“The critics are right that most people who start a MOOC don’t finish.” The introductory statement of the latest Coursera report on Moocs trends is clear: if you assess the value of a MOOC by the number of “finishers”, MOOcs are dead. Even more if you read that “MOOC enrollees predominantly are well-educated residents of developed countries”. What was thought to be a way to open up education to those who hadn’t a chance to go to college is in fact a hobby for graduate students.
Fortunately, the picture is lightly different. globally we are still talking of millions of students that have finished MOOCs. More importantly – and this is the major finding of this study – when you look at tangible career benefits, “career builders with low socioeconomic status and lower levels of education report tangible career benefits at about the same rate as or more than those with high status and lots of education”. MOOCs would therefore be the only massive instrument able to combat social inequity in education in a cost effective way.
Let’s have a look now at a second piece of news published by the french daily Le Monde: les amphis bondés de l’Université d’Amiens (the jammed classrooms of the Amiens University (in the north of France)). What is said basically is that the students no longer fit into the University’s physical space. Too much is too much! These students are not any students. They are issued more than anywhere in France from low socioeconomic families. And the region has a need of new skilled workers that must be trained in the region. Are the MOOCs a solution to solve the physical space problem? They can be used to teach classes instead of packing up students in amphiteathers that will always be too small. As in a flipped classroom context, students would then meet in small groups and work on projects.
This hybrid model could be a first step towards greater social equity while reducing budgetary pressure on existing infrastructures. However, it requires a critical approach of the pedagogy that sustains the MOOCs: the RESET project lead by three spanish Universities (Universidad Carlos III, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universidad de Valladolid) starts from the hypothesis that current MOOCs are a set back on major advances in education mainly because of their massive scale and direct instruction model that goes against particularization of teaching and use of active and collaborative pedagogies. This hypothesis is challenging as it drives us towards a brand new pedagogic model that should combine MOOCs effectiness in the massive delivery of knowledge and participatory learning schemes developed in small physical spaces that will enable the required degree of personalization.
The model of MOOCs Academy experienced in Israel by Yaakov Hecht goes in this direction: opening up small learning spaces where MOOCs learners can gather and learn together with the support of voluntary mentors.
Innovation in education is also about magic numbers.
For many of us, the magic numbers are the number of students, teachers, schools that can benefit from innovative solutions to change the way we learn and teach. Do we value education in view of the more than 750 M. students that go to primary school worldwide or their roughly 30 M. primary teachers? Do we focus on the 125 M. young children and adolescents that have never started school or have dropped out?
For some of us, the magic numbers are pure macro. US $ 5 trillion spent worldwide on education (8 trillion by 2020).
Do we value education according to the needs of million or according to the trillion spent every year?
For others,magic numbers are product-based: 400 million tablets sold and many of them in schools 150000 education apps in the ,appstore, US $ 3.2 billion for Learning Management Systems (LMS)…
Magic numbers give vertigo to education policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors.
Innovation in education may be worth what an education startup is worth. The first half of 2015 alone saw education technology companies raise $1.6 billion across 167 deals. In April 2015, LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. Ellucian that services, from to higher-education institutions across 40 countries was valued at $3.5 billion, the same than Blackboard and its LMS.
$ 3,5 billion represent roughly 350,000 more than the $ 10,000 spent yearly on average by an OECD country on their students. This would mean that Blackboard is worth 350,000 students! It doesn’t make much sense, no?
Innovation in education may be worth what a student is worth. In that case, it may be worth the debt he or she contracted to get an education. For instance $ 1,2 trillion for US students. It may also be worth what an educated student can bring in terms of GDP growth. A study commissioned in the US showed that raising the education standards just half of Finland, one of the top international performers in terms of student achievement, could add more than $50 trillion to GDP between 2010 and 2090.
It may also simply be worth the $ 10 to $ 50 charged to some students on a yearly basis to access a 1:1 collaborative environment on their tablet at school or worth the hundreds of dollars of school materials spent every year per student…
We could go on endlessly and easily get lost.
Innovation in education is worth a lot and this “lot” will vary according to the high expectations of entrepreneurs and investors, the equally high expectations of students, teachers, parents or policy makers.
