sure, these students won’t learn as much, but you’re still giving the people what they want.

Again, this is a feature of MOOCs, not a bug. From the same article about MOOCs at Penn, here’s Coursera’s Daphne Koller:

“Unbundling is a good thing,” Koller says, “because it allows you to extract units from courses that are of value in and of themselves, and provide them for students.

Presumably peer grading is going to go the way of the dodo because very few people seem to want to participate in that activity. But wait!:

Recently, peer assessments have been the focus of extended research as an outgrowth of the remarkable help some MOOC students gave their classmates via discussions and ad-hoc learning groups. When a class grows to over 1,000 students, Stanford professors found that students tend to support each other and rely less on the staff for answers to their questions. For example, the first Stanford AI class taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvik featured one (yes, 1) teaching assistant.

What if students could be even more active? Could they be taught to grade the work of their peers?

Um…no. First we had the magic rubric. Now we have the magic carrot to get students to read the magic rubric even more closely. If the course is unbundled so that students don’t have to do every part of it, they will have no incentive to do all the work. If the students do not know the subject they are grading, there is no way they will ever be able to grade as well as a trained professor. That’s why the rush to redefine MOOC completion rates vs face-to-face completion rates is in full swing. Because it’s obvious that MOOC completion rates will never get better. Low numbers are a feature of MOOCs, not a bug.

Which brings me back to my illustrious alma mater. From the same article:

Penn has a nonexclusive agreement with Coursera. “We put our energy into this partnership,” he says. “It makes sense to play this out in a way that benefits both Coursera and Penn. But if at any point the company moves in a trajectory that’s not consistent with our mission, there’s really nothing lost by that. And to some extent one could imagine a scenario where our investment in that company proves to have been a wise investment in a financial sense, even if we part ways and move in very different directions.”

Let’s imagine a scenario in which Coursera does something unspeakably awful for education. Penn says, “We’re going to take our MOOC business somewhere else.” Not only is Coursera still around to keep doing that awful thing, Penn will presumably still be in the MOOC business. If you’ve accepted the notion that the university making a profit from education is compatible with Penn’s mission, I don’t see how it’s ever possible for a partner like Coursera to ever do anything that contradicts with that mission.

After all, the primary market for Penn MOOCs is the rest of us, not Penn students. Price can always protect them from the Big Bad Wolf, but not students and faculty outside of West Philly. In other words, MOOC derangement syndrome, the irrational belief that MOOCs can one day be just as good as face-to-face classes, is a very convenient syndrome to have if your professors aren’t the ones at risk for being unbundled.

“Once I took the spinal cord out, the course went quite gelatinous.”

You should really go read Jeremy Adelman dissect his own World History MOOC over at the Princeton Alumni Weekly. As an added bonus, you can read me say the exact same things I’ve been writing here for almost a year now.

The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.

“Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself.  Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison.”

- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, p. 319.

There’s been something of an explosion in professor-as-student MOOC blogging lately. The first one I ever saw was Laura Gibbs writing about the Coursera Fantasy MOOC. My posts on Jeremy Adelman’s World History MOOC (scroll down a bit) benefited immeasurably from Jeremy Adelman’s active participation in the comments. Steven D. Krause is blogging the Duke Composition MOOC, which is an immeasurable service to people like me who don’t see how a composition MOOC is even possible. There’s even an online site now with nothing but MOOC news and reviews (called, fittingly, MOOC News and Reviews).

What all these efforts have in common is a desire to explain the mechanics of how MOOCs work, and to make earnest suggestions for their improvement or improved use on campus.  Krause, for instance, suggests this scenario:

“What if a student could put together a portfolio from one of these MOOCs and use that body of work to place it into a particular level of first-year writing or out of the requirement entirely?  I don’t see how Coursera makes a ton of money from that, but it at least is a use for Coursera.”

Aye, there’s the rub.  While this does indeed seem like a reasonable use for a composition MOOC, Coursera and its ilk will never be satisfied with such a small, comparatively non-renumerative market.  After all, the company has investors to please.  That’s why the MOOC monster will never be satisfied until it takes over all of academia.

You can see more than a tacit acknowledgement of this in the rhetoric of people who urge faculty to dip there toes into online waters before the sharks take over the entire ocean.  Pat Lockley, writing in Hybrid Pedagogy, compares educational technology to the development of the machine gun.  ”If you’re willing to hold the revolver,” he argues, “then you must be willing to hold the machine gun.”  [Having just made it through David Graeber's amazing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, all this talk about economics and guns seems particularly apt.]   “To do nothing,” Lockley suggests, “is to let…others have dominion over your pedagogy.”

