More on MOOCs

Following up on Lou's post from a couple of days ago, there is a great post on MOOCs, Online education and Online degrees are dead; now let's move on to something real, by Roger Schank on Education Outrage.

Professor Schank writes, "I have been working on online education in one form or another for over 30 years. I am now ready to declare online education officially dead."  He continues: "But now universities have adopted online education wholesale. They are producing gabage."  He notes, "Or, take a look at some Udacity or Coursera courses. They look suspiciously like the boring lectures most students skip out on when they can. Nothing has changed. Now the lecture course, which was always the worst aspect of college education, is being made available to millions. "

He asks, "What is education? Its an experience, mentored by an expert, in which the student tries to accomplish something, fails, and then after some discussion with peers and mentors, tries again. This is not a new idea, Most PhD programs work this way. But since universities care about undergraduates just enough to require a thousand of them to fill a lecture hall, now they are doing it online so the numbers can get much bigger. It's all about money." (emphasis added)

Schank declares, "So, while I am declaring online education dead, because every university is doing it and the market will soon be flooded with crap, I am not declaring the idea of a learning by doing mentored experience dead.  So, I  propose a new name, Mentored Simulated Experiences."

He concludes, "Let’s build those and change education from listening to doing. It is not that hard folks, it requires caring about students and real learning. Well, maybe that is too much to expect."

(Scott Fruehwald) (hat tip: David Thomson)

P.S. He also notes that "I have heard through the grapevine that big corporations are now refusing to hire people with online masters degrees as result of finding -- big surprise, that graduates of the much vaunted Georgia Tech MOOC in Computer Science, actually don’t know much about Computer Science.  They just listened and passed tests. Not exactly the path to expertise."