Online Course Guilt
It always interests me when I see trends in education show up on the radar of mass market media. For example, Time magazine has run several stories on MOOCs. The most recent article I read is about a guilty participant. The author, starts by saying that when the "seventh e-mail about coursework and assignments arrives in my in-box, the guilt is too much to take. The online class I signed up for started on Sept. 17, and as the unopened emails pile up from Coursera, I haven’t watched a single lecture or done any work."
That's not something only true about massive online courses; it happens in more traditionally-sized online courses and face-to-face courses too.
So why did Tuttle, not a traditional student, sign up for a MOOC? He lists a number of factors: it's free; access to a world-class professor; the appeal of a top university (he looked at MIT and Princeton, signed up for "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" at Stanford). He also admits that he found the video introduction a good promo. The professor, Keith Devlin (who he says "looks and sounds like a long-lost Monty Python troupe member") sold the course as a math course that involves almost no math. Perhaps, he was also swayed by the best-seller appeal of knowing that more than 50,000 students are also signed up for the course.
He watches lecture one. It's 29 minutes of Devlin talking with a white-screen background. Tuttle is distracted - checking e-mail, reading Tweets. Does he make it through the course? More at http://nation.time.com/2012/10/02/mooc-brigade-with-free-online-classes-guilt-is-part-of-the-bargain
That's not something only true about massive online courses; it happens in more traditionally-sized online courses and face-to-face courses too.
So why did Tuttle, not a traditional student, sign up for a MOOC? He lists a number of factors: it's free; access to a world-class professor; the appeal of a top university (he looked at MIT and Princeton, signed up for "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" at Stanford). He also admits that he found the video introduction a good promo. The professor, Keith Devlin (who he says "looks and sounds like a long-lost Monty Python troupe member") sold the course as a math course that involves almost no math. Perhaps, he was also swayed by the best-seller appeal of knowing that more than 50,000 students are also signed up for the course.
He watches lecture one. It's 29 minutes of Devlin talking with a white-screen background. Tuttle is distracted - checking e-mail, reading Tweets. Does he make it through the course? More at http://nation.time.com/2012/10/02/mooc-brigade-with-free-online-classes-guilt-is-part-of-the-bargain
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