Luminaria 2013: Rise of the MOOC

IN THIS ISSUE
Luminaria
Rise of the MOOC
LEARNING
ENHANCEMENT
CENTER
METROPOLITAN
COLLEGE OF
NEWYORK
Designed and Edited by Nathan Schiller
Welcome Letter from
Dwight Hodgson
2
I Took A MOOC 3
Interview: MCNY
President Vinton
Thompson
6
Learning To Learn 12
MOOCs At MCNY? 13
Low MOOC
Completion Rates
14
A Brief Tour of MOOC
Providers
16
MOOCs And Math 18
PLUS!
LEC students speak out
about the pros and cons
of MOOCs
Art from Taxgedo
V O L U M E 2 | I S S U E 1 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

2
A
s the new Coordinator of the Learning
Enhancement Center (LEC) and Men-
tor & Leadership Development Pro-
gram (MLDP), I am excited to welcome you to
another edition of Luminaria. This edition
seeks to unfold the MOOC phenomenon. Re-
cently, I have found myself thinking about my
past professional experiences in non-
conventional environments, which have given
me an array of perspectives on education and
learning. As the Education Center Coordinator
for an adult basic education center, I analyzed
issues ranging from the residual effects of a
flawed K-12 system to the impositions of family
life on the adult learner. As the Coordinator of
a CUNY access program charged with getting
young minorities involved in biomedical re-
search and the world of STEM, I worked with
students at the top of their undergraduate clas-
ses—students who didn’t need remedial inter-
vention but who needed to be introduced to,
and guided through, research opportunities,
internships, and summer programs. And as
Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion at
a premier city high school, I promoted diversi-
ty within an intelligent and articulate but, from
the perch of interpersonal engagement, socially
and culturally uninformed student body.
In each of these situations—and in many more
like them—MOOCs have the potential to fill an
education gap by giving students the time and
space to step in and out of the classroom expe-
rience without interrupting their work flow.
Having seen
early college students selflessly offer up their
naivety in exchange for an introduction to dif-
ferent cultures, I imagine students will bring
that same innocence and yearning to the glob-
al, virtual MOOC classroom. I like to think
that, in the same ways my former students
strung their life experiences outside the class-
room into an applicable learning device when
they worked with their tutors, students en-
rolled in MOOCs will use their experience to
enhance the experience for all. And I also be-
lieve that the communal MOOC environment
will foster an opportunity for students to chime
in on topics they never imagined they could
have anything of substance to offer.
I am not concerned, and do not think, that
MOOCs will replace the traditional classroom.
More likely, they will supplement the brick-and
-mortar education system richly and robustly .
. . with many hiccups along the way. And that
brings me full circle, to my role with the LEC
and MLDP here at MCNY. As online classes
and MOOCs continue to expand throughout
higher education, support services—where con-
fused and introspective students converse with
real, live human tutors and mentors—will be-
come all the more vital. As you survey the per-
spectives of this issue, I hope you take a mo-
ment to consider how the digital MOOC model
might add to the analog nature of your educa-
tion and your life. Happy reading.
—Dwight Hodgson
Dwight Hodgson is the
Coordinator of the Learning
Enhancement Center (LEC)
and Mentor & Leadership
Development Program
(MLDP).
Welcome!
LEC Students on MOOCs
There are students who you don’t want
to be in classroom with—they steer the
professor away from the topics.This set-
up can be a waste of time. MOOCs can
change that.
—Ronald Knight
2

3
Why take a MOOC?
I have to admit, I love being in a classroom. I
enjoy trudging or skipping to class under an
umbrella or behind sunglasses. There’s nothing
quite like the tangy stench of white board
marker or the sharp smell of chalk and the
gleam of ideas filling a once-empty board—
learning takes hold of the space, and the world
outside the classroom melts away. I
had never taken an online course
before, and, though I feared I
would miss the inimitable experi-
ence of classroom learning, I was
excited to join the worldwide move-
ment of students enrolling in Mas-
sive Open Online Courses. I was
intrigued to try my hand at learning
in this new “classroom” in which
the student is simultaneously alone
and in the company of thousands.
