During the courses I took, I noticed certain trends. Students with Indian-looking names were often most concerned about the certificate of achievement given out after the course. In each course I'd see students asking if it were available yet well before the end of the course! I suspect that this may be due to the high importance that Indian society today places on the possession of credentials, even if there's insufficient knowledge and experience to back up those credentials.
Likewise, questions about the marking scheme and grading were often coming from students with Asian-looking names. I suspect that this is due to the high degree of emphasis in many Asian societies that is placed upon obtaining extremely high grades in academic studies, even if these grades don't truly reflect understanding.
And questions asking about exact midterm or exam content tended to come from students with Western European or American names. These societies tend to place a lot of emphasis on getting work done with minimal effort, including getting exam questions in advance to avoid unnecessary, from a grading perspective, studying.
Bring together all of those students, and those types of questions can easily take up 70% or more of the discussion. That doesn't leave much room for other discussion. Even that discussion was usually lacking, due to many students not having a good grasp of the course's language of instruction. Bringing together students with different backgrounds may be a good thing, but too much difference is just as bad as extreme uniformity, if not worse. At least in the case of uniformity there is the similarity that the students have in common.
- Pacabel
The only one I completed, the instructor was engaging and interactive in the sense, he didn't show just the slides and read, he interacted with the slide. By the time, he finished the video, the slides were all written over in his handwriting.
The one course I dropped because instructor was reading the slides in the videos. I can read slides faster myself, I don't need to watch a lengthy video and listen instructor read the slides.
The second course dropped because instructor wasn't very good at explaining things. He will just show the slides but then ramble on. Though expert in his field, I got the impression that he wasn't a good teacher. Teaching is an art and not necessarily every expert can teach.
The MOOCs need to be engaging, not just the topic wise but also instructor wise.
The future of education is probably not MOOCs alone, or brick and mortar schools alone. The future is allowing students to learn however they want to learn without barriers. That will truly be transformative.
I personally like to learn in isolation, I have a tendency to quickly ~plagiarize ideas of others thinking I understand, so learning alone in my room is better.
Inspiring teachers I've met fits on one hand fingers.
I enrolled on many MOOCs, dropped right away from 50% of them (acute click-itis), got late halfway and dropped 25% (but what I could got was solid improvements), finished the rest with many worthy discoveries and good exercises, surrounded by interesting encounters interactions on IRC.
[1] I'd like to add that an unconfident student will have difficulties with teachers too. Small politics, personal preferences and shallow details will play against you. Think submitting a shitty looking but concise self-critical .pdf summary of your project vs a nicely printed and shiny report but full of fluff.
I work as an assistant teacher every now and then and it is mostly small group teaching and going over the homework exercises. What I have seen is that the first couple of sessions are totally worthless subject wise. But they are extremely critical. During those sessions the students learn to know each other and me. When everyone is comfortable attending the sessions can the actually learning begin.
From this perspective I think MOOCs would need the following. Firstly, you need to create small enough groups of people that are comfortable discussing the subject with each other. Encouraging local study groups is a one way of doing this. The other thing is to encourage discussion through anonymity with forums or IRC. And you need to acknowledge that you don't reach all of your students with these methods and not rely on them too much.
> I personally like to learn in isolation, I have a tendency to quickly ~plagiarize ideas of others thinking I understand, so learning alone in my room is better.
There's nothing wrong with self-study per se, but it has a one great flaw. It is easy do the kind of plagiarization I think you are talking about without knowing. This can be remedied by getting feedback from an instructor, or going through the material with someone else and then cross checking how you understood the ideas.
That sais I think my paragraph about copying others idea came out wrong. When I'm with people, learning by osmosis often lead to superficial repetitions of some of their findings, something that is not deep learning. I like to reach the enlightening phase, ability to find solutions from blank slate, hence being alone helps avoiding this to an extent.
I think we are on the same page about your last paragraph. You are right, you face a problem of a same kind that I wrote about when learning in a group. Someone seems to know the material well, they are confident and maybe even charismatic. They go through their solution and everyone just nods and agrees.
The trick is to get everyone tell their solution (maybe not for the same problem) and have an atmosphere where people feel comfortable correcting and getting corrected. That is a key responsibility of a small group teacher.
The "peril" in self-study is a bit different. You may find your enlightenment but how do you know that your mental model is correct?