Fail: Online Class About Online Classes

[Don Dresden]

Fatimah Wirth

Not to be confused with Fatima Blush.

Not perfected yet?

My first MOOC: Online class about how to create online classes failed miserably
By Jill Barshay

At a recent event, a bigwig at McGraw-Hill, the textbook publisher, urged the audience to take an online course so that we'd have a sense of the future. As a journalist who covers online education, I was embarrassed not to be enrolled in one.

So, a couple weeks ago, when a dear friend in Washington D.C. asked if I would take an online course with her about how to make online courses, I jumped at the chance. She'd assembled a fancy study group of people with PhDs and impressive employers, from the World Bank to the Smithsonian. Some of them wanted to use online education to solve big global health problems. It felt important to be emailing with them.

The class, entitled "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application," was delivered through Coursera, one of the largest purveyors of massive open online courses or MOOCs. And like Coursera's other courses, it was free.

The six-week course launched a week ago Monday, January 28th. The instructor, Fatimah Wirth, was from The Georgia Institute of Technology. She had worked with NASA. The course promised to be hands-on; we'd be producing our own online class as a final project.

Within hours, things were going awry. Neither the "Getting Started" tab nor the "syllabus" tab offered much direction on how to begin the class. I wasted an hour taking surveys on my personal learning style. (One said I was a visual learner. The other said I wasn't).

The biggest problem was breaking our class of more than 41,000 students into discussion groups. Dr. Wirth asked us to sign up using a Google spreadsheet. The only problem was Google's own support pages clearly states that only 50 people can edit and view a document simultaneously. I was one of the thousands who kept clicking, but was locked out. When I finally got in, it was a mess. Classmates had erased names, substituted their own and added oodles of blank spaces.

My little group of nine stayed intact, but it was disappointing (in a snobbish sort of way) that we were forced to include 11 strangers who typed their names alongside ours. How can you really have a good small group discussion with 20 people anyway? (I remember a professor once telling me that positive effects of small class size evaporate once you exceed 15 students).

With Google Docs imploding, the teacher suggested that some people randomly start a discussion thread and then asked that 19 others randomly jump on that thread to form a group. But, apparently, the small group discussion technology didn't cap the participants at 20. More students could barge in and did.

In the meantime, the video lectures were mind-numbing laundry lists of PowerPoint bullet points. A survey of educational philosophies left me no more enlightened than before I watched it. The readings were a bit better. One of my favorites, Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning, linked to a hilarious PowerPoint comedy sketch about the stupidity of reading PowerPoint bullet points.

No one missed the irony that this online class about how to create online classes was failing miserably. Discussion forums full of venom were popping up everywhere on the course site.

This is a disaster! And where is the professor? I am so excited to learn about this topic, but this online course, teaching us how to make online courses, is totally bunked. Google spreadsheet? For thousands of people? Really? I'm a little nervous about the validity of this course right now.

By day six, a Saturday, the professor shut the course down. All the reading materials, videos, assignments were erased.

The professor's email to me:


Dear Jill Barshay,

We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.

Yours,
Fatimah

I telephoned and emailed the professor to understand what caused her to pull the plug. She did not get back to me. The story was already hitting the blogosphere, including this exhaustive blog post at Inside Higher Ed.

What did I learn in six days? Not everyone should try to be an online teacher. One of the great ideas behind online education is that there performers who can deliver riveting lectures, who are masters of explication. Wouldn't it be great if the internet could deliver them to millions of people around the world? That's what's marvelous about some of Sal Khan's mathematical videos. The problem is that almost anyone can set up an online course and thousands of people will enroll. Unfortunately, there's no guide to tell you who's good and who isn't.

[Martin Eisenstadt]

Not perfected yet?

Is it just me or does it seem like a barely understandable third world accent is a prerequisite to a PhD these days?

Has it occurred to anyone that these MOOC courses (or attempted courses) might have more value if the students actually could understand the profs?

And perhaps we should work out the bugs before we put it online?

Are there no squared away English-speaking Americans left in American higher ed?

PhD 2005, Ohio University

MEd 1988, University of Washington

BA (Education) 1987, Seattle University

BA (English) 1985, University of Washington

So she's been in the US at least since 1981, and most of it in the Northwest and Midwest. Somehow she managed to pick up a southern accent but still not lose the burka-babble singsong. Are they sure she isn't some sort of Al Qaeda plant assigned to destroy the US higher ed system?

[ham]

So she's been in the US at least since 1981, and most of it in the Northwest and Midwest. Somehow she managed to pick up a southern accent but still not lose the burka-babble singsong. Are they sure she isn't some sort of Al Qaeda plant assigned to destroy the US higher ed system?