ChoosingThe Course
Subject Matter
I chose a course called
“Foundations of Teaching for
Learning” because I knew it would apply di-
rectly to my work at the LEC and other teach-
ing jobs. There were other interesting course
offerings (literature, philosophy), but I sus-
pected it would be difficult to stay motivated in
them, as I know I learn certain subjects best in
the company of others in discussion-based
seminars in “brick and mortar” classroom envi-
ronments. This course was described as an
overview of basic, student-centered teaching
practices, and I thought it would be a great op-
portunity to review what I already knew, en-
gage with teaching as I was practicing it day-to
-day, deepen my understanding of new re-
search in my field, and expand my set of skills
and resources.
Time Commitment
The course description predicted that this
course would require 4-6 hours
each of the four weeks. This
seemed manageable to me. (I end-
ed up spending a bit more time on
weeks that included an essay as-
signment.)
First Impressions
The class “went live” on a specific
date, and I logged in as soon as I
had a free moment. I was “greeted”
by a welcome statement, and it was
initially a little uncomfortable to
realize that I was reading it, rather
than actually being welcomed by a
person/teacher. (There I found the
first of a surprising bounty of typos
in the regular written correspond-
ence from course administrators.) I felt excited
to start, and I took an optional “getting to
know you” survey. I imagine the survey is a
way to help the course designers understand
their audience/student population. My excite-
ment around this reminded me of how thrilling
it was to take those quizzes in Seventeen maga-
zine to find out what your “fashion personality”
was. Who doesn't love being asked about one-
self and filling in little bubbles to answer? My
first interactions with my MOOC were not so
I Took A MOOC
MOOC
is an
acronym
for
Massive
Open
Online
Course
3
By Polly Bresnick

4
different
from early-internet quizzes
(“Take this quiz to find out your animal spirit
—CLICK HERE!”). Most of the questions on
the survey were straightforward (“What is your
level of education?”), and the final question
asked me to identify my gender! Interesting!
The welcome email also encouraged me to
poke around the course site. I am easily intimi-
dated by technology, but the course design
seemed sensitive to that, and I found the “base
site” quite user-friendly. It was like a web-
based syllabus/course schedule, with hyper-
links on a sidebar leading to the course materi-
als. The page for each week contained four vid-
eo lectures available to click on and view as
many times as you’d like, with the ability to
pause, rewind, and fast-forward. Each week’s
course material page also included suggested
activities to enhance learning, and some of the
practices were interspersed between the video
lectures—short videos of teachers in action or
speaking about their practice, worksheets to
use for evaluating oneself or one’s students,
and additional reading material. I would take a
multiple choice, electronic quiz, accessible at
the bottom of each week’s course materials
page. The quizzes “went live” at the end of each
week, and I would submit them electronically
by the middle of the following week. I would
complete two essay assignments, and submit
them electronically for peer-assessment, a pro-
cess I had not heard of. As part of the peer-
assessment system, I would evaluate the com-
pleted essays of two fellow students based on a
common assessment rubric.
Without an essay assignment, suggested activi-
ty, or a video lecture to watch, I was impatient
to start, so I went to the forum, hesitantly, to
check out what was going on there. The first
post I read started with: “Hello everyone, My
name is Y____ and I live in India. I have got a
degree in Electronics and Communication En-
gineering and an M.A. in English Literature.”
India! There was also a student in Guyana, and
one from Burma! The Philippines, Mexico . . .
There seemed to be a lot of ESL-focused teach-
ers in the group.
Finally, the first lecture was available to view.
It was a clear, thorough introduction to what
the course would cover and how to use the
technical aspects of the course. In order to en-
sure fairness, an introductory email stated, all
students participating must agree to abide by
an academic honesty code of conduct. I was
delighted to agree to this and eager get going
with the course!
