A Couple of MOOCs

CEO L R I D E R. We can move on to the topic. That's fair. That's fair. So we're going to talk today about again more about the future of education and UH and the rising trend of distance

learning and things that are related to that. This idea of being able to attend classes virtually, either as someone who is actually enrolled in a course but they are attending through some sort of computer connection, or someone who just wants to further their education and they are looking at courses that are available online either for free or you know, you're paying money but it's not like it's

college credit. UM, and what are these various options that are out there, and are they actually effective at teaching people coursework? This is important stuff because you know, we've seen that there's a rising interest in this. People want the ability to access the best in education, and uh it, I mean it can be pretty tricky. All of us went to college in an era where distance learning was pretty early on, and right, right, I I had a

couple like lecture courses that you could attend via video. Nice. Did you have anything like that, Joe, No, I didn't have anything like that. I all the classes I took you had to show up bit class for. But I definitely took a lot of classes where there was an online component. So say you'd have class meetings, but then you'd go home and part of the work you'd do outside of class would be online on a discussion board

or to take a quiz maybe or something like that. Right, I went to college before either of you and did not have any of that. All of my course work was done before they invented the wheelbarrow. Was shortly after the wheelbarrow, which was good because he had to carry all those taxtbooks or rope. At any rate, it was it was before online coursework had become part of the

University of Georgia. That's where I went. Well as of as one study by the Sloan Consortium, which I want to say at the top here does promote online education. I've got a couple of things to quote from them, and so just at the top, they think it's pretty rad. So their numbers might be a little bit skewed, but not necessarily unbiased. But according to them, they say that UM students taking a least one online course as of numbered above six point seven million in the u S alone.

Got you So, I mean this is a number we expect to see grow over time. Uh. It's something that I'm sure some colleges think is promising to be able to offer more of these kind of classes. Some might be thinking of it as something of a threat, uh to see that people might pursue education online as opposed to attending a brick and mortar school. UM. But really, whether or not it's good for the university system, let's talk about the options that a student has. So there

are lots of different ones out there. One of the most basic ones is just the fact that a lot of schools will offer up coursework online for free. Uh. There's no college credits. Right yeah, uh m, I T does this and uh and so you can go and you can It's almost like auditing a class in college where you're not getting any credit for it, but you get the experience and you get the chance to access some of the information that students who are going after

an actual degree in that school would have. And I've used this myself in order to do some research and get a basic understanding of concepts that I was really rusty on, specifically chemistry. I used my T courses to kind of um relearn some principles and chemistry and learned some things that were new to me. Obviously not new to chemistry, but I had never encountered it because my chemistry, uh education only went so far. I was a wheler.

It was an English literature major. Once we determined that you could not turn lead into gold, we moved on. Now. Was was this one of the one of their massive open online courses? This was not this, This preceded the

massive open online courses. It was essentially just the basic coursework and some some videos, But a massive open on line course tends to get a little bit more involved so that you can actually not just watch and and and uh and and read the course material, but participate in a deeper level, even going so far as to be part of an online forum where you can discuss the work with fellow students. Uh, you can get a lot of them. You actually get your work graded, right, Yeah,

you can either by fellow students or by a computer program. Right. So, so in this case you could actually be you know, tested on your knowledge that you're supposed to be gaining through the course. In my case, it was just truly asynchronous learning. And asynchronous of course means that you access it whenever you have the time and interest in doing so.

And that's not new homework is a synchronous Yeah, although uh, with the course I was taking through m I T, it was so asynchronous as to be you can take months between classes, right, And that that was the bent of fit for me, was that I could access it when it was convenient for me. Uh. With your traditional homework, you do eventually have a deadline, So this it's a

little bit different. It's it's very much um up to the student to stay on task and make sure that you are still pursuing this as far as you need to to get the information you want. And uh, I think it's fantastic. When I saw this coming becoming a thing, I was really excited. But it's just the tip of the iceberg, right. Sure. Sure, I would argue that that most online education puts a little bit more of the

impetus on the student too. I mean, I mean, of course, any any course, any kind of education, the student is responsible for showing up and actually learning and and doing something with that knowledge in a way that makes it

stick with them. Um. You know, in different different educational styles of of of course, the teacher has huge impact on that in the way that the information is presented, but especially when you get online, it's it's so much more dependent that you really have to be more motivated

