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

Hi,
There are faculty here at UVa involved in MOOCS, but I am not.
Since about the year 2000, two of us in the Physics Department have been offering physics courses online for inservice teachers.
When we started, there were very few institutions doing this and we had a lot to learn and probably have made all the learning curve mistakes
and then some. Most of the offered courses were conceptually based. However, one was a modern physics problem solving course.
I have made comments below based on what we have learned from inservice teachers taking our courses. These teachers are not the traditional young and "immature" student
so my conclusions would not be the same as what you would learn in general from a MOOC.
Richard Lindgren







On May 23, 2013, at 12:17 AM, John Clement <clement@hal-pc.org> wrote:

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.

We have yet made any PER studies to see how much students have learned compared
to traditional courses. Since some of these same students come to UVa in the summer to take
residence introductory physics courses, we do find that those who do well online also do well in the
residence course. I don't remember anybody doing well in the online course and then doing poorly
in the residence course that would signal something illegitimate going on.

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.

In my courses every student is required to have a proctor to monitor them taking an exam. Since the students are teachers,
I request that the proctor must be a principal, superintendent, chair of a department, Librarian or have some professional role
at the school. No relatives or social friends can be proctors. Each proctor emails me back after an exam concurring that the
student followed the exam rules.

Exams are all multiple choice with 50-75 questions since they are clearly the most objective to grade.
Home work are a mixture of essay, multiple choice, and numerical as in webassig,
The multiple choice are the most difficult to contract yet easiest to grade.


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.


In our online courses there is no sliding through but offering courses to inservice teachers is not
quite the same as the general population. I think online courses is one of the best ways for teachers
to do professional development and learn. At one time we had up to 60-70 teachers in a course and I admit it was tough to handle
with even two TA's and myself. One of the challenges I have found is being able to grade, comment, and follow up discussion on essay questions
walking a tight rope between being encouraging yet still grading fairly and pointing out the mistakes and misconceptions and doing this within a finite amount of time.

Regards,
Richard Lindgren
UVa

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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_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
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http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l