What Made It Great
Format
The week-long modules were broken into 10-
to 15-minute video lectures, which I could easi-
ly make time for throughout the week. I wore
headphones and took notes while watching the
lecture videos, to help me focus and concen-
trate. If I missed any information, I appreciat-
ed having the option to “rewind” and listen
again. If I wanted to spend more time looking
at an image the professor showed on screen, I
could pause the video for as long as necessary.
And, of course, if I was interested in reviewing
any of the material covered in previous video
lectures, I could access them any time.
The quizzes at the end of each week were chal-
lenging! After struggling through the first one,
I made a point to review my notes and the
course material from each week before taking
the quiz.
I work, and I’m always rushing to school,
and the train is annoying. With MOOCs,
I could go home, take a shower, drink a
cup of tea, and then go online and learn.
—Tara Rowley
4

5
The two short essays offered another valuable
opportunity to review my notes, synthesize my
reactions to the information from the lectures,
and articulate how I planned to apply what I
was learning. Two other students taking the
course “peer-assessed” my essays and I “self-
assessed” my own essay! I thought this form of
assessment was a truly innovative way to offer
feedback to thousands of students. It was an
interesting challenge to evaluate myself hon-
estly—a valuable lesson in personal accounta-
bility and independent learning.
Content
Because the subject matter related to my work,
I could directly apply what I was learning as I
was learning it. This gave me the self-
motivation necessary for an online learning
situation in which there wasn’t a “live” teacher
taking attendance and holding me, the student,
accountable. I approached the course with the
goal of professional development. The infor-
mation I absorbed through taking this course
significantly added to my “bag of tools,” and it
deepened my intellectual engagement with my
work.
What Could Be Improved
Content
I know it was an introductory course, but some
of the information felt too basic and, at times,
gratuitous. The final week’s video lectures, “A
World of Change,” “Outside of School,”
“Professional Development,” and “Questions of
Professionalism,” for example, felt drawn-out
and were far less practically applicable than the
earlier lectures. The lectures in week two, for
example, “Thinking About Thinking” and
“Teaching for Learning,” were particularly in-
teresting and useful to me, as they deepened
my pedagogical approach to engaging students
with specific metacognition practices (a schol-
arly term for “thinking about thinking”). I had
difficulty self-motivating and engaging with the
course during this last week. I think the infor-
mation presented in the final week of the
course could have been condensed into one
lecture or left out.
FinalThoughts
The video lectures and announcement emails
often urged students to engage with the
“forums.” When I first started the course, I
peeked briefly at the forums. They were always
brimming with hundreds of entries posted by
enthusiastic students from all over the globe. I
was mentally overwhelmed and exhausted af-
ter spending about three minutes scrolling
through, and the experience discouraged me
from looking at the forums again. I suppose it
might have been interesting to discuss the
course material with my fellow students—to
have, for example, a “dialogue” of my experi-
ence incorporating the practices suggested in
the video lectures—but I didn’t feel like I had
time to engage in this way, and besides, I was
able to share and discuss what I was learning
with my friends and colleagues—far preferable
to “e-discussion,” even if it’s multi-perspective,
international, fellow student/fellow teacher “e-
discussion.” Nonetheless, I value the experi-
ence of taking this course. I certainly plan to
take more MOOCs in the future to continue
flexing my self-directed learning muscles and
adding to my professional skill-set. I do think
I’ll stick with professional development
MOOCs on subjects I can discuss and activate
with real people in the real world. In fact, I’ve
signed up for another MOOC on a specific ESL
teaching approach. It starts later this month.
Even though online learning can’t quite repli-
cate classroom learning, it appears I’ve caught
the MOOC bug.
Polly Bresnick is a Writing
Specialist in the LEC.
