MOOCs – A Great Way to Lower Education Standards
The standard education system that has existed for centuries may be on the verge of collapse. Technology has finally found a way to take over the education system. After the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the traditional brick and mortar schools have been threatened with the idea that soon MOOCs will take over education completely, leaving no need for traditional schools. MOOCs are free online courses available to anyone. It is a convenient method to gain an education by allowing people to access it anywhere and take them anytime. MOOCs allow the people who cannot afford a higher education to take the courses and learn the same things they would at a college or university. This easy-access to an education can, and most likely will increase the number of people graduating with degrees. However, the many imperfections with MOOCs leave them unprepared to take over brick and mortar schools. Learning online will change the quality of students’ education. Staring at a computer screen for an hour rather than at a teacher will affect how the students think and absorb information. Despite MOOC’s ability to provide easy and convenient access to an education, MOOCs cannot provide college students with the same effective education that prepares students for their careers as brick and mortar schools because of the easy environment to cheat, get distracted and/or lose motivation and interest.Cheating –there’s no stopping it
Cheating has and will always be a problem in schools. Teachers monitor students sitting in class yet somehow some students still manage to cheat. If cheating is still possible in a classroom with a teacher monitoring the student, imagine how much easier it will be for students to cheat when there is no one watching. How easy it will be for them to Google an answer, how easy it will be to pull out a phone during a test, how easy it will be to have someone else do the assignment, how easy it will be to get a degree that they don’t deserve. Many people believe that if you “take away the classroom you’ve made a bad situation much worse” (Youngberg). Cheating is already a major problem in any brick and mortar school, but in the home with no one watching, those numbers will increase dramatically. As Martin Snyder (an AAUP senior associate general secretary) describes, “verifying that the student who has signed up for a MOOC is the same person who has completed the work and taken the exam is at the moment, a daunting obstacle”. If people begin receiving degrees in which they didn’t do the work, the job industry will feel the effect as they hire people who are not educated and therefore cannot fulfill their tasks accurately.Cheating in a brick and mortar school is more of a threat to students then cheating in an online course. The consequences have been laid out and the fear of being caught by their teacher –a teacher in whom a student knows and respects—is motivation to not cheat. Universities have the power to dismiss a student from school if caught cheating. Such extreme consequences would cause the student to have wasted tuition money and have a hard time finding another school to accept them (Geno). The significantly lower threat for cheating on MOOCs increases the number of students willing to cheat. Students know, just as Christopher Geno, author of “Why You Should Never Cheat in Online Courses” points out, “MOOCs [don’t] have as many consequences as cheating in college or university courses” and will therefore cheat because of the lack of consequences. The lack of consequences will greatly increase the numbers of students willing to take the risk to cheat.
One popular method of cheating is plagiarism. The students will use someone else’s work as their own. New technology allows MOOCs to detect plagiarized papers, yet when they catch a student, the cheater will not learn anything. Even advanced websites that can detect plagiarism have faults. They are useful tools when looking to catch the troubled students that cheat. However, these tools, such as turnitin.com, eliminate a teacher’s opportunity to help students. Having a teacher that cares for their students and develops that student-teacher relationship opens opportunity for growth and improvement not only in school, but also in a student’s behavior. Going to school is not just about gaining an education, it is about growing character and other skills that will help students survive in the job field. When a student cheats just being punished will not stop the behavior. Most students do not react well to being punished (some don’t even care) and most do not change their behavior because of it. When teachers find a student with cheating problems, most take the time to work with the student to overcome the problem, encouraging them to improve. Turnitin.com can only punish the students. A professor that teaches MOOCs will have over 1,000 students –there is no possible way they can work with troubled individuals. The cheating students can never be helped when staring at a recorded lecture with no personal interactions with peersor teachers to help them grow/mature in their behavior as well as their education.