Well…sort of.  I agree, in the sense that if faculty keep their heads in the sands and keep teaching the way they’r professors taught, they’ll likely be overwhelmed by technological developments that will ruin the economic viability of college teaching of all but the most super of super professors.  I also agree that if you use technology, it can significantly improve the teaching of any subject.  However, to conclude from this analogy that MOOCs are higher education’s one inevitable future is a mistake of historic proportions.  ”The real story behind MOOCs,” explains Tarak Barkawi at Al Jazeera English:

“may be the ways in which they assist management restructuring efforts of core university practices, under the smile-faced banner of “open access” and assisted in some cases by their “superstar,” camera-ready professors.”

In other words, bring in the machine guns and we all may just end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

Longtime readers know that when it comes to the war against MOOCs, I am hardly a pacifist.  Of all those MOOC narratives I listed in the first paragraph to this post, I think mine is the closest to being unremittingly hostile.  Yes, I think MOOCs are good for teaching a limited number of things in a limited number of ways, but I believe that no matter how many tweaks you put on them they will never be ready for prime time.  In other words, they can never be allowed to replace real college courses.  Every student deserves access to a professor, both for personal and pedagogical reasons. To abandon that principle, particularly out of naked self-interest, is simply a recipe for disaster.

That’s why we have to keep on MOOC providers to do the kind of things that are good for education, but not necessarily good for their bottom lines because they certainly aren’t doing those things now.  When Laura Gibbs examined the Coursera Science Fiction and Fantasy MOOC after taking it, she found that it hadn’t really changed at all. The moment when I got closest to trolling Jeremy Adelman rather than critiquing his MOOC occurred when he explained to the class that he was only going to reshoot a few of his lectures again because despite the fact that you couldn’t possibly find a more dedicated teacher in this world, he still expected his MOOC to run itself.

When you think about it though, this attitude makes sense.  Coursera is a business. Businesses are in the business of making money.  Reshooting lectures or redesigning courses takes time, money or both.  Since Coursera has a virtual monopoly on humanities MOOCs, there is no competition nipping at their heels.  Their staff, therefore, can devote the majority of their time to expanding their offerings rather than doing quality control.

There’s a part in Debt where David Graeber notes that in order to complain to a king about their policies you have to speak the king’s language.  In this case, the language of all our rulers is money.  Pleas about the need to improve the quality of education might as well be Greek to them.  We can make all sorts of reasonable suggestions about how the quality of MOOCs can be improved, but the private companies that provide those services have no incentive to take them seriously as long as we treat their coming as inevitable, the only outcome of higher education reform even worth considering.

This poses a potential problem.  Inviting an insatiable, giant, man-eating, tennis-playing blancmange to your party is stupid enough, but if you have to be that dumb then at least lay down some ground rules.  For example, don’t let the monster eat you out of house and home. Don’t let them eat any of your other party guests either.  If the monster can’t abide by those simple ground rules, then somebody is going to have to keep a weapon around in order to slay the beast because I can pretty much assure you that it will not go quietly.

Teaching in a straitjacket.

The robot currently filing columns for the New York Times under the byline “Tom Friedman” is VERY EXCITED ABOUT MOOCS!!!:

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

In other words, the forces of the free market will unleash an army of truly super superprofessors who will join together to educate the world!!!

Thank goodness for Jeremy Adelman. While the Fried-bot was pontificating at a partially-off-the-record conference in Cambridge, he was publishing actual statistics from his MOOC in AHA Perspectives* that allow us to put this thesis to the test:

The gist of the course for Princeton students (weekly readings, papers, exams) did not change. For Coursera, I assigned fortnightly papers of 750 words each to be peer-reviewed. Any student who completed a paper by the due date was expected to assess five papers submitted by classmates. They had a week to write a paper and a week to assess their peers. In the end, 1,963 discrete “users” submitted over 5,000 essays and participated in almost 30,000 evaluations.