5

6
Interview: MCNY President
Vinton Thompson
6
M
CNY President Vinton Thompson did not go to college to become a college
president. He studied biology at Harvard in the late ’60s, writing his senior
thesis under the late Stephen Jay Gould, the renown evolutionary biologist,
and then pursued a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, where he
carried out investigations in experimental fruit fly population genetics. In 1980, he was
hired as a full-time Assistant Professor of Biology at Roosevelt University, in Chicago,
an urban university serving a largely adult, commuter student body. At Roosevelt, he
took on administrative roles, eventually becoming Provost, and helped grow the univer-
sity’s downtown campus. In 2004, he was named Provost and Vice President for Aca-
demic Affairs at Kean University, in Union, New Jersey, where he oversaw the revitali-
zation of faculty scholarship and the development of many new programs, including the
university’s first doctoral programs. Four years later, in 2008, he became President of
MCNY. His work here has involved stabilizing enrollment, increasing the enrollment of
new students, leading the college through a successful regional reaccreditation visit,
and extending the campus to the Bronx. In this interview, he talks about the history of
distance learning, online classes, MOOCs, and the changing nature of higher education
in America.
Interview begins on the next page

7
7
Can you talk about the history of distance
learning?
Historically, distance education, particularly by
the federal government, has been viewed with
some suspicion. People have always treated
correspondence schools like they were voca-
tional things not of very high quality. I think
people tended to look at distance education
that way. And there’s still absolute schizophre-
nia of the federal government’s approach to
this. On the one hand, the federal government
would like people to do lots of online education
to reduce costs. On the other
hand, it’s extremely suspi-
cious about whether the qual-
ity of the program is good,
and whether we’re really veri-
fying that the person who says
they’re out there at the other
end of the connection is the
person they say they are.
These are not unreasonable concerns.
We’ve democratized, fantastically, higher edu-
cation: if you go back to the period before the
Second World War, fewer than ten percent of
people went to college, and barely ten percent
of people graduated from high school. We’re
now in the situation where something like 70
percent of people go on to higher education.
We’ve gotten high school graduation rates up,
and high school dropout rates aren’t nearly as
bad as they used to be, and this is true not only
for white students but for black and Latino stu-
dents. We said education is important, and
people have pretty much taken that to heart.
The issue is, now, that a lot of people aren’t
getting through college. That’s especially true
of people who come from relatively disadvan-
taged backgrounds. In a certain respect we’ve
solved the problem of access. Now there’s great
concern that we haven’t solved the problem of
success and completion. And there’s angst over
the question of whether through this process
we’ve diluted the nature of college degrees.
And so this whole issue of MOOCS and online
education plays out in that context.
What do you think colleges most fear about
online education?
There is a good bit of concern, on our own
board and nationally, that the net consequence
of moving toward a lot of online instruction, in
which more initiative is put in the hands of stu-
dents, may advantage the already-advantaged
and disadvantage the already-disadvantaged,
and lead to a brutally two-tier system of educa-
tion in which an elite handful
of students study in a more
traditional mode at residen-
tial colleges with live profes-
sors, and everybody else takes
online course with anony-
mous people somewhere who
may not be real professors in
the traditional sense. I think
there’s probably a danger of
things moving in that direction.
When was the first time you encountered
online distance learning?
In my last three years at Roosevelt University
in Chicago, 2000-2003, I was Provost and Aca-
demic Vice President and oversaw all the aca-
demics at the university. We had an early and
active online program in which we put a couple
of degrees at the master’s level entirely online.
It was through interacting with the dean of the
college of continuing education, who oversaw
this effort, and the person working immediate-
ly under her, that I first really got lessons in
understanding what online courses were, and
how they might function, and some of the ins
and outs of putting them together.
How did the students respond?
We marketed those programs essentially as
separate programs; they were not closely inte-
grated. So students came specifically because
There is concern that
online instruction may
lead to a brutally two-
tier system of
education.

8
they
wanted to take a fully online degree
program, and we enrolled people in places like
Poland. The people in the program were posi-
tive, because that’s what they were looking for.
There wasn’t this issue we face now of blended
classes, where you have a population that is, in
many cases, involuntarily exposed to distance
learning.
Do you have a similar vision for distance
learning at MCNY?
When I got here [five years ago], there had
been a lot of tentative efforts at instituting dis-
tance learning opportunities. At that point, we
had achieved some
fully online courses.
