Interesting MOOC discussion .. starting with one of the best courses I've
taken, Michael Sandel's political philosophy course "Justice". I'm sending
a scrape of the NYT page due to their limited access policy.
The last sentence is the key:
When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.
Guess we all gotta get special to keep up!
-- Owen
The Professors’ Big StageBy THOMAS L.
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March 5, 2013 421
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I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and
Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” — a k
a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free
from massive open online courses?”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston
disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend
Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice”
course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities
offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me
at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.
“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently
been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into
Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular
figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first
pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to
boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in
Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big
moral dilemmas.
Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000
people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with
Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese
Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind
of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and
N.B.A. players.”
O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs
revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real.
These were my key take-aways from the conference:
¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell
Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.”
Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is
on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do
with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry,
just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was
willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more
competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you
acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in
a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered
the competency.
¶Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and
delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes,
followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked
and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and
the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can
be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There
seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online
lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall,
San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of
M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students
would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come
to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and
answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to
problem solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those
passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And
since this course was the first step to a degree in science and technology,
it meant that many more students potentially moved on toward a degree and
career in that field.
¶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.
¶Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential college
experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it
facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of
those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education
outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on
what works, but standing still is not an option.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on
disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s
traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just
before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and
topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach
entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham
Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that
Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily
available, average is over.
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