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Re: [Phys-L] Is Higher Education Running AMOOC?

Already, I see some of the fallacies in the Harvard program. While is is
certainly true that some professors get high marks from students for their
teaching, that does not mean that they achieve better education. Just
because they are "entertaining" and popular does most probably does not
translate to better learning. This has been shown by some of the PER
studies where the conventional lecture system achieves the same learning no
matter who delivers the lectures.

Then there were the multiple choice questions which nobody would get. I got
them by just thinking about which ones were most reasonable. MC questions
should first be vetted as free response questions, and then the highest
frequency wrong answers are the distractors. I saw no mention of research.
They are going into this by the seat of the pants without any real research.
And how do they prevent students from passing answers to other students?
All you need is a gang of 20 students all communicating with each other and
when one gives a wrong answer they communicate it to the others. They take
turns answering questions so that no one student gets too many wrong. It is
an ideal setup for students to scam the course.

Yes, education is currently expensive, but cheapening it by letting students
slide by even more is in the end much more expensive for our society.
Actually, MOOG may make education even more devalued than it is now in our
anti-intellectual country.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


You-all have, of curse, read the long article on MOOCs in the
nearly current New Yorker?

LAP TOP U

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller

bc only now reading, as he had to tear it out of Gate Keeper's hands.



On 2013, May 21, , at 15:24, Marty Weiss
<martweiss@comcast.net> wrote:

As they say... Youth is wasted on the young... However, we
older folks are not the demographic the media caters to.
They seem to forget we are in those years when our IRA's are
starting to be tapped and pensions and social security (the
old three legged retirement stool) are enabling us to go on
cruises and enjoy life. That includes taking on-line courses
because we have time and the maturity to get something from them.

On May 21, 2013, at 6:10 PM, Leigh Palmer wrote:

I am currently enrolled in a MOOC* and I am enjoying it
very much. Oh, yes, by the way, I expect that I am also
learning from it, but the revelation here is that the MOOC is
entertaining. I think there is a great and rapidly growing
market for MOOCs among my peers, retired presenile retirees
who have the spare time, inclination, and taste necessary to
engage with high quality learning.

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