Whiteys have been ushering third-worlders to be educated in the West with red carpet service since the XIX century (Indians, Arabs, Indochinese). The USA repaid a contentious debt to China after WWI with a shower of scholarships.
Once it was fabulous honkies teaching savage Sambos, rabid Farooqs, meek Rajeevs and demode Chongs the wonders of the white world. Now it's multi-culti party time with Sambo, Abdool, Chong and company walking in on defeated ex-empires, whose point of pride are stock market crashes and legions of junk shares, to enrich them with their profound spirituality and high intellectual achievements.
I took courses and a university certificate in a foreign language. The school's students were overwhelmingly Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans...).
Teachers reported how struggling these students were; in spite of wanting to get 6,8,10 hours a day of tuition, they were incapable of making the progress I was making with ONE hour.
I guess the "intelligent oriental" stereotype -which I endorsed- belongs together with other nonsense.
Politics, politics...


HEE-HAW!

[Armando Ramos]

Is it just me or does it seem like a barely understandable third world accent is a prerequisite to a PhD these days?

Back in the days of Wernher von Braun the foreign (or at least German) accent seemed to symbolize the notion that American science, technology and academia represented the finest in the world. Nobody cared where you came from, or even if you used to be a nazi, as long as you had it on the ball.

Now the "on the ball" element plays well down the list to the libtard "diversity" scam. Look at us, we are soooooo open minded! Please send us more black gay handicapped marxists. Who cares if no real work gets done, it ain't like we're spending our own money. Symbolism over substance, we are the world, your tax dollars at work.

I guess the "intelligent oriental" stereotype -which I endorsed- belongs together with other nonsense.
Politics, politics...

Don't forget the other part of that stereotype--tireless work ethic. Doesn't take some folks too long to get in the swing of the "lifestyles of the privileged class," which for some reason they imagine college professors to be. Success becomes a burden, because then they expect you to do it right all the time. Better to roll out a half-assed program you can put on your 30-page CV next to that NASA gig than to sweat the details and risk obscurity.

[Dickie Billericay]

Is it just me or does it seem like a barely understandable third world accent is a prerequisite to a PhD these days?

Came across this at the website of Tulane University, alma mater of such notables as Andrew Breitbart, Neil Bush, Newt Gingrich and Lauren Hutton.

From the names I'm guessing there is maybe one white American male in the entire business PhD program, depending of course on how you define "white." I imagine this is pretty representative of most major universities these days. Not that I begrudge any of these folks the fruits of their labor, but I think the answer to your question is "no, it's not just you."

I wonder whether universities are deliberately excluding certain unfashionable groups of people, or whether there are just so few locals willing to go deep into hock for a degree that will never pay for itself that they have to make up the shortfall with naive foreigners who don't know any better?

Finance Students
Vadim Balashov
TaeKyung Eom
Mehmet Cihan
Arda Karaaslan
Betul Mollahaliloglu
HyunJun Na
Qiyuan (Rachel) Peng
Cristian Pinto Gutierrez
Rogerio Mazali
Roberto Stein
Liyu Ye
Cristine Zhang

Management Students
Benjamin Alexander
Shanna Daniels
He Gao
Alison Hall
Han Jiang
Caitlin Smith
Shirley Sonesh
Hyun-Soo Woo

http://www.freeman.tulane.edu/programs/phd/current.php

[ham]

Did you know fabulous progressive Wilson -in one of his switch&bait, stick&carrot routines- mandated picture IDs in the applications for civil service to appease radical Southern factions? Pics? You mean John Smith may just not look like my eponymous cousin AT ALL?!

[Don Dresden]

An excerpt from Debbie Morrison's blog, wherein she declares "The MOOC Honeymoon Is Over." She describes the now infamous Fundamentals of Online Education course as a "calamity" and a "disaster."

She totally nails the flaw present in so many online programs--they use the exciting modern technology to attempt to replicate all the boring, outdated aspects of traditional classroom teaching.

It was not technical issues that derailed this course (which was a symptom), it is the underlying philosophy that many institutions still hold onto—that a MOOC is similar to, or the same as a course in a traditional face-to-face classroom, and it can be successful using the same structure, same content and similar instructional methods. MOOC courses offered through Cousera and other such platforms, often appear modified to ‘fit’ into a course experience on the Web, albeit with thousands of students.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress....-calamity/

Although Fatimah seems to have single-handedly derailed the MOOC revolution, she might have done us all a favor by exposing how the retro-traditionalists of the higher ed cartel are attempting to co-opt the new technology to delay or avoid the change that likely will put most of them out of work.

[ham]

She totally nails the flaw present in so many online programs--they use the exciting modern technology to attempt to replicate all the boring, outdated aspects of traditional classroom teaching.

TMS dispenses with that hogwash, but TTC, which is a top-shelf provider of courses, seems to still cling to this stupid assumption. Like an investment advisor in three-pieces suit: must be honest, don't you think? Can't see he got a tie?