[Phys-L] MOOC proliferation

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

Hi --

I recommend
 LAURA PAPPANO 
 "The Year of the MOOC"
 The New York Times / November 4, 2012 
   http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/the-year-of-the-mooc-660618/

> MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie 
> learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite 
> universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now 
> offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary 
> education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In 
> September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and
> Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

I've been predicting for about 20 years that something like this would catch
on.  I was only off by about 18 years as to how long it would take.

> "What's frustrating in a MOOC is the instructor is not as available
> because there are tens of thousands of others in the class,"

That shouldn't be a problem for anybody on this list.  Here's how I've 
been doing it lo these many years:  If there is a canned video on the
subject that is better than anything I could do myself without huge
effort, I just show the video ... but I'm still there.  If anybody has 
a question, or if the video says something I want to emphasize or disagree 
with, I can pause the video and deal with it.  We can discuss everything 
afterwards.

The Pappano article includes a laundry list of MOOCs with a few words
about the status of each.

For more about the history of MOOCs, see
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

Obviously MOOCs are not going to solve all the world's problems.  In
particular, I reckon they are of more benefit to the best students than
to the worst students.  Still, there's something important here.  I feel
bad when the worst students are not living up to their potential ... but
I also feel bad when the best students are not living up to their potential.
Furthermore, anything that makes it easier for the teacher to keep one 
half of the class happy frees up more time for tending to the other half, 
so everybody wins.

Also note that online lectures are, well, lectures.  There is a limit to
what can be done with lectures.  Some students respond to lectures better
than others.  Still, the fact remains that lectures are being given every
day in lots of places.  I say if you're going to give a lecture, you should
at least make sure it is an above-average lecture.  And with online lectures,
it is easy to make it optional, for the students who want a lecture.  For
students, this is in some sense the ultimate in school choice:  If you don't 
like what your local school is offering, you can find something online.

The Khan lectures I've seen have been pretty lame:  Poor production values
and occasional wildly wrong physics.   The MIT lectures tend to have even
worse production values, but better physics, although still IMHO rather
unsophisticated and unmodern.  Still, I reckon these are significantly 
better than the "average" lecture given by some "average" instructor at 
some "average" institution.

I consider these to be "first generation" MOOCs.  I'm hoping that at some
point, somebody will come along and redo all this with significantly higher
production values, and significantly more modern, state-of-the-art material.
By production values I include things like this -- at a minimum: rather 
than using chalk to sketch a piston and waving hands to indicate expansion, 
we could have 4D graphics (3D plus animation) of an expanding piston.

Bottom line:  It seems MOOCs are here to stay.  People on this list should
think hard about how to make use of them.