to make it stick. One figure that I saw about these, about these massive open online courses, is that there moos yes, which which is strange because the word mook means a foolish and significant or contemptible person I get all the time. I don't see what the problem is, go on, vocal bumb goodness, migracious um. But that the average pass rate um. I think this was according to the Chronicle of Online Education, perhaps was only seven point five percent of students who

began a given course. Yeah, UM, just just mostly meaning that, um that most people dropped out after a certain period

of time or didn't take the final exam. Of course, there could be a self selection issue going on there in that people who are going to be taking online courses are probably more likely people who have like scheduling conflicts and stuff like that that would make it difficult to finish a course anyway, Absolutely, does that make sense, Like if you're if you're taking this, it's probably more likely that you're somebody who's also working a full time

job and it's trying, and that's the kind of thing that would make it harder to finish your course. Now, obviously, the benefits here are are pretty easy to grasp. The idea that you could learn without having to relocate to a college if you were able to take all your coursework this way. Clearly, if you had to show up in person for some classes, that wouldn't necessarily be the case, but it would also free up your schedule so that you could be a much more flexible on a day

to day basis. You wouldn't have to set aside specific time unless there was that interactive element to the course where you were expected to participate in some sort of online chat about the subject matter. Um, so it gives a lot more flexibility on both the side of the student and on the teacher, which is kind of interesting.

But then you get into questions like does this is this something that can can give a student the same sort of experience, the same sort of uh ability to grasp the coursework as they would if they were to attend a face to face kind of interaction. Well, part of it depends on what the educators are putting into

the coursework to begin with. Um that that survey there was this big service the Chronicle of Online Education did with basically every mook educator that's terrible, every every massive open online course educator that they could find who existed on the planet. And they said that typically these professors spent over a hundred hours on the coursework before it even started, um, gathering their material together and preparing everything, and then would spend an additional eight to ten hours

per week on upkeep. So that's still great. Imagine, you know, to me, almost unimaginable amount of work to put into something that you're not so experimental right now. Well, and and it's so young in its in its life. Assuming that this proves to be an effect of and efficient means of of teaching people, Uh, I would imagine that we would get better at that so that the amount of time spent decreases a little. I don't think it's ever going to decrease so much as to be said

to like this is effortless. That's never gonna happen. But still it's still education, and that's still an incredibly impressive job, right right, I mean, you know, and and it's again still fairly experimental at this stage. I will say that I've read some interesting studies. There's one called learning style and Effectiveness of Online Face to Face Instruction and online and face to face instruction, I should say, um, and this was a study that was published in the American

Journal of Distance Education, So take that into consideration. But part of the findings were and I quote, the results revealed no significant differences in test scores, assignments, participation grades, and final grades, although the online group's averages were slightly higher. And so that's kind of interesting, and that the people who are taking the course that essincely they looked at the courses that were available online as well. As in face to face, tried to limit the variables as much

as possible, which is really hard. We've talked about this before in social sciences. It's really hard to to isolate the things that you specifically want to look at, right, you know, it's hard to say that, well, maybe the students who took the online course were just already very familiar with the subject matter, or they just had a natural affinity for it. It's hard. You can't really eliminate that.

But it was interesting that they scored slightly higher on average, which at least might suggest that online is around the same level of effective comparable effectiveness. You can't necessarily say it's better, but it doesn't look like it's worse. Uh Still, I mean again, when you're looking at something like this, that it's you can't you can't say for sure right down the middle, because people's as people's. I wonder if there are certain subjects or levels of education coursework that

are more suited to online education than others. Um And one reason this occurs to me is that there are a few things that obviously cannot be entirely online. You know, One really obvious example would be like physical education. Like if you were, you know, training doing sports something like that. Another one though that occurs to me, would be lab work in the physical sciences. You don't have lab conditions

at home. You need to you know, be able to gopment, go out and try to bring home some of the chemicals that you wouldn't want anything that would excellently generate like chlorine gas in your own home obviously and kill everybody who's in there. Um And you really you shouldn't be doing microbiology at home. I mean, it's all these are things where you need stuff that you need the facilities,

facilities beyond what would be available to you. Yeah, some some courses you can easily imagine being done out of the home, like things like its electronics, where one of the things that everyone has to get is a basic breadboard, which is easily available in in at least in the

