to the top of a list of challenges for
MOOC educators:
˲ Business Models. No one has yet
determined how to make the MOOC
model self-sustaining. Educators say
the current emphasis is just on delivering content; the rest, they say, will work
itself out “eventually.”
˲ Student Evaluations. How does an
instructor effectively grade students
who are doing homework and labs,
writing essays, creating projects, and
taking exams online? It’s easy when
the tests are multiple choice or when
the work is peer-graded, but technology still needs to catch up to evaluating
the rest.
In the case of Norvig and Thrun’s
AI class, the tests and quizzes were all
multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank and
could be graded automatically.
“It takes some effort to convert an
open-ended question into a fill-in-the-
blank question,” recalls Norvig, “but
with some practice it can be done, at
least for classes in technical subjects.
For other, more open-ended subjects,
like literature, one would have to use
peer-assessment or self-assessment.
Scott Klemmer of Stanford has a paper
out [see the “Further Reading” list] in
which he describes the successful use
of self-assessment in the design course
he taught.”
And, just as in physical classrooms,
there is a trust issue: How does one au-
thenticate that the person doing the
work is the person who signed up for
the class?
˲ Certifications. Because most
MOOCs are not part of degree programs, what do students receive after
completing a course? In most cases,
it is a certificate. But is completing a
free online course the same as having
paid for and completed a course on
campus? How potential employers will
deal with this branding issue and how
they will evaluate the meaning of, say,
a certificate that testifies to a student’s
taking an online Stanford course versus getting a degree from Stanford still
needs to be played out.
“Students who put classes on their
resumes who have not received official
credit or degrees is, indeed, an issue,”
says Norvig. “I think there will be a variety of accreditation schemes and we’ll
just have to wait and see how valuable
each of them turns out to be.”
“i think there’s
a tremendous value
to what we’re doing,”
says Daphne Koller.
“We just haven’t
decided yet how to
make it pay for itself.”
Meanwhile, Carnegie Mellon University, through its Open Learning
Initiative, has been providing online
learning for over a decade, with a focus
on systematic student assessment.
“We’ve concentrated more on the
science of learning than on delivering
courses to the masses,” says Jeannette
Wing, professor of computer science
and department head of Carnegie
Mellon’s computer science department. “But now, because the media
has been focusing so heavily on course
delivery, we have been having internal
discussions about where we should be
positioning Carnegie Mellon in this
space. I can’t predict what decisions
will be made, but I can say this is the
number one topic on campus—just
as it is the number one topic on many
campuses right now, especially in the
computer sciences.”
full speed ahead
Other universities, however, are rapidly
moving forward with delivering classes
online, using various delivery platforms.
In mid-April, for example, two Stanford University computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew
Ng, launched Coursera, a for-profit
“social entrepreneurship company”
that partners with a growing number
of universities—including Stanford,
University of Michigan, Princeton,
and University of Pennsylvania—and
presents online many of the universities’ courses in the fields of computer
science, biology, medicine, the humanities, and more.
“In October [2011], for the very first
time, Stanford made available on-
line—and at no charge—three of its
most popular computer science cours-
es,” says Koller. “More than 300,000
students registered for ‘Introduction
to Artificial Intelligence,’ ‘Introduc-
tion to Databases,’ and ‘Machine
Learning.’ Seeing the success of that
experiment, my colleague, Andrew Ng,
and I decided we needed to build on it
but couldn’t just make it a Stanford-
specific effort. Great as Stanford is,
there are other universities that offer
amazing content currently to only a
tiny sliver of the world’s population.
So we decided we’d spin this out of
Stanford and open the opportunities
to other top institutions to engage
with this amazing experiment on free
access to top education for everyone.”
While Coursera was initially funded
by a $16 million venture-capital grant,
Koller and Ng are still debating how to
make their efforts sustainable.