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This article and a lot of the articles on the San Jose State are all of over the map when it comes to improving MOOCs: more TAs, more focus on the content, etc. They do, however, share one major thing: that half of the kids failing the SJSU class is, in fact, a problem that we need to fix. What? What about the other half of the kids? Think about it. This was an online class, with presumably very little (if any!) vetting of the students, with little or no supervision (they didn't even know a lot of the kids didn't have computers until three weeks in!), and a whole 50% didn't fail? I mean, this isn't a failure, this is a revolution. Let's face it, these courses aren't designed to signal anything more than competency and --arguably-- the only way to actually display your competency to the world is to have not everyone pass. Because imagine if everyone did pass? You would go to your future employer and say, "Yeah, so, I took this course, online, where not a single person failed, and it's obvious that I'm competent, because they have this, ya know, innovative learning algorithm." If everyone passed than you might as well do MIT OCW. Which, by the way, is the exact same thing as a library, which we've had in every modernized municipality on the planet for 200 years. No, online education is to regular education as the CFA is to an MBA. What is it, like 30% of people pass the CFA? Yeah, 30%! But no one is clamoring about how the CFA needs to be fixed. Quite the opposite--it's the gold standard. And not only that, it's downright democratic: anyone can take it in the world, and if you are in fact one of the ones that pass, the certification really does mean something. I mean, people put CFA after their name! That's the future in online education. Not prestige, not A-'s and B+'s, and not feel-good relationships with professors: no, it's cold-hard certifications and frankly it's a godsend. |
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learndirect