W e h ad no t
achieved any en-
compassing strategy
for distance educa-
tion. I thought it
was important that
we do so, and when
we did our 2009-
2014 Strategic Plan, we incorporated a number
of goals related to distance education, which
probably the most encompassing was a goal of
achieving initially 20 percent—we’ve now mod-
ified that to 20-30 percent—of content in every
program through online delivery, either
through pure online courses or through blend-
ed courses, recognizing that the circumstances
in different programs might lead to different
approaches.
What are the reasons for doing that?
There are a variety of reasons. One—and I
think this is the single most important one in
this circumstance—is to give flexibility in the
schedules of individual students. We serve
adult students as our primary market. One of
the major characteristics of adult students is
that they’re balancing a number of things in
their lives, and typically school is their third
priority, after their family and their job. The
nature of our education, where we encourage
people to study full-time while they often work
full-time and have significant family responsi-
bilities, leads to extremely full schedules. We
had talked loosely in the past about offering
flexibility to our students, and what we’ve real-
ly offered is convenience in the scheduling, in
the sense that we offer classes in the evenings
and on the weekends. But actual school sched-
ules are inflexible—you come when we sched-
ule classes, and there’s not much choice in
those schedules, because people go through a
fixed program. One way we could introduce
flexibility in that structure is to give students a
choice about when they study, through dis-
tance learning, so that they can take the 20 to
30 percent of their
c o u r s e w o r k
through distance
learning at times
that suit their com-
plicated schedules.
And that should
both make life easi-
er for our students
individually and
make our programs more attractive for stu-
dents. The option of working full-time while
going to school full-time is a very attractive
thing; it’s one of the main reasons students
come here. But we have to find realistic ways
for people to actually do that.
Another major reason for introducing distance
learning is that you can do things in a distance
learning mode that you can’t do in traditional,
conventional classes pedagogically. At this
point in history, it would be utterly uncon-
scionable to graduate students who have no
The right professor needs to manage
the course, someone who motivates
the discussions and is not a “Ghost.”
—Clarita Liepolt
8
Working full-time while going to
school full-time is one of the main
reasons students come here. But
we have to find realistic ways for
people to actually do that.

9
experience working in an online environment.
Almost anyone, right now, who does any job
that’s not manual labor—and most of our stu-
dent graduates are not going to be doing man-
ual labor—does a lot
of work, if not all, in
an online environ-
ment. There’s a ma-
jor practical learning
experience involved
in working in depth
in an online environ-
ment. You learn that by doing it, and you do it
in part by working in these courses.
And the third consideration—and this is also
important institutionally—is that if we admin-
ister online learning well, it should reduce the
pressure on our classroom space. For instance,
right now we tend to be chockfull of students
Monday through Thursday evenings. Our
classrooms are relatively unoccupied during
the day. They’re fairly well occupied on Satur-
day, but not as well as they could be. It’s very
expensive, particularly in New York City, to
rent space to accommodate peak demand. To
the degree that we can reduce pressure on
classroom space by administratively well-
chosen schedules for distance learning oppor-
tunities, we can serve more students for less
facilities costs. In the long run, that puts less
pressure on tuition, which should enable us to
lower costs for students.
Another consideration—and it’s a significant
one, though it wasn’t the driving force—is that
this will enable us this coming January to move
to a 14-week academic schedule. We presently
run three full 15-week semesters a year. I’m not
sure I know any non-profit four-year school
that does that; typically, what happens is that
summer sessions don’t offer either a full sched-
ule or don’t last 15 weeks. A 15-week schedule
poses difficulties for students and staff, be-
cause there’s not a lot of down time. With a 14-
week schedule we will be able to start a week
later in January, which will give a longer holi-
day break. It will give more time for people to
get grades in and processed; from the point of
view of recruiting, it will give more time to en-
roll new students without a rush in the begin-
ning of January.
We’ll also be able
to increase sub-
stantially the sum-
mer break, which
our faculty are re-
ally looking for-
ward to. And,
there’ll be longer breaks in the summer and
winter for students. It would not be possible to
run a 14-week schedule without the incorpora-
tion of distance learning.
Do you ever see MCNY offering a MOOC as an
elective or transfer credit?