To make sense of those numbers, you also have to know that Jeremy’s course topped out at somewhere around 92,000 students. That means that the percentage of students who completed even one of the course assignments was incredibly low, way below the Mendoza Line. To accept that as a mark of success would mean accepting what the guy who lost Florida to Al Gore in 2000 once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Does this mean that Jeremy failed as a superprofessor? Absolutely not. As Phil Hill reminds us, students enter MOOCs for different reasons and therefore participate in different ways. What it does mean though is that MOOCs are not nearly as effective as actual college courses at getting students involved in every aspect of higher education. That’s why nobody I know is saying, “Kill all the MOOCs,” but they are saying don’t let MOOCs replace traditional higher education entirely because free online education isn’t there yet. I don’t think it can ever get there, at least not for humanities courses.

Jeremy is much more optimistic. However, he is also smart enough to be able to spot the existing flaws in his current course design:

For Coursera students, peer assessment needs upfront tutoring. It is not a natural skill; it cannot develop organically within the timeframe of an accelerated 12-week semester without frustration and attrition. With time, students did learn to evaluate each other, and by the end many students did feel they had gained from the exercise of writing and assessing six essays. But there was too much stumbling around in the dark as I learned along the way.

Does this mean that Jeremy believes in the magic rubric? I don’t think so. It seems more like he wants every participating student to get their own TA. If that’s true, I hope that Princeton is willing to put up the money for all that extra labor because I’m pretty sure that Coursera won’t or they’ll never be profitable.

That for-profit business model is like a straitjacket that will prevent Jeremy from doing what has to be done for the MOOC experience to measure up to what his on campus students get from him semester after semester. It’s not like he’s tightly bound and hanging upside down off the top of a building, but he’s bound nonetheless.

Perhaps Jeremy can wriggle out of his straitjacket and make his MOOC work as well as his other classes, but there was only one Houdini. To think that every superprofessor in every discipline cares as much as Jeremy and will therefore match whatever pedagogical success he achieves while working within the constraints of the MOOC format either makes you an ideologue or a fool.

I’ll let my readers decide which one of those labels best applies to the Fried-bot.

* It’s currently for subscribers only. If I remember the AHA’s system correctly it will be free access starting in April 2013.

Black is white. Up is down.

“Daphne Koller even argued that large online classes are better than small classes because when you have the students do the grading and the feedback, the quality of the responses goes up and the time for responding goes down.”

- Bob Samuels, “Report from Little Hoover: Standing in Front of the Online Train,” Changing Universities, February 27, 2013.

For now, I’ll simply note that my experience in Jeremy Adelman’s World History Coursera MOOC demonstrated almost the exact opposite. I’m hoping that you all will be able to read my extended thoughts on the subject of peer grading one of these days, but since I’m told they will actually be published somewhere other than this blog I have no control over exactly when they will appear.

Superprofessors are people too.

Writing in Inside Higher Education, Coursera’s Andrew Ng reminds us that superprofessors are people too:

Online courses inherently allow students to create their own pathways through the material, which forces educators to think about the content in new ways. And MOOCs offer professors fresh opportunities to observe how their peers teach, learn from one another’s successes and failures and swap tactics to keep students engaged. This is, in turn, makes them better teachers.

He then goes on to quote many of the superprofessors who’ve run courses for Coursera, including friend of this blog, Jeremy Adelman:

Jeremy Adelman, a Princeton University professor who teaches A History of the World Since 1300, explains, “When you lecture into a recording box, it’s different from lecturing to students in person. I have a teaching style that relies on energy from students, and I had to figure out strategies that would transcend [that style] for my class on Coursera.”

Adelman discovered that in putting his course online, he became more focused on what students are experiencing, even though he wasn’t in direct contact with them. “When I lectured, I had to ask myself at all times ‘What is it that I want my students to learn?’ In the old-fashioned lecture hall I was an entertainer, more self-focused rather than teaching-focused, but I was not conscious of this dynamic until I put a course online for the first time,” he says. “For me, the lectures alone were a source of continuous learning and adaptation.”

Anybody who’s read the comments on my 16-part series about Jeremy’s course knows that he cares deeply about teaching the best MOOC he can create. More power to him, and the same thing to all of Coursera’s other superprofessors.

So I don’t mean to be the killjoy who takes the punch bowl away in the middle of the party, but how much did all that caring affect the completion rate in Jeremy’s course? I don’t mean to just pick on Jeremy here (Lord knows I’ve done enough of that). I read on Twitter this morning that the average completion rate of MOOCs as a whole is 10% or lower. Nobody’s said that all the superprofessors for those MOOCs are uncaring monsters. I’ll bet you anything that they’re trying to create the best MOOCs they can too.