The cheating problem has been acknowledged and many ideas regarding how to solve it are being presented. Technology can now track a student as they take a test online. The student’s keystrokes, websites, mouse clicks and the student’s style of typing are monitored (Eisenberg). Many people have claimed that this new method of preventing frauds/cheaters “‘may end up being as good –or even better—than the live proctoring at bricks-and-mortar universities’” as Eisenberg said in her article for the New York Times. However, the question remains: will this method to prevent online cheating ever be put in place? Completely monitoring a student invades his/her privacy creating legal issues. Even with such monitoring procedures a student can still find some way to cheat. They still have no way to tell if the student getting the credit is really the one taking the class. They may be able to monitor key strokes and such, yet if the same person has been taking the course the whole time (regardless of whether it is the same person as whose name its under), there is no differentiating the name from the person actually taking the class –for there has been no changes in their “keystrokes”. Also, there is no way of telling the students who take a long time to answer a question apart from the students searching the answer on another electronic device. They cannot track the time it takes for a student to answer because of the injustice it will bring to the slow test-takers.
Distractions –Sleep or watching a lecture…which one would you choose?
Taking courses outside of a classroom introduces new distractions. A brick and mortar school is a place designated for learning. Students can focus in a classroom because they are accustomed to learning in a classroom. Move learning to a student’s room and suddenly there are endless possibilities of what they could be doing instead of watching a lecture, whereas when in a class a student must be respectful to the teacher by staying until class is over. MOOCs are having a hard time capturing student’s attention, proven by the 90% that don’t finish their online courses (Fowler).
In a traditional school, classes are spread through a number of years before one can graduate. For MOOCs, many students try cramming in all their classes at once to get them over with quickly (known as degree-of-freedom). Taking that many classes at once leads them to not treat MOOCs as traditional college classes –they don’t put forth all the effort that they would a traditional college class (Advice for fellow). Trying to learn excessive amounts of material in a short period of time (whether from taking a lot of classes or trying to take the whole course in a couple of days) will decrease the total amount retained for later. David Meyers states, “the amount remembered depends both on the time spent learning and on your making it meaningful” (Meyers, 334). The longer one spends studying, dragging it out over weeks of lectures rather than cramming it in in one night, the longer a student will remember the information (Meyers, 334). Brick and Mortar schools help students take time to learn by having class every set day however many times a week. For MOOCs, any one student could take the whole class in a week –leaving the student with no long-term memory of any information they studied. If they earn a degree for a course they sped through, they are unprepared to get a job in their field because of the information they were unable to retain. They studied to information for a day so it could last a week. This habit of students to “get it done as fast as possible” will not prepare them for future careers.
Motivation –Classes take too much self-discipline when you’re on your own
One of the biggest concerns with MOOCs is the loss of motivation and interest. Credit is only offered to some students –who pay to earn the credits. Without the incentive of earning college credit a student has little motivation to do well or even finish an online course. Currently the number of students that start a MOOC that actually complete it is only 10% (Fowler). Students need extrinsic motivation to get them to try hard to complete the course. What’s in it for them if no credit is offered? Yet when credit is offered the worry of cheating and fraud comes back into play. It is a cycle that cannot be solved –MOOCs will either give out unearned credit to cheaters or will not provide the extrinsic motivation necessary for the student to complete the MOOCs. MOOCs will risk losing the high standard of education through their inability to prevent cheaters and capture attention. However, MOOCs are a great source of knowledge to the few intrinsically motivated people. If the students just want to learn for their own gain then no credit is needed. MOOCs should be available to the people who just want to learn, but they should not offer credit.MOOCs are useful for the people that are intrinsically motivated and are self-disciplined enough to take the time to complete MOOCs, yet for every student it is hard to stay focused when staring at a computer screen. Fowler, author for the Wall Street Journal suggests “perhaps the largest challenge MOOCs face is that students lose interest when they don’t feel engaged”. Despite MOOC’s attempts of engaging students through use of videos, chats and activities, “staring at a screen makes some students feel isolated and disengaged” (Fowler). The feeling of isolation leads to a decrease in student’s performance and an increase in dropout rates. The best way to maintain higher performance rates is to have interpersonal interactions with teachers and peers (Fowler). Having face-to-face interactions with people is critical for learning. Teachers in brick and mortar schools work hard to learn student’s names and create relationships so that they can understand their students and their needs (Graham). Teachers change lessons according to how students respond to homework and lectures. They can see when students are confused or when they need a better explanation. Pre-recorded lessons are set in stone.