I anticipate that, going forward, we will see one
of two things happen. First, we will see people
bringing, for credit, on transcripts, as transfer
students, courses that they’ve taken in MOOC
form. My guess is that we will accept those
courses, like we accept other transfer courses,
once they’re on the transcript. There’s already
a New York non-profit institution that does a
lot of distance education itself and is making a
specialty validating MOOC courses—Excelsior
College, in Albany.
Second, people will come to us with MOOCs
that have not been transcripted somewhere
else. We will eventually have to have some poli-
cy on that. My guess is that our policy will be to
follow the guidelines of recognized national
organizations. We already give credit for cer-
tain types of military experience, and there are
guidelines for doing that, published by the
American Council for Education. We adhere to
those guidelines; it’s one of the ways we’re a
veteran-friendly school. The American Council
for Education is also working on mechanisms
to give credits for MOOCs, and should they do
so, I think it would be very likely that we will
accept those courses in one form or another. In
9
At this point in history, it would be
utterly unconscionable to graduate
students who have no experience
working in an online environment.

10
that sense, MOOCs pose a challenge that isn’t
all that fundamentally different from students
bringing all external credit. You often have sit-
uations where the transfer credits don’t direct-
ly correspond to any particular course that you
give in your institution, so you give credit and
make informed decision about what substitutes
for what in your own curriculum.
Do you think there is chance that the MOOC
will be remembered as a “fad”?
I think that it’s not just a passing fad. But I
think the nature of MOOCs is going to trans-
form. There are hopes that people can find the
mechanisms to take online courses and perfect
the pedagogy in such a way that they’re not on-
ly inexpensive or free but very effective and,
particularly in situations where students need
remediation. Gates Foundation and Lumina
Foundation, which are the big private funders
of higher education initiatives and innovations
in the United States, are both putting money
into this. Whether it’ll be successful or not, I
don’t know. My own intuition tells me that in
situations where students need a helping hand,
human interaction is an important component.
And I am skeptical that we’re going to solve
this whole issue of cost, in conjunction with
access, through online education.
However, it also seems to me intuitively that
online opportunities, particularly in things like
mathematics, combined with the support of
live, empathetic instructors, may be, in the
long run, more effective than what we do now,
particularly for students who are struggling.
And there, I suspect—because I think a lot of
money is going to be thrown at this sec-
tor—within a
few years we’re going to end up with some real-
ly good online tools. I also see a world in which
people are conducting more and more of their
lives through the Internet. People will come to
expect to be able to do a lot of their school
work and interactions through the Internet,
and this will inevitably have to translate in one
way or another to pedagogical forms that re-
spect that. Distance education as it exists now
is the harbinger of that. What this is going to
mean overall for colleges, I don’t know.
It seems like, at their core, online classes and
MOOCs are attempts to address growing
needs/issues in higher education.
Society, on a per-capita basis, isn’t willing to
put the investment into individual college stu-
dents that we did in the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s, when a much smaller portion of the
population went to college. So now, what do
you do? One of the answers for the last ten,
twenty years in particular is, “Well, we’re going
to solve that problem by making loans easily
available, and that’s okay because all you folks
who run colleges have convinced us that a col-
lege education has such wonderful effects on
peoples’ earning potential, and therefore col-
lege is primarily a private good, and for people
who are getting this private advantage, it’s rea-
sonable that they pay for the good, and we’ll
front the money, and then they can pay it off
later.” But people are now very concerned
about whether the ratio of debt to return, eco-
nomic and otherwise, is sustainable. And,
again, one answer to that is to say, “Okay, we’ll
just find cheaper ways to do higher education,
and then people won’t have to go into so much
debt to achieve it.” MOOCs, I think, are so at-
tractive in many corridors because they seem
to offer a glimmer of possibility for doing that,
in, what ostensibly, on the face of it, is a highly
democratized environment. What could be
more democratized than [anyone] being able to
take a course at Stanford?
Interview by Nathan Schiller,
LEC Writing Specialist
They seem like a great option for people
who want to learn from home and feel
comfortable with computers.
