General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: College Professors Are About to Get Really Mad at President Obama [View all]Pholus
(4,062 posts)Physics. The bane of so many people based on the groans I typically get when asked what I do for a living. And like many good professors, we're playing the game and trying MOOCs. And learning a few interesting things at the same time.
Found an arxiv.org paper from just three weeks ago...kind of a mid-semester progress report of a new class from Georgia Tech.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2533v1.pdf
They designed the calculus based class to occupy the students from 11-14 hours per week. I actually think that is a bit light, given that intro physics is typically a 5 credit class which means by the classic standards you should expect at least 18 hours of work per week (four hours lecture, two hours lab, 2 hours of outside work for every one hour in class).
They also show the biggest problem with MOOC's. Unrealistic student expectation about just what it will take to excel. 83% of students in their pre-course survey said that they planned to spend less than 9 hours per week on the course. As good as an admission that they had no clue what it was going to take them here.
They found out I guess.
The paper's Figure 2 is a hoot. So 18829 students signed up. Only 27% of the students even watched the first week lecture videos, only 16% actually worked on the homeworks. Each component of the lab (Homework, Lectures, Labs) experience an attrition of 50% for each week after that. By the time labs were introduced into the course on week 3, only 2% of the students actually worked the first one and only half of them did the second after that.
By week five, only 4% of registered students were still continuing at some level (watching the video). Homework and lab participation were at 1% of registered students.
Perhaps MOOCs work for softer subjects, but this paper shows that something is distinctly lacking when a rigorous, mathematical science class is presented online. I would posit that it is the missing ability to ask clarifying questions in real time which of course is the most labor intensive part of teaching.
From the concluding remarks..
possible with the MOOC environment. While it remains
to be seen how many students will complete the course,
what they will have learned, and what factors contributed
to their success, we believe that YWYL demonstrates
an upper limit on what MOOC students will engage in.
YWYL represents a course that is as closely related to an
on-campus introductory mechanics course as the tech-
nology will allow presently. Few students are continuing
to participate fully in the course, which brings into ques-
tion the nature of the MOOC revolution. Similar to the
on-campus offering, we estimated students should spend
roughly 1114 hours per week on the course. However,
less than one-fifth of students (17%) initially expected to
spend more than nine hours working with course mate-
rial. It is also likely that the heavy emphasis on laboratory
activities in YWYL has driven many students from the
course, so that a re-balancing of laboratories in future of-
ferings might lead to lower attenuation and broader par-
ticipatio"