Massive open online courses (MOOC) have been around for a few years now and are becoming more popular all the time. The concept can be described simply as the Web version of traditional distance education, which has been around for over a century.
Probably the most widely known of the many companies listed on the MOOC Wikipedia page is Coursera.com, right out of the heart of Silicon Valley. Personally, we also like edX, formed as a joint venture of Ivy League giants MIT and Harvard, offering many courses from different institutions. You'll find many of the same institutions on Coursera and edX, as well as on other sites.
Being such a hot topic, much has been written about advantages, disadvantages, and challenges in terms of technology, money, measuring achievement, and so forth.
As a user of MOOCs as well as their distance learning precursors, the blogster has a somewhat relaxed view of the subject, the "old folks" view of someone over thirty, if you will.
Some courses may technically be more refined than others, or better structured, or more pertinent to the stated course subject, but the one deciding, defining measure of any course, to the blogster, remains the teacher, the educator.
This is not meant to downplay the role of other people in a given course, for example very helpful tutors.
It is also not an endorsement of the whole hierarchy thing, where the educator rules and students put down their heads and learn.
Educators deserve a lot of credit for conducting a MOOC in the first place, but - just like their students - some are better than others and will thrive.
Having gone through a good number of courses, either for job related learning or out of sheer curiosity, the blogster believes that some teachers can be fooled into thinking their MOOC is not much more than a spruced up presence course with web delivery.
The scale of a course is nothing short of stunning, even for educators who have done lectures in front of a packed auditorium.
The staple, boring "Any questions?" in a MOOC chat session can bring down servers despite the fact that, like in a presence class, only a small percentage of students raise their hands.
Other rules of engagement don't apply either, as seasoned distance education teachers had to find out decades ago: there is no more casual glancing across the class room to spot the older lady student who may already have a PhD or to find the students who show signs of not understanding a critical concept.
This means, for instance, you may find yourself utterly blindsided by a query without advance clues to the exchange, or that you will lose students more easily without other indicators of lack of grasp of a concept.
These are well known issues, but the single most painful thing to see, in the opinion of the blogster, has been the struggle of instructors with an over-sized ego.
The time tested staples of big ego management that still work well in small classes don't work as well, or lead to spectacular failure, in a MOOC.
Quaint academic name dropping as in "I did my PhD with Doctor Marvelous at Harvard" may put freshmen on notice who will be your captive audience for the next two years, but stated as a lead in to a MOOC it will be seen as insecure at best and pompous at worst.
While greater diversity of students or weaker "forced attachment" may be part of the explanation, the blogster thinks there may be a couple of other aspects.
Honey, I shrunk the teacher! or Ant-Man II
It is true and manipulated like hell in politics but also applies to teaching. Unless students see a MOOC teacher on an f***ing big screen, MOOC teachers are small people on a small screen. If an econ 101 seven foot teacher has had the pleasure of stature make an average intellect more convincing in a classroom, it is gone.
Find your voice or The TEDx Conundrum
We may overstate the comparison to movies and politics a bit, but many an actor takes voice lessons for a reason. Students don't have the same expectations of their teachers, and at the right level of genius nobody can afford to attach much importance to it. But the teacher's voice can and will distract and drive some students away. It happens in class, sure, and it is less important in some subjects than in others, but if Joe from Underwater Basket Weaving 101 can be barely understood by several thousand people, try to alleviate the problem.
If you can provide a sign language interpreter, why can't you have a native speaker do the voice in the audio and audio-visual parts?
Don't force teachers
Distance educators from TV courses were sometimes chosen not for academic achievement or job title, but for their ability to convey subjects in the setting of the medium. The same approach can help in a MOOC.
Accept failure
The blogster did an economics 101 refresher course once which turned out to be, in a classic sense, a failure. A career academic, attached to the name dropping and publication mentioning ways of yore stumbled and fell when he failed to turn the implosion of one of his very first examples into a teachable moment. He wanted students to discuss tipping in a restaurant, using the assignment of tables at his WASPy eatery, the manners of the servers, their dress and demeanor, etc. to show how tipping got customers good service and was the good old capitalist way to "give customer feedback" and to "earn more". He found himself under a deluge of responses from Americans who explained distribution of tips, tipping out of co-workers and barbacks and had to cope with international students explaining how service included countries work.
Bruised, he proceeded to a discussion on whether driving to a store half a mile away could be more environmentally friendly than walking.
The next day or so, a person who introduced herself as the course administrator popped up and notified the students that Mr. Teacher was unable to continue the course, and that another teacher would take over ASAP.
Some MOOCs bomb, the bigger they are, the more spectacular it will be.
Accept it.
As students, we need to be kind to the teachers who put themselves out there, opening themselves up for failure.
And we need to cherish those who know their subject matter and manage to explain it to us in ways that make us want to come back for more.
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