When thinking of innovative startups in the field of education, one should realize that the value is not predefined by some success stories but should come as the result of a genuine transformation of education processes and a measurable impact in learners’ skills and knowledge. In other words, there is no magic numbers on a market that will be at the same time hopefully increasingly rewarding for investors and entrepreneurs and increasingly demanding in terms of social impact and achievement.
“If China is like a ‘manufacturing factory’ of the world, India should become the ‘human resource capital’ of the world”. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ‘Skill India’ Mission as part of the government’s “war against poverty”. Technology is at the core of this plan and should provide the tools and contents for “dynamic training in skills”.
In a recent post, I was mentioning another initiative in India that aims at bringing a low-cost, digital learning solution to thousands of low-income schools. “Skills India” lies at the other end of the spectrum, where jobs need to be created and sustained for the population at large.
India, skills capital of the world
Numbers give vertigo. In seven years, the objective is to train 400 M. people and this should happen mainly through on-line training. Learning yoga, creating a small business, getting basic IT skills will all come together as training should be part of everyday’s life. “Education is the answer” seems too often a dream shared by NGOs and inspirational leaders. This time it is the core of a national strategy and a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of edtech solutions.
I had a chance to visit some of the leading education startups in India. Wheebox, Talentedge, Peoplestrong are all addressing key challenges to combine technology with a people-centric approach. Harness, a UK based company created by Indian entrepreneurs and part of the Open Education Challenge provides innovative solutions to combine the best of class-room learning and elearning solutions. These solutions are ready to use in Europe also.
Which lessons can be learnt? India like Europe is used to promoting top down initiative. The recent eskills for Europe report concluded that “National governments should offer access to high quality information and career-support services for young people.” But providing advice is not the same than voluntarily advocating for flexible online training. At the same time, India will promote short online training targeting “the common man”.
Which path will work best? There is still an open debate in Europe regarding the future of online training. Its cost-effectiveness is widely questionned, essentially by face to face trainers… It just seems as if Europe was ready to lose another battle for employment! and this won’t be because we lack good and innovative startups.
What do I know? What do I want to know? A learning journey takes place between these two questions.
During thousands of years, the learning journey took place by speaking to each other. Until the invention of writing. Umberto Eco in his 1996 article “from Internet to Gutenberg” tells us that according to Plato (in Phaedrus) when Hermes, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, he praised his new technique that was supposed to allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But the Pharaoh was not so satisfied. “My skillful Theut, he said, memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by training it continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any longer to train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtue of an external device.”
What if the Pharaoh was right? “Ceci tuera cela”. This will kill that. In Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo shows us a priest, Claude Frollo, pointing his finger first to a book, then to the Paris cathedral, and saying “ceci tuera cela”. The book will kill the cathedral, reading will kill images and listening. Today, the same fear occurs with learning. Will MOOCs kill books or at least text books? Will MOOCs kill universities and schools?
This is not a new debate. Back in 1996, Eco wrote that “a good educational tv program can explain genetics better than a book.” This is exactly what the new massive open online courses – MOOCs – pretend to deliver: a new learning experience more powerful than a textbook that should help the learners learn and even remember better.
Eco again writes, “even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both”. This is what can be said about learning: even if online learning can in some circumstances be more effective than face to face learning, the problem is still how to improve both.
What do I know? Que sais-je? French students remember this famous collection of short books covering almost any subjects, a pocket encyclopedia made up of thousands of titles where one knew that he or she could always grasp pieces of knowledge. This collection Que sais-je? almost disappeared from bookshelves as reprinting titles turned out being too expensive. The solution could have been to convert them into ebooks, creating one more on-line encyclopedia.
According to Alberto Manguel, “every change of instrument implies a change of action, but not perhaps in the way we imagine. E-books, virtual libraries, i-pads allow us to read in ways we never read before: we can now carry whole libraries in our pocket and, from our own bedroom, we can access volumes ensconced in the remotest libraries.”Manguel laments at the same time that a library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
Que sais-je? The french collection didn’t turn digital as the publisher decided to invest in print on-demand creating a new type of personalized relationship with its readers.
Personalization is at the core of the new learning paradigm.
MOOCs understood as social learning make possible another type of reading that we will call “social reading” i.e. the possibility for thousands of learners to explore knowledge together and share a new form of social experience. Imagine a MOOC for every Que sais-je? A MOOC for every book that will create a social experience shared by thousands of readers.
The Pharaoh was maybe right. Learning is about speaking to each other.
In her famous article “five myths about MOOCs”, Diana Laurillard argued that “MOOCs won’t solve the problem of expensive undergraduate education”. She referred to “evidence from several universities (that) suggests that well over 60 per cent of those who register for MOOCs already have degrees” and she concluded that “MOOCs do not provide an opportunity to discover how to teach first-time undergraduates successfully in an online format”.
What would Laurillard think of the recent initiative taken by Arizona State University and Edx to offer enough MOOCs so that students can complete their first year of undergraduate studies online at a fraction of the cost for regular on-campus students? In the words of the promoters, “The partnership was established to provide quality higher education opportunities to anyone, anywhere in the world”. Once again, the promise of a quality higher education for anyone was revived. This announcement created the buzz within the “MOOCs community” and generated some very contrasted comments from “Cheap MOOCs for sale” to “promising full college credit”.
Is it all about giving larger access to higher education to a new category of students that would have been excluded otherwise, as Laurillard would like? Or is all about money?
Europeans may not be used to comparing education to a pie and are not always aware of the huge controversy over higher education costs on the other side of the Atlantic. In the last three years, MOOCs went all the way from being an – almost – philanthropic initiative to continuously looking for new revenues. This is may be just what ASU and EdX are doing: making the whole pie bigger, recruiting students at any cost, selling them certificates against college credits and thus generating new revenues, especially attractive for second tier universities and MOOCs providers – even if, as in the case of EdX, we are still talking of a “not-for-profit” institution (the American way, though).
At least, what the ASU – EdX initiative demonstrates is that another of Laurillard’s myths about MOOCs is falling down: content is not free in education. Charging for certificates and credits just means that online contents have to be curated and that this has a cost.
What is unclear in our example is how contents will be curated. And this is maybe the most preoccupying part of the story. The initiative has been launched but nothing clear is said about the courses’ format, the students’ support and assessment. The only thing we know is that: “the MOOCs will be the same in all essential respects as the variants of the courses taught in person”. A little bit imprecise indeed.
As Europeans we still have a hard time adapting to this pure market vision of “the education pie”. The EMOOCs conference that is about to start in Mons (Belgium) will hopefully transmit another vision of MOOCs and say “bye bye education pie”.
Have you ever watched a course as if it were a TV show? This is what’s about to happen with MOOCs. It seems that you no longer take a MOOC or study a MOOC – as you would with any course – but instead, you watch it; you watch the videos and often judge the quality of the MOOC by the quality of the videos.
Recent studies have linked students’ engagement to video elements including duration, structure and rhythm… Mike Sharples recently gave a talk, where he used data from FutureLearn to show that a video of over 10 minutes will make students leave the MOOC – not just turn off the video. Research by the MIT found that shorter videos are much more engaging, and that students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos. Yishay Mor – P.A.U. Education’s Educational Design Scientist – created a “six-minute video” design pattern to put special emphasis on the issue.
If a MOOC is an an audiovisual product, what would differentiate educational TV? Education writer Audrey Watters considers television a form of broadcasting educational content that could count as a MOOC.
Where is the limit? Can we passively watch a MOOC like watching TV and learn?
For Lorena A. Barba, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at George Washington University, “the fixation with videos in MOOCs, online courses and blended learning is worrisome”. For her – and many learning designers – MOOCs can provide a quality learning experience without videos.
In fact, MOOCs are above all, a new way to activate learning. A recent study has demonstrated that abandoning traditional lecturing in favour of active learning has increased the number of students to receive a degree in science and maths. Another study has shown that students passively sitting in the classroom produces only minor changes in skin conductance – referred to as electrodermal activity (EDA) – and therefore indicates low emotion, cognition and attention.
Active learning is not a trivial concept. Creating and facilitating group activities in online classes can be exceptionally effective in creating innovative learning experiences. The social dimension of learning has long been hidden by the “tyranny of contents”. Keri, a student at Duke University says that what she really enjoys about a MOOC is being able “to interact with many different students, read their opinions, and watch collaboration on problems sets or fundamental ideas. It made the class feel more interactive.”
The future of MOOCs will rely on building an effective and participatory online learning community. This is one of the issues that will be addressed at the upcoming eMOOCs conference co-organized by the Université Catholique de Louvain and P.A.U. Education.
It also the core of the strategy of Open Classrooms, a fascinating French startup that is introducing different types of community activities, including personal mentoring. Pierre Dubuc – Open Classrooms co-founder – links MOOCs’ success to the creation and management of cohorts to maintain social interactions.
Completion rates are usually defined as the number of completion / total number of enrollments, and are sometimes defined as the number of completion / total number of users that watched the first video. They will have to be measured against other true participation indicators, like number of interactions. Identifying and engaging active learners will be the key to MOOCs’ success.
This could lead us to redefine the MOOC’s structure, by veering away from the audiovisual fascination, and managing, for instance, asynchronicity and removing time limits for the course delivery, in order to maintain registrant involvement regardless of enrollment date or giving the students the capacity to decide how the course will proceed and develop – like a new version of Dungeons&Dragons!
This is the option explored by Yaacov Hecht – one of the speakers at the eMOOCS conference – and his team in Israel (Michael Shurp and Roi Ziko) with their teacher-training MOOC.
The following “code of conduct” defined by Christian F. Freisleben, an Austrian journalist, encapsulates how MOOCs should depart from the “watch syndrome” and focus on cooperative learning:
A MOOC is about:
getting to know each other
collaborating
inspiring and helping each other
sharing and learning from each other
creating new knowledge together
being innovative through collective action
bringing about unpredictable transformation and change around the world
“Change the world” – exactly what Andrew Ng from Coursera said last year at the eMOOCs conference. (He has since decided to leave the company before changing the world).
Nancie Atwell is the “best teacher in the world”. She teaches English as a writing-reading workshop in a rural school she created in Maine (USA). She was just awarded with the Global Teacher Prize.
What can you learn from the best teacher in the world? I read her book “the Reading Zone” to get closer to her teaching philosophy.
Being a teacher for her is like embarking on a life-time mission. “The good teachers I know from every grade and subject are in the classroom because they want to influence kids for a lifetime, to make a difference over the long haul, to inspire students to become thoughtful, productive grown-ups.” So everything that could constrain teacher’s inspiration and freedom –like the obligation to follow the Common Core curriculum and assess students’ performance with standardized tests – will go against teaching as an inspirational and aspirational profession. When interviewed, she recommends “creative and smart young person NOT to go into teaching unless an independent school would suit them”. You can be the best teacher in the world and maybe the last one…
Atwell defines reading instruction as a process that “brings knowledge, joy, purpose, skill, personal preference and a sense of community”. This is a powerful definition of innovative learning that makes knowledge only one component of the learning experience. As she puts it: “No child ever grew to become a skilled, passionate, habitual, critical reader via a fat, bland textbook.”
Questioning “fat, bland textbook” is another way of highlighting the importance of the learning experience as both a unique personal experience and at the same time shared with peers.
Atwell understands reading as a personal art and defines the key for learners’ engagement: “every day they engage with literature that enables them to know things, feel things, imagine things, hope for things, become people they never could have dreamed without the transforming power of books, books, books”.
Engagement is the school #1 problem and early school leaving or boredom at school are two symptoms against which Atwell brings solutions : know, feel, imagine, hope.
No such thing as rewards in Atwell’s pedagogy: “The passions aroused by stories and characters are the prize”.
It is interesting to put Atwell’s visions in perspective with the main digital learning challenges.
MOOCs are criticized for the lack of students’ engagement with students facing the solitude of the on-line learning process and unable to engage into fruitful exchanges with peers. All types of rewarding schemes have been imagined from certification to gamification. But following Atwell, passion for learning should be the true reward!
Teachers, trainers, MOOCs instructors are therefore all facing Atwell’s challenge: inspire students. And certification is not the substitute for passion!
A last comment regarding being the “best teacher in the world” as opposed for instance to be the “best tennis player in the world”. The million dollar Prize will be paid in equal annual installments over a period of ten years and the winner must continue to teach for a period of five years after the awarding of the Prize. Imagine Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal being paid for winning a grand slam tournament in ten installments and forced to keep playing for five years.
Shouldn’t be teachers considered as trustworthy as tennis players?
“Too often we forget how lucky we are to go to school”. This sentence opens the brilliant documentary “On the Way to School” by French director Pascal Plisson, produced in partnership with UNESCO and Aide et Action.
The true stories of four children who walk 15 kilometers across the savanna of Kenya, cross the Atlas mountains in Morroco, ride for hours on horseback through the middle of Patagonia, and push a wheelchair along 4 kilometers of sandy trails in India “just” to go to school are the best testimonies of what it means to have access to education and the right to a better future. At P.A.U. Education, we published a similar story written by a young Liberian girl named Korto, who wrote about her experience of being allowed to go back to school once the civil war was over.
It is certainly worth remembering that, at the same time, 58 million primary school-aged children and about 63 million adolescents of lower secondary school age are not in school. And there is a need in 2015 for an extra 1.6 million teachers in order to achieve universal primary education. But these inspiring stories still exist and show the way for many.
But what is happening in Europe where education is fully guaranteed as a right? Have young Europeans forgotten how lucky they are to go to school?
More than 12% of all European pupils are early school leavers, with peaks in some countries (like Spain), where the rate is well above 20%. Every sixth young person aged 18 to 24 in EU-28 leaves school with only a lower secondary level education, and participates in no further education or training beyond this point.
Why do young Europeans decide to leave school early when young Indians, Kenyans, Argentinians and Moroccans are risking their lives to go to school? Statistics don’t always tell the true lives of students, especially when they get bored instead of enjoying every minute of their school day.
I had an interesting chat with my son Eliot, aged 13. He told me that he dreamed – sometimes – about not going to school anymore (we went together to see the documentary, and I am sure his dream won’t disappear). I asked him, “What will you do then if you don’t go to school?” His answer was, “I will study first on my own, then go to school to exercise what I just learned.” He had just reinvented the flipped classroom, because of the disappointment he felt with some of his classes.
Innovative learning isn’t just good for rich countries. Would technology enable the young heroes from the “On the Way to School” documentary – and many others – to access school more easily? This is one of the questions that may be raised at the upcoming “Mobile World Congress”. In Kenya, for instance, 75% of the unbanked population now has access to improved financial services through mobile money. Could they, in a near future, access basic education the same way?
The father of Samuel – the young Kenyan in the documentary – blesses his kids before they start their journey to school, telling them, “God bless your pencil and give you success in life”.
Might he say one day, “God bless your cell phone (or your tablet)”?
“At a samba school the dominant activity is dancing. But it has another purpose related to the Carnival, at which each samba school will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; they are engaged in a common activity – dancing – at all levels of competence from beginning children to superstars. The fact of being together would in itself be “educational” for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. What counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the samba school.”
Paper identified two innovative features in the learning process that takes place at a samba school: learning together and learning from each other. These two simple ideas take us back to the pre-digital era when socialising with friends was seen as fundamental for a child’s development. Roger Hart and Colin Ward were two experts insisting early in their works on the importance of children’s informal participation in their communities.
Learning is nowadays increasingly seen as a mix of formal and informal experiences, and this is one of the greatest achievements of digital learning. But the socialising experience should remain central. This is what Paper tells us about the samba school and this is what is progressively emerging with the latest trends in digital learning.
photo by Luiz Fernando Reis/Flickr Creative Commons License
What we call “social learning” refers to the degree of interaction between learners of different levels of competence. Learning from others and learning with others are fundamental elements of the learning experience and essential for students to get full ownership of what they learn.
A few months ago, I wrote about MOOCs as “Maracana Open Online Courses” taking the Maracana stadium as the symbol of a new learning experience where tens of thousands of students get together and learn in the same place. I should have added, paraphrasing Colin Ward, that no learning is governable if it does not grow learners who feel it is theirs.
Carnival and football are two experiences that create incredible ownership among the participants. Let’s learn from the “Brazilian touch” to transform education!
