Indiana University faculty are also feeling some pressure to try MOOCs. Why I think we should be cautious:
1. It was in the New York Times recently with much acclaim that 150,000 or so students world wide signed up for a computer science course offered from Stanford. What was buried down in the article was that only around 13,000 finished. That is a 9% retention rate; not very impressive. If my class had that low a retention rate I would be in trouble with the dean, not reported in the New York Times.
2. All retention data over the past 20-30 years shows that students tend to stay in school when they make a personal connection with someone (faculty, staff, student group) on campus. This is one of the biggest factors in retention and it is very hard (not impossible but difficult) to engender in an online course. Education is a social process.
3. Correspondance courses of earlier times were successful only for a small percentage of highly motivated students. It takes someone who is very self motivated to stick with an educational program that does not have other social components. Education is a social process. We have no idea at all if social media can replace this aspect of education.
My conclusion (based on 25+ years messing around with technology) is that, yes, some teaching/learning can be done online. Self paced tutoring programs, online grading of homework, online monitored chats, interactive simulations, etc. seem to be somewhat useful (although as yet there is very little hard evidence (i.e. research with pre/post testing) that these make a large difference). Some subjects and topics may be more amenable to online or hybrid courses (learning basic skills seems to be one area but critical thinking not so much). There is a lot of innovative stuff out there and I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying new stuff. But the majority of students will do best taking the majority of their classes in person, particularly if the class has a large degree of student participation (active learning). For the vast majority (excluding a rare few, autodidactic faculty) education is a social process.
I recently attend a Sloan conference on online learning in Las Vegas. There are people who think the entire university system will cease to exist in the near future, replaced by online courses. However I have noticed that these people tend to have very little background in pedagogical issues (education research in particular) and have assumed that education is somehow hopelessly broken (as opposed to fair and gradually improving). They also tend to be pushing some kind of software that, if widely adopted, would make them a lot of money.
The MOOC approach is appealing to administrators because they have gradually been moving towards a business model for education and so are susceptible to advertising and a hard sell. If all 150,000 enrollees in the Stanford course had paid $10 to enroll, Stanford probably wouldn't care what the retention rate was.
kyle
--------------
'Those who can make you believe absurdities and make you commit atrocities.'
- Voltaire