—Huarquidia Dominguez
10

11
As much as I try to run away from it, eventually everything is goingto be online. I wouldn’t want to take an entire Master’s degreeonline. I need to be in a class setting. MOOCs take discipline. Youhave so much freedom—you don’t have to go to class, no one takesattendance. But it brings spice to your learning to see teachers fromAustralia and England. The next generation, that’s what they’ll be do-ing in schools. It’s good and bad.
—Yenie Perez
11
Polly Bresnick and Anthony Harrison (MBA, 2014) review the structure of his case study.
Scenes from the LEC

12
12
Learning To Learn
By Parker Pracjek
S
keptics and proponents alike typically
love to predict the fate of emerging inno-
vations. For those meant to succeed and
become integrated into the fabric of a market or
culture, there are often a host of lessons learned
and interesting standards that take shape. And
so it has been with the MOOC.
Though only a few years into the MOOC experi-
ment, nationally, it seems, we are moving be-
yond a honeymoon stage and into a serious
reckoning of what this phenomenon means for
higher ed, for MCNY, and for individual learn-
ers. Already the radical MOOC has entered ado-
lescence, growing pains and all, and its adult
features are starting to take form. Some of these
features include 1) democratization of access to
learning from field experts, 2) technology and
instructional design as co-facilitators of learn-
ing, and 3) a shift from instructor/institution-
directed instruction to student-directed. The
emergence of these features is good news for
many, but particularly for adult learners.
In looking to answer my curiosities about the
relevance of MOOCs for the MCNY community,
I returned to readings about adult learners and
andragogy. Andragogy, a system of ideas, con-
cepts and approaches to adult learning, was first
popularized by educator Malcolm Knowles in
1968. This model sees instructors more as facili-
tators helping learners maximize their learning
abilities. This approach is in sharp contrast to
teacher-directed instruction, which can be
said
to promote dependence and obedience
(Knowles, 1984). What Knowles and others ob-
served, and what many MCNY students would
consider self-evident, is that “people who take
initiative in educational activities seem to learn
more and learn things better than [. . .] more
passive individuals (Hiemstra & Sisco, 1990).
Indeed, MCNY’s Purpose-Centered Education
asks that the learner be a student of their own
learning through regular, intensive shaping and
application of knowledge in the field. So at its
core, MCNY seems to capture the importance of
individual learning continuing long after the
formal learning activity is completed in class.
But is this enough to satisfy the needs of today’s
adult learner?
Enter MOOC stage left. Suddenly, much of what
we know and revere about the traditional class-
room is called into question. With the appear-
ance of this MOOC on our stage, certain things
many of us have long taken for granted can be
seen in high relief: the traditional instructor/
institution has full responsibility for making
decisions not only about what will be learned,
but how and when it will be learned and if it has
been learned.
In many ways, the traditional classroom struc-
ture is alienated from the way we gather and
process information in our extracurricular lives.
As we navigate a city like NYC, a multitude of
adult demands and curiosities sparked by ac-
cess to new troves of information and media, we
are naturally engaging in the very activities re-
quired of learners in any MOOC scenario: we
are making connections with “various ‘nodes’ of
content [. . .] on the Web, aggregating content
and creating knowledge” (Morrison, 2013).
Certainly adult learners—to varying degrees and
I’d rather sit face to face with the profes-
sor. If I need a question answered, I need
it answered right away.
—Venita Rice

13
depending on the course content—have the
ability, need and desire to take responsibility
for their learning (Knowles, 1980). Theories of
adult cognitive development tend to agree that
adults are motivated to learn by a sincere de-
sire to solve immediate problems in their lives
and that mature adults cherish independence
and are responsible for their own actions
(Hiemstra & Sisco, 1990). In the MOOC model,
and more than in classic distance learning, the
learner is necessarily an empowered driver of
his or her learning and an active participant in
the assessment of knowledge.
At every turn, the LEC and the Office of Aca-
demic Support promote independent, lifelong
learning. Self-directed learning skills set all of
us up to be adaptive, inquisitive and connected
in a world in which rapid change seems to be
the only stable characteristic (Knowles, 1975).
