MOOCs Again

There is a piece in the New Yorker on MOOCs. The author states:

The other major problem is that MOOCs tend to be set up in a way that minimizes frustration for students (who might drop out at any moment). There often aren’t pop quizzes or the kinds of challenges that can alienate students in traditional settings. The problem here is that easy learning does not make good learning. In fact, the very tools that we believe make for better education may also make students more likely to quit. More frequent testing, for instance, can improve memory, learning, and retention. And, sometimes, the best test of all is the test that you fail: recent work from the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Ligon Bjork has shown that pre-testing on never-before-seen materials helps students perform better in a subsequent course covering that material. In general, Bjork has found, speed bumps in learning are good—desirable difficulties, she calls them. MOOCs would likely be more effective if they didn’t shy away from challenging students, rather than presenting a fluid experience which gives the false impression of the learning and retention.

 Frankly the problem with MOOCs is that those who do so in English do not know English. For example in a recent MIT exam for a materials course they asked a question which required height and width. Except they stated:

a width, b, of 20μm and a depth, h, of 1μm

Now what is depth? One was given the length and allegedly the width but one needed height. Is depth a new word for height? Words mean something.  Now I am facile in six languages, so I tried translating into each but came to the same conclusion, there must be some language wherein depth equals height. I think.

This is the problem of MOOCs, students and teachers who don't read what the wrote, at least in the language it is taught!

As to the above suggestion, my response is clap trap! The MOOCs maximize frustrations. Again in the same course one must enter equations in a format that is hidden in the bowels of the course. One spends hours finding out how to do the computer side of the course, NOT the material taught.

In addition the approach to grading is an all or none approach. One must go through all the equations, convert them to a program, run the numbers and then make certain the the units are consistent. To complicate things the units in the problems are disparate to say the least.

Finally the New Yorker shows Lander at MIT, strangely the only existing MOOC instructor who has a course that works. One wonders if the New Yorker writer had the slightest clue!I suspect as a psychology major she does not!

Then there is the Harvard Medical School course on Anatomy. Apparently the TAs has disappeared. The answers are wrong and the students in the discussion group are running wild. The overhead on a good MOOC is significant, and costly. Lander has figured it out, as he has with everything he touches. Almost all the others have not. Some seem clueless.

UPDATE: Well I just found out that depth=height. Amazing what people will come up with.