United storts more or less non hazardous. But then you know, like you were saying, something more complex, something that's in the organic chemistry, then you know you've heard of the reason why people have been going to universities to begin with, I mean, to to have access to that wonderful equipment that they get well, right, I mean think about that university is really for a long time, we're just they were centers of learning because that's where the knowledge was held, right,

It wasn't just where the experts were. That's where all the books were too, and if you wanted to get access to that learning, you had to go there. But now we've got this distributed network that's out that allows at least some of the information to be available on a much more global scale. And it's and now we're we're you know, it's a couple of decades after that's taken effect, we're starting to see some pretty significant disruption

in that in that industry. Yeah, that that taps into a broader interesting issue that we touched on a little bit in the video. But that taps into a broader issue, which is that I think information is just simply less rare than it used to be. Um. The issue now is that there there's so much we can learn and

we really can get at it. Like if you are a person who has a laptop with access to the Internet, there's information that you can get that would not have been available had you lived, you know, in the same place a few dred years ago, like sure, or even a few decades ago. Honestly, um and so, but there's obviously still just as much need for education. And that's interesting to me. It says that in education is more than just the bank where you go withdraw information, because

now that bank is your computer. Yet school is no less useful. Well, and I would argue, it seems to me is not less. I would argue school's role is really the most important thing is teaching people how to think.

Teaching people how how to think and how to learn, because uh, like, just just take a casual interaction between people these days, where Lauren and I have a conversation and she mentions a movie that we've both seen, and then she says, oh, it's got that that person in it, that's so and so, And then you just quickly type in something online that pulls up the information you have it, and then you continue your conversation. Now casually, that's as if I had remembered the name of the actor. But

in fact I haven't. I just used the computer. I've offloaded that to the computer, and while I have access to the information, I don't really I can't say that I know it. I might have actually committed it to memory after I've looked it up because that's refreshed it. But you know, on a on a small scale, that's kind of what we're talking about that you could apply across the board. You could give someone access to all

the world's information. It does not mean that person is going to understand it and make it meaningful in any way. So obviously education is more than just of them access to the data. You have to teach people how to

think right. And I think that that's why a lot of the the huge important Ivy League kind of universities have started jumping on this massive online thing, you know at M M, I, T and Harvard and all all, like thirty three of the biggest names in post secondary education have signed up for for for these for these massive online things, and uh, and they've got and they've been they've been earning a lot of venture capital towards them and pouring a lot of their own funds into

it and spending a lot of time and effort developing it because you know, because they had started putting out this terrific information, like like Jonathan was saying his chemistry class, but it's not it's just information at that point, it's not someone guiding you on a learning course, right, I can. I can watch the videos, but I can't go and ask the teacher a question. If I don't understand something that came up in the lecture. You might be able to dig up his email and drop him a note,

but where or not here to reply. I mean, that guy's got his own stuff to deal with. He's got all these actual students who are really in that lecture hall and not just watching online. Uh. Yeah. One of the schools that's doing this is the rival to my my school, Georgia Tech, right down the road. So guys, if you ever want, and I say this guy's as to Lauren and Joe, we just do a little field trip down to Georgia Tech talk to some people about

Mook sometime. That might be kind of fun. We should. Yeah, so it's a date because we didn't think about it until just now. But no, there there are instructors there that are working on putting together these online courses so that they are able to to meet the needs of students. And uh, this is really exciting stuff for me because it means that I, you know, I don't know about either of you. Both of you may have been exemplary students who really appreciated the whole student experience when you

were going to school were shaking your heads. I wish I could go back and do it again to like I feel like I wasted my time there. I just just grinding through it rather than actually taking advantage of it, like what was wrong with my brain? Were immature? All three of us, of course, now work for a company where curiosity is the principle that we all are are looking at that that's that's that's what we that's that's

the guiding light of discovery. Right, It's all about curiosity, and our jobs are to learn things and then talk about them. So we all obviously professionally have this need to do it, but I think we all also share that just as a personality trade at this point that it's one of those things where you you just you want to learn more because the more you learn, the

more you realize how amazing the universe is. And it's it's something that I know I possessed a small amount of that when I was a student, but not nearly enough to appreciate it while it was happening. And I really wish it had been otherwise, because who knows what more I could have picked up during my college years, besides the fact that I could skip four days out of five and statists are symbolic logic and still pass with an A. It's the only thing I really learned.

Nice humble bragg there. Yeah, it's the only class I took that was at all related to math that completely made sense to me. Everything else I had to work hard at to understand. So of course I'm gonna humble brag about it that I learned some important life skills about how to talk my way out of assignments. I learned exactly how much water I could add to raman so that it would be tasty. I learned how shamefully lazy and stupid I was. Yeah, so valuable lessons, however,

we probably could have learned more. So that's you know, that's why these sort of things really interest me, is that it gives people like us the opportunity to continue learning once we've really developed that appreciation for what learning is. And and also hopefully in the future, they're going to be refining these and working on them and uh incorporating them into the the official educational system and start, you know, being able to give people credit towards credit for like

an actual degree. Yeah, yeah, they're the As far as offering up credit for things like these massive open online courses, that's just in its infancy. The courses have been around for a couple of years, but but they were always kind of divorced from the concept of college credit. It was more like, if you want to continue your education, here are some opportunities to do that. And some of them are even though they are open online courses, meaning that they are open to anyone, they do cost money

to attend. Some of them are free, some of them aren't. So um. Something else to keep in mind. I'm curious if these things will still be viable if we discover and I'm not saying we will, but if we discovered that there is a really important part of education that comes from physical presence, like being in a room with people. Do that. I think it does matter. I think that a student can get a good grasp on a subject

without that element. I do think that that's possible that if you have a well designed online course, a student can have uh what would be considered a passing grade, you know, even even an exemplary grade. But you might not have the full appreciation of it that you would if you were in a class of like minded individuals and could have conversations about this stuff. Uh, anecdotally, I can give you an example of this. In high school,

I went to classes. I was in, uh lots of different courses with the same people year after year, and in general it was it felt like it was, you know, a place where you sat down and you would learn a few things, but you know you're really not giving it your full attention. You weren't. I never felt fully engaged with in most of my classes. Um, which speaks a lot about my own character. I don't mean to

say that this is anyone else's fault. So I was giving the opportunity to go to a special summer course called Governor's Honors Program. It was like six hundred students that are picked to go to this thing, and you had to really be interested in whatever the subject matter was that you were nominated in, because it meant you were giving up your summer for six weeks to go

and be in classes with other students. But that meant that I was in classes with people who were really, really interested in the same stuff I was interested in. And it turned the classes into these incredible discussions where we didn't just learn about whatever the subject was, we really explored it and came up with new ideas and gained a real appreciation for it, which is something you can't necessarily replicate with an online course, even with forums

and chat rooms and things of that nature. That being said, UH, as soon as that program was over, and I that was when I was a rising senior. Rising juniors and seniors are the only ones allowed to go to this program, which meant that I had my senior year to go through in high school. I come back to high school senior year, and day one, back in that classroom, I'm right back to where I was before I went to

this special program. So, even if you do have the face to face interaction, there's no guarantee that you're going to have that fantastic environment where it's really conducive to not just learning, but appreciation and real comprehension of what the subject matter is about. However, it at least gives you that opportunity. Well a component some of these, but some of these massive online courses, some of the people taking them have taken it upon themselves to get together

in study groups. Uh, locally right, Yeah, which is good. I mean, I think that that's an element that's very important in education. Uh So, I wonder if we do find out that that face to face time or sort of gathering in a room is really important to the educational experience. I wonder if that can be simulated at a distance, well, just by something like virtual environments, which is not that hard to do. That's certainly a possibility.

I mean the there I can talk a little bit about some real work that's been done in virtual environments, not in an educational setting, but in a way that demonstrates that being in a virtual environment can be immersive enough so that it gives you the same effect as if you were in the real environment. Neurologically convincing. Yeah, and it really only takes a few minutes of getting acclimated to the virtual environment for this to actually take effect.

And the way I've seen it in action is through

the treatment of social anxiety disorders and phobias. So, for example, let's say that you have a fear of heights, and you use a virtual environment, use a a a head mold display, and uh it tracks your head motion so that your perspective changes within the virtual environment based upon how you look around, and they create, uh, an environment that simulates being at the top of a building, or or not even at the top of the building, just in a hotel room that's like twenty stories up or something.

They've actually discovered that the patients were starting to have physiological responses, stress responses, just as if they would if they were in a physical environment that was in that same set of circumstances. Yeah, so, uh, it's a it's a kind of therapy where they can get it's exposed to the stimuli that normally caused them their their disorder, their their anxiety rather uh and get more acclimated to it.