Perhaps lack of caring on the part of superprofessors isn’t the problem with MOOCs then. I’d like to read more essays in the higher education press about what is.

Give the people what they want.

Apparently, people out there really want to know what it’s like to take a history MOOC. Therefore, by popular demand, here’s a report on the first week Philip Zelikow’s version, including similarities and differences between his and Jeremy Adelman’s. Before I begin though, let me repeat, this will not be a regular feature of this blog. I managed to watch the first week’s lectures because there’s always a little extra time during your first week of classes before the grading and such starts. This will not happen again soon as I have lots and lots of other work to do besides watching videos.

***

The most obvious difference between these history MOOCs is that the production values on this one are absolutely first rate. I’m sorry if you’re still reading this blog Jeremy, but his MOOC makes yours look like public access television. I’m not just talking to the absence of conversations with Valeria, or the fact that I can actually read the maps. I’m talking about almost everything.

Ironically, there’s no studio involved here. Zelikow is filmed in what I presume is his office, in front of a shelf of hardbound leather books (maybe State Department reports?). While this sounds cheap, it’s not as so much else is going on. For example, Zelikow makes much greater use of pictures than Jeremy did. So do the producers. There are Ken Burns shots over the pictures. There’s cuts of Zelikow from one angle to another. There’s also a lot more PowerPoint style text than Jeremy ever used, including that fade-in feature that only an experienced PowerPointer can master.

With respect to the content, this course begins later than Jeremy’s did – 1760. With less time to cover, Zelikow used his first segment to introduce history as a concept (which is kind of ironic since MOOC students will only be graded on how well they remember specific factual information). I also thought it was very interesting that he cited other historians like David Landes and Angus Madison in his first set of lectures. I might be wrong, but I don’t remember Jeremy doing that even once.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two MOOCs is what has to be the enormous amount of work that went into this one. For example, because each picture was used by permission, the huge range of copyright clearances that had to be necessary to create each presentation was obvious for all to see. On one level, the comparison is unfair because Zelikow had much more time to prepare his course than Jeremy did. My guess, however, is that the difference has less to do with the respective superprofessors and more to do with their respective employers.

Jeremy’s MOOC materials were all copyrighted by Jeremy Adelman. Here the emblem of the University of Virginia flashes at the beginning of each segment and the copyright at the end is by the “Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.” My hunch is that UVa dumped more manpower and money into the production of this MOOC than Princeton did for Jeremy’s because they expect to get much more out of it in the long run. I’m not sure whether that should be gratifying or terrifying, but that’s a question that’s worth a whole post by itself so I won’t handle it here.

***

I guess this is where I’m supposed to give Zelikow’s MOOC a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to become the Roger Ebert of history MOOCs no matter how much the people want it. Besides my other obligations, I’ve taken something that Bob Samuels wrote the other day very much to heart:

During a break, a TV reporter pulled me aside and asked me to talk about why I hate online education. I said I do not hate it, but I believe that it will increase costs and possibly lower the quality of our “better classes.” I also added that this whole discussion about online education allows the UC to avoid talking about the real cost drivers in the system.

[emphasis added]

In other words, I’d rather write more about the political economy of MOOCs going forward instead of spilling pools more digital ink on the mechanics of the system. In the meantime, I will not fault any superprofessor for trying to create the best MOOC they can teach. Instead, I’ll try to refocus the conversation in this space on much more important broader issues.

So I signed up for another MOOC…

Don’t be alarmed. There will be no new 16-part series of the entire process because I have my own three classes to teach starting later today. I just wanted to see how Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia handles the structural issues surrounding his World History MOOC and maybe check out his lectures on some of my favorites subjects like industrialization and World War I.

Even though the class just started today, I can see major differences with my last MOOC already. For one thing, Zelikow isn’t using peer grading. Instead, MOOC student grades are based on long (at least compared to Jeremy Adelman’s class) multiple choice tests. On the one hand, as a believer in good writing I should find that appalling. On the other hand, peer grading in the Adelman MOOC was such a disaster (at least IMHO) that I actually understand his decision. This doesn’t mean I want to give anyone college credit based on their performance, but I do understand why Zelikow went this route.

The other major difference is only obvious because I’ve been in contact with Zelikow already and he was nice enough to send me his on-campus syllabus.* He is doing what they call in the trade these days a “flipped classroom.” In other words, his students at Virginia are watching the exact same MOOC lectures that the Coursera students are. In other words, the University of Virginia is both a producer and a consumer of Zelikow’s MOOC materials.

