Morning Must-Read: Duncan Black: Does Anybody Remember MOOCs?
Does Anybody Remember MOOCs?:
“They were all anybody who wrote about education…
…would talk about for awhile. Where did that all go? Apparently administrators finally figured out that a ‘course in a box’ actually costs a lot of money, that it doesn’t scale nearly as well as they hoped, that they are a substitute for ‘learning from a book’ not ‘learning from a person,’ and you can’t charge $50,000 per year tuition simply because your prestigious name will be on the online course degree. I knew all of this because I saw people experimenting with online courses… 15 years ago. The technology, except maybe easy use of video (you could use video, it was just a bit more of a pain), was all there then…
“A substitute for learning from a book” is not quite fair. What we want is an experience machine that is a good enough replica for learning 5-on-1 from a person or, if we cannot get that, a good enough replica of learning from a really good lecturer. For something like 1% of the population–which includes me–a simple book is a good enough replica experience machine. For something like 10% of the population a book is an OK-but-not-good-enough replica. But we now have much better technologies then books at our fingertips, eardrums, and eyeballs, and so we should be able to build experience machines that will push that 1% up to 20% or so and that 10% up to 70% or so. But we are not doing so well so far…