MOOCs have made an effort to incorporate “face-to-face” interactions with peers and teachers. Researchers have acknowledged “one-on-one teaching still matters” when taking MOOCs (Kolowich). MOOCs now contain “chat rooms” that students can participate in to talk to peers and have discussions (Do). This feature allows students to ask the teacher questions and get feedback. However, such discussions remain very ineffective for most students for “How does someone connect with 2,000-plus people? How does a learner even begin to make sense of all the voices adding commentary, questions and posts” (Lisa)? A student can easily get lost when trying to ask a question on the chat feature. “The chats are rapid and filled with so many voices at one time, that there isn’t a viable way to ask a question and get it answered” (Lisa). Such discussion ends up confusing the students more leaving them lost and frustrated. Not being able to have questions answered decreases a student’s motivation to finish. When a student does not understand, it does not take much for them to give up completely, especially when there is no incentive to do well (when no credit is offered). In studies done it has been proven that “the more you engage within the course, with other participants, and with the distributed content, the more you will learn” (Lisa). Students who make the effort to participate in discussions and contribute more to it increase their scores, yet students don’t get the chance to do so with 2,000 other people trying to contribute too (Fowler). Brick and mortar schools offer an easier environment to interact with both teachers and peers. Forming study groups, being able to have conferences with teachers and being able to ask questions in class help students to learn quickly and effectively. Taking that away will significantly lower the effective education system known today, leaving students with a lower-quality education.
Is There Hope for MOOCs?
MOOCs should be used solely for people who cannot afford a higher education or people who are just looking to expand their education. MOOCs are a great learning source, however, MOOCs should not be used to earn college credit to prevent people from obtaining unearned degrees. Brick and mortar schools are critical to a student’s education. Not only does it provide students with an environment dedicated to studying and learning but it also provides students with the interactions with teachers and peers that they need to enhance their learning. Brick and mortar schools allow students to learn from each other, and build on one another’s knowledge and experiences. MOOCs may be cheap, they may be convenient but they cannot provide a student with the education needed to succeed in the business field. They will not be able to produce well-educated students prepared to face a real career. Who knows how many of them cheated or raced to the finish only to forget all the information the next day. MOOCs are a good way for dedicated students who cannot afford college to gain an education, yet they should not be able to give out credits or degrees because of their many imperfections and faults. Brick and mortar schools should never be replaced with online education or else knowledge and education will both fall dramatically.Works Cited
“Advice for Fellow MOOC Maniacs.” Degree of freedom. 8 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.Do, Annie. "MOOCs- A Student's Perspective." Office of the Under Secretary. N.p., 6 June 2013. Web. 07 Nov. 2013.
Eisenberg, Anne. “Keeping an Eye on Online Test-Takers.” The New York Times, 2 March 2013, Business Day Technology. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.
Fowler, Geoffrey A. “An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses.” 21st Century Fluency Project. 28 Oct. 2013, Web. 4 Nov. 2013.
Geno, Christopher. “Why You Should Never Cheat in Online Courses.” Campus Explorer. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Graham, Greg. "How the Embrace of MOOC's Could Hurt Middle America." Academic Search Premier. EBSCO, 5 Oct. 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.
Kay, Judy, Peter Reimann, Elliot Diebold, and Bob Kummerfeld. "MOOCs: So Many Learners, So Much Potential." AI AND EDUCATION. N.p., 15 July 2013. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.
Kolowich, Steve, Grossman, Sara. “MOOC Students Scored Higher With Offline Help.” Academic Search Premier, EBSCO, 21 June 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2013.
Lisa Chamberlin and Tracy Parish. “MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses or Massive Often Obtuse Courses?” eLearn Magazine, ACM Publication, August 2011. Web. 4 Nov 2013.
Meyer, Patrick J., and Shi Zhu. "Fair and Equitable Measurement of Student Learning in MOOCs: An Introduction to Item Response Theory, Scale Linking, and Score Equating." RPA 8 (2013): 26-39. Research and Practice in Assessment. June 2013. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.
Meyers, David. “Psychology.” Worth Publishers. 2010. Print. 19 Nov. 2013
Peterson, Deb. “The Pros and Cons of MOOCS.” Continuing Education. 24 July, 2013. Web. 15 Nov 2013.
Snyder, Martin D. “Much Ado about MOOCs.” Academic Search Premier, EBSCO, Dec 2013. Web. 3 Nov 2013.
Youngberg, David. “Why Online Education Won’t Replace College—Yet.” Academic Search Premier, EBSCO, 17 Aug. 2012. Web. 30 Oct 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment