Dispute About the Impact of MOOC's on Education

The large online courses are forcing instructors to rethink classroom approaches, other than major changes won't be seen for years, the experts say.

Massive open online courses or MOOCs are admired for providing a free education to people across the world. Other than they have a murky record in terms of their overall effectiveness, particularly in light of their low student completion charges.

Experts are divided on whether MOOCs be able to advance the overall quality of higher education in the U.S. Some say the courses have before now made a positive imprint, even as others say more time has to pass before the effects of MOOCs can be seen in online and brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Fiona Hollands, who recently led a study about MOOCs for Columbia University's Teachers College, says there is little data about whether MOOCs are more helpful than other learning models.

"Almost no one is doing that work," she says. "It's rare and I do not really recognize why people are avoiding it."

That said, she believes there is a few evidence that MOOCs have begun to have a positive influence in on-campus classrooms. The MOOC hype has made instructors rethink how they move towards their teaching, she says.

In on-campus classes with online components, known as blended classes, instructors are following in the footsteps of MOOC leaders by dividing their lectures into short segments, giving more frequent assessments and providing more opportunities for problem-solving activities that have proved effective in improving student performance, she says. In some cases, instructors are using MOOC materials to enhancement their own on-campus courses, the experts say.

"In blended classrooms, on-campus university course can leverage the power of MOOCs to free up classroom time for interactive discussion and collaboration, testing and problem-solving, CEO of the nonprofit MOOC provider edX, said in an email. At San Jose State University, edX helped produce a blended electrical engineering course which had higher passing rates than traditional course, he said.

MOOC providers may also be able to improve teaching practices simply by analyzing the large amount of student performance data they collect, says Peter Shea, an education professor at University at Albany SUNY.

"It is still early," Shea says, "however there are high aspirations to do research on how people learn in MOOC environments and some of that research would provide guidance on how to structure and sequence what will already be very high quality content."

Part of the edX mission, for instance, is to conduct research on how students learn and how technology can transform learning. Others dispute that MOOCs can help instructors effectively learn to use peer grading - a popular MOOC technique in which students are assessed by each other and how to manage a truly international classroom.

"The lessons learned are still coming," says Joel Hartman, an administrator at the University of Central Florida and president of Sloan Consortium, an organization that promotes effective online learning. "I do not think you are going to be seeing an extremely broad impact on what is learned from MOOCs for at least a decade."