UVa isn’t hiring adjuncts and grad students to do the teaching dirty work here. As Zelikow’s syllabus explains:

“[E]ach discussion section will be in a classroom of no more than sixty students. It will be led by the professor, not a TA.”

This is a good thing. Think how easy it would be to immediately double or quadruple the size of the class. Despite the obvious, immediate cost-savings adjuncts could bring here, Zelikow and UVa are talking the more expensive way out. After bitching for three months about how nobody taking Jeremy’s MOOC had a living, breathing professor helping them out, the on-campus MOOC students at UVA will have Zelikow himself. How can I possibly complain about that?

But what’s going to happen on all those campuses where Zelikow isn’t available? As far as I know, cloning him isn’t option. For any other campus, this flipped classroom would become a “wrap-around.” That means they would farm out their content creation to Zelikow and Coursera while local faculty would just lead discussion sections. Six community college faculty members in an absolute must-read at IHE today explain the problem with that arrangement:

In the meantime, our job as professors, according to the dictates of the emboldened technocrats, is to become rope-makers for our own professional hangings. The debate here is not really one about technology and higher education, as most of us know that online education is now a permanent part of the educational landscape with legitimate uses. No, what this MOOC debate is about is whether we blithely open the door to the gutting of what is most precious about what we do.

No self-respecting tenure-track historian would allow their content creation to be farmed out off campus because picking what they teach is what makes the job fun. Besides, as I’ve explained before, content knowledge is what makes Ph.D.s worth our salaries. Without it, we’d all be paid like high school teachers or even worse. Despite Zelikow’s excellent intentions, this is how the debundling of the history professoriate begins.

Look for more occasional updates about this MOOC coming eventually, but this time I’m conceding immediate failure before I ever begin. Sure, I feel guilty about contributing to the ruination of the course retention numbers, but at least I’m doing it in the name of quality blogging.

* Which, by the way, I describe and quote with his permission.

World History MOOC Report 16: In which I try to sum the whole thing up.

Well, I just hit submit on my last essay so even though I have a little bit of peer grading left to do, my MOOC experience is basically over. When I started this thing I wrote:

I could definitely stand to learn more specific factual knowledge from outside my country of specialty.

Although it turns out I knew a lot more about World History than I thought I did, there’s no question that I met that goal. Of course, I would have learned more had I read the textbook and took notes on the video lectures, but I’ll bet you anything I would have quit the whole thing in frustration if I had gone in whole hog. In that sense, maybe having different levels of MOOC participation is a good thing.

I still wonder though whether the course might have been designed better to draw slackers like me in further. When I teach my survey course, I spend the entire first lecture going through the syllabus and explaining the differences between history in college and the kind of history classes that students likely had in high school. Perhaps Jeremy does something similar on campus, but for this MOOC he certainly hit the ground running. Everything technical and bureaucratic had to be absorbed passively on the web site or through e-mail as the lectures (apart from the goofing around with Dan or Valeria) were all business – history business, that is, rather than the business of the course. I realize that the MOOC machine is supposed to be canned, but I don’t see why some of it can’t cover the course details that will change from semester to semester. After all, as numerous people have pointed out in the comments to earlier posts in this series, the history certainly does.

With respect to that history, what surprised me most is the way that I perked up more often when Jeremy was lecturing on material that I already knew rather than the stuff I knew nothing about. It’s not that I was determined to find errors in the lectures (I think I remember just one through the whole course).* I think it’s because that’s the material for which I already had the knowledge to put what I was learning into context. I knew there were lots of local revolutions during World War I, for example, but considering them altogether helps me understand that conflict better outside the limited American context.

Jeremy assumed a lot of prior knowledge for the students in his class. I’m sure that works for Princeton students. I had a lot of it (but by no means all that I needed). I have to wonder though if most of the 92,000 people in the course had what they needed to make sense of everything. And you have to remember, a lot of those lectures went over the “normal” three hours per week that you’d get in an on campus course. We were being inundated. For my peculiar purposes that was a good thing, but I doubt that was true for everybody.

If a history MOOC is really going to simulate a college class, it has to somehow teach writing and critical thinking. While I would quibble with a few of Jeremy’s administrative decisions with respect to the peer grading assignments (for example, I think the footnote/bibliography thing just confuses matters), I really admire his efforts to actually duplicate the Princeton in-course experience. I think the problem is that peer-grading is basically doomed from the start almost by definition.