And it's to build up to the point where they can actually uh confront this in a real life setting. And I've also seen it used not just in uh, you know, a height sort of thing, but also for someone knows if you're flying, and they can go and have a virtual trip to an airport, not even getting on a plane yet, just to introduce them to this experience the things that would set off their their anxiety triggers.

And to do this enough times knowing ultimately that they are in a safe environment, you know, they are never to what there's never at a point where they think I'm really in an airport. It's just convincing enough where they get that physiological response, but they know ultimately they're in a safe place and they can work toward actually conquering that phobia, managing it to a point where they can, uh, they can do these these things without being completely overwhelmed

by their anxiety. So if it's convincing for that, then it could easily be convincing I think for yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine, like think about think about the We have the tools already, right, We've got all the pieces that we would need to be able to do this. We could use a combination of things like webcams or even devices like the Xbox Connect to get

the footage of the student. You've got a monitor where you could watch the teacher, or if you want to get really fancy, you get something like the Oculus Rift. This is this head mounted display that has a screen for each eye and it sets it up so it's a three dimensional view for the person who's wearing it, and it can be wired directly to a platform so that when you look around, you see what you would

see if you were in that physical location. Let's say that you're in a virtual classroom with twenty nine other students, and so you look around, you see where everyone else is sitting. It might be some sort of avatar representation of that person, probably without the oculus rift on top of their heads, because otherwise just all looking at sideboards of each other. But it would be an interesting way

to try and have a telepresence in a classroom. Yeah, so moving moving towards something something like in snow crash um One note, I do think that if I had an oculus rift, my first choice would not be a KEM lab to visit. But that's fair. But but but also on the flip side, if you're if you're working towards a virtual reality helmets, or even even if you're just on a laptop with a regular old webcam on.

On the flip side, teachers can start using the feedback from that technology to hone their lessons, to to figure out where your visual attention is and uh, you know, what's what's working for you and what isn't. I mean, if it's all enough group, why not something like Google Google Hangout. Yeah, you can do something along those lines.

Or or design a tool that is similar to that, and then I mean, if nothing else, you can have class discussions that are in something like that where who whomever is speaking first, our loudest is taking center stage, and then everyone else just sits there and watches. You just click or raise your hand button. Yeah, yeah, I would always be front and center on that. You know, you're both giving me the look of Jonathan would never stop talking, he would not seed, I refuse to give

over the chair. Um. But yeah, I mean it's we're already seeing this in some forms, implemented in various ways. I'm I'll be I'm sure we're going to see this developed further. I'm encouraged that the studies so far seemed to suggest that it's as effective as going to uh

an actual class. But I also I am encouraged that there are students out there who recognize is the value in having these discussions in person and going beyond just consuming information and making sure you have some sort of level of understanding and retention, because, like we've said, learning is more than just that. Well at core, I would

say learning has a lot to do with socialization. It's not just getting information, and it's not even just learning how to use that information in a smart way, but it's being part of an intellectual community and knowing how to interact with that community and knowing how to submit ideas and to receive them and receive feedback on them. Yeah, that's that's that that that process is really at the

core of academic learning. It sums yeah, I mean it's I'm really interested to see the progression, right, I'm really interested see, like, in ten years, where are we going to be with this sort of trend. Well, we eventually get to a point where the physical schools become sort of uh an afterthought. Uh. Part of me, the nostalgic part of me, says, I hope that never happens. Uh, And then another part of me is thinking, well, how

exciting would the future be, you know in that case? Well, I mean, I think one of the most important parts of having stuff like in class discussions and things like this is it's one of the main ways I think

kids interact with ideas they're not used to. You know, you're going to be you may grow up with people who think the same way about as you do about most issues or something, but suddenly you go to college and somebody raises their hand in class and says something you've never heard before, and you don't have the algorithm on Facebook hiding that information from you because you don't like it so much. Right right where You've insulated yourself so that the only people that you ever hear from

are the ones who do you agree with. Yeah, what a wonderful development that is. H I'm guilty of it. I have set up those filters. I have not, so I'll show you how after the podcast. All right, So that wraps up this discussion about about distance learning and moos and uh guys, if you have any suggestions or future topics that we can tackle, please let us know. You can send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com or go to fw thinking

dot com. It's a fantastic website. You can read our blogs, you can watch the videos, you can listen to the podcasts, and we also have links to our social media there so you can interact with us on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google Plus. We look forward to hearing from you and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places