The Chronicle of Higher Education calls it MOOC Madness. Others call it MOOC Mania. But whatever the term, it seems clear that institutions of higher learning are rushing to participate in a new movement to offer online courses free of charge to anyone anywhere who wants to sign up with no questions asked.

Articles about the new movement have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in a special October report and in the New York Times Education Life supplement in early November. The Harvard School of Public Health is among the first to offer a combined biostatistics and epidemiology course through EdX entitled “Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical and Public Health Research”.

Hopkins MOOCs

And the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is offering eight courses through Coursera, including one entitled “Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp”, and others including obesity economics, nutrition, primary health care, community change, and data analysis. Hopkins reports more than 175,000 students have enrolled in their courses in the past three months and claims it is “the largest online public health provider in the world.”

Why Free Courses?

Multiple questions are being asked about why institutions of higher learning are rushing to offer their content free of charge to persons off campus when campus students are paying tuition for similar content. Hopkins Dean Michael Klug attempted to answer this question in a letter to alumni. “Why give it away free?” Klug asks. He says that “our faculty have an almost evangelical belief that educating people about public health is a good thing, that the more people who understand the principles of prevention and population health, the better the world will be…We can reach more people, more quickly with our lifesaving knowledge. And that is well worth the cost of giving it away for free.”

Concerns With MOOCs

But concerns about the new technologies involve not only money. They include issues about providing credit for the coursework,

cheating, grading large numbers of students, and finding ways to interact productively when thousands are involved. In an interesting article in the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Online Learning, Glenna Hartz, a professor of philosophy at Ohio State University describes why he changed his mind about teaching online.

Good News

According to Hartz, the culture has changed drastically and electronic media have become the standard way of communicating, online courses offer the students a convenience that live courses do not, there are financial savings, cheating can be avoided, students do about the same level of work as in live courses, student contact is not eliminated, and a synergy can develop between the online and traditional versions of the same course.  Asks Hartz, “So, do I like online courses? My answer is that it doesn’t matter. The students like them, and we have to adjust to their demands…I now think the university will survive, but it will be in a different form.”

Harvard Epi Teacher

In an interview with the Epidemiology Monitor, Harvard’s Professor of Epidemiology Earl Francis Cook who is teaching the epidemiology component of Harvard’s Health in Numbers course said that teaching the new course is “a lot of work but also a lot of fun.” He attributed the fun part

to learning to teach in a new style, for example, in a series of modules ranging in length from as short as two minutes to as long as 15 minutes and then pausing for students to work through assigned problems.
 

Cook has four teaching assistants that work with the two principal instructors to monitor the chat rooms where lively discussion takes place. He called the rooms “very interactive” and said that sometimes the students help one another infinding answers to their questions. He checks in on the chat rooms a few times each day, he told the Monitor.

Readers interested in checking out the courses offered on the EdX or Coursera websites can go to www.edx.com or www.coursera.org

The key features of each of the three largest sites offering MOOCs and student views about these courses are highlighted in the two following articles.

The New York Times compiled a short list of the main features of the three largest providers of massive open online courses (MOOC’s). Selected excerpts from this list are reproduced below. For an interesting history of the recent developments related to these MOOC’s see the NY Times story of November 14 entitled College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All http://tinyurl.com/cnmjopx

A Washington Post writer Nick Anderson has queried students taking the biostatistics MOOC at Johns Hopkins to get student views about MOOC’s. The queries were posted in the online discussion forum for the course. Below is an excerpt from one of the student responses. For others, visit:

http://tinyurl.com/cnmjopx

“One major aspect of this learning experience that I prefer over university style learning is that you can watch the videos on your own time, when you feel mostmentally ready/on/etc. So I can watch and learn when I decide to and how much I decide to. This is great for someone like me who is most on late in the evening -- not to mention being bound by a full-time job anyway. And there’s a rewind button here :) So I can really personalize the pacing of everything. Another obvious plus: only picking/taking courses you’re interested in. This alone can transform any experience for the better, and so far my personal performance proves it.”--Victoria Vassileva, 23, born in Bulgaria, lives in Texas. 

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