I don’t want to get too much into this as I have an essay written up on this subject that I’m currently trying to place. The short version of the critique are two points that I think I’ve made in earlier installments of this series: 1) There simply aren’t enough incentives to make students care about their grading duties. [The last essay I turned in got a perfect score. Unfortunately, I was the only person who had bothered to grade it.] And 2) Even if they do care, there’s no reason to think that they can grade anywhere near as well as a trained professional. Maybe you can teach the world a lot of facts by showing them videos of the best professors of the world, but if you can’t teach them how to “do” history, then MOOCs will never be able to replace the in-class experience unless the powers that be no longer care whether students get access to that experience or not.

Alright, that’s it for me and MOOCs for a good long while. I’m going on a MOOC holiday. Unfollow the blog if you’re only here for the MOOC bashing as I think I’m going to start back after Christmas with a whole new topic. No, it won’t be all culinary history but there’ll definitely be a lot more history here than there’s been lately. I suspect I’ll even still cover some educational technology from time to time, but MOOCs are starting to bore me to tears.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Here’s hoping that 2013 turns out to be the year of something with a better acronym.

* It’s that bra-burning myth, Jeremy. The 1968 Miss America protestors actually dumped ladies undergarments and other “instruments of women’s oppression” into a “Freedom Trash Can.”

World History MOOC Report 15: In which I watch “a global conversation about global history.”

I mentioned recently on this blog that I got absolutely no guidance in graduate school about teaching. At least I didn’t get a chance to teach my own course until my very last year. Starting in my second year, however, I did serve (off and on) as a teaching assistant.

If you don’t know, the sole job description of history graduate student teaching assistants in the pre-MOOC days was to run discuss sections and to grade tests and papers. My professors always graded three or four papers to show you what their scale would be so that you could do better. I don’t ever remember getting guidance on how to run a discussion and it’s not as easy as it looks. Sometimes students don’t do the reading and therefore won’t talk. Sometimes students do do the reading and don’t want to talk. On the other hand, students sometimes won’t shut up and you have to manage them. All that time, you need to try to pass on the kinds of skills that all those students need to succeed in the course.

I thought of those experiences while I was watching the “Global Precept” for Jeremy Adelman’s World History MOOC last night while simultaneously returning to the course’s forums (as I promised Jeremy I would) in order to read some of the comments there. I thought about being a TA not because the Global Precept conversation resembled that experience. I thought about it because that experience couldn’t have been more different.

For one thing, Jeremy Adelman did a fine job at keeping an interesting conversation going. Yet, at the same time, he didn’t really have to work all that hard to do so. The participants were a varied group of interesting Princeton undergrads, grad students and very interesting students from all over the world who have participated in Jeremy’s Coursera MOOC. He called it “a global conversation about global history” and it certainly was. It was also an excellent review of the general advantages of approaching history from a world perspective. It was obvious that this course has reached all of these students and taught them not just valuable historical facts, but historical concepts that they will find useful for understanding the world around them for the rest of their lives. As an educator, this was the most useful thing I’ve watched since I started taking this course. Bravo Jeremy.

But – And you knew there was going to be a “but” didn’t you? – I couldn’t help but think of all the people who weren’t participating because they already dropped the course or the ones who still might be in it and won’t watch it because it’s not required. When I went back to the forums I remained extremely confused, but I also noticed for the first time that each individual comment has a number of page views attached to it. None of the comments in recent weeks had more than a couple of thousand. Most of them had only a few hundred. [For context, Jeremy recently told us that 92,000 people have signed up for this course.] Some of that is obviously attributable to students dropping out of the course, but some of that has to be people like me who simply aren’t taking advantage of what the forums have to offer.

Jeremy got a chance to pick the best of the best for his conversation, but who’s going to teach this stuff to the people who are merely average or below? I guess I keep coming back to this because it’s my primary pedagogical takeaway from my MOOC experience: I think every student deserves a caring education professional directly monitoring their progress. Ironically, the people who could most benefit from a global conversation like this would be precisely the people who won’t watch it.

Contrary to my relatively newfound reputation as a Luddite, I don’t want to take anyone’s MOOCs away. What I want is to see caring educators everywhere join together to make sure that the new permanent worldwide austerity doesn’t leave anyone anywhere with those MOOCs as their only higher education option.