Thankfully, the MOOC has lasted long enough
to impact how we think about our learning
and, quite possibly, how we can learn without
being taught.
Parker Pracjek is the
Director of Academic
Support.
References
Hiemstra, Roger. (n.d.). “Moving from pedagogy to
andragogy,” Adapted and Updated from Hiemstra,
R., & Sisco, B. (1990). Individualizing instruction. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from
http://www-distance.syr.edu/andraggy.html
Knowles, M. (1980). Modern practice of adult education:
from pedagogy to andragogy. Revised and updated.
New York: Cambridge.
Morrison, D. (2013, February 5). The MOOC
honeymoon is over: three takeaways from the
Coursera calamity [Blog]. Retrieved from: http://
onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/the
-mooc-honeymoon-is-over-three-takeaways-from-
the-coursera-calamity/
13
MOOCS At MCNY?
As MCNY continues to expand the number of
courses offered as either hybrid or fully-online,
we cannot ignore the MOOC craze that has
shaken up higher education over the past year.
Therefore, the Office of E-Learning continues to
monitor the trend toward MOOCs offered
through providers such as Coursera, edX, Udaci-
ty, Udemy, and others. In coordination with the
faculty and academic administration, we also hope
to develop a procedure for offering credit for
MOOCs delivered by another provider or institu-
tion that fit the necessary criteria for our differ-
ent programs.
New MOOCs in varying content areas are being
rolled out all the time as this method of course
delivery continues to develop and become more
popular. I believe that eventually there will be
MOOCs offered that can apply to all of the pro-
grams here at MCNY. Some day in the future, we
would love for MCNY to offer its own MOOC
through one of these providers. The Emergency
and Disaster Management MPA program has con-
sidered the development of a MOOC in an effort
to build on the momentum and global networks
made during the SMARMIE Conference held at
MCNY in March.
MOOCs are definitely here to stay, and the Of-
fice of E-Learning hopes to incorporate this type
of learning environment for students here at the
college in the near future. If you have taken a
MOOC on your own, we would LOVE to hear
your feedback on the experience. You can email
elearning@mcny.edu to share.
—Claire Machia
Claire Machia is the
E-Learning Coordinator.

14
14
Low MOOC Completion Rates
By Aleksandr Rusinov
N
owadays, MOOCs are getting a lot of
positive attention in the mainstream
media. One year ago, the New York
Times published an article titled “The Year of
the MOOC.” Clearly, MOOCs are part of the fu-
ture of education. But before we praise them as
the future, we should examine their alarmingly
low completion rates in more depth.
MOOCs attract many participants for two main
reasons: they are inherently “massive,” and tra-
ditionally they have not charged tuition fees.
This has led to completion rates—typically de-
fined as earning a certificate—hovering around
10 percent. In many cases, the statistics are
worse. Last fall, for instance, of the 12,725 stu-
dents enrolled in a MOOC called Bioelectricity,
at Duke University, only 345 of them (2.7%) at-
tempted the final exam.
To contextualize the low rates, let’s look at a
doctoral study titled “Deconstructing Disen-
gagements: Analyzing Learner Subpopulations
in Massive Open Online Courses.” By surveying
three Stanford MOOCs—Computer Science 101
(high school), Algorithms: Design and Analysis
(undergrad), Probabilistic Graphical Models
(grad)—the study identified four types of partic-
ipants: auditing learners, who watch video but
take few quizzes or exams; completing learners,
who view most lectures and take part in most
assessments; disengaging learners, who take
part only at the start; and sampling learners,
who watch the lectures at various times. For
each course, the study tracked the percentage of
participants according to these populations. In
all three classes, the highest percentages of par-
ticipants were sampling learners, while only the
high school class had greater than 8% of partici-
pants completing learners.
One reason for low completion rates may be
that MOOC participants are often professionals
with a college degree. MOOCs give these partici-
pants control over where, how, and with whom
they learn, but the participants do not seem to
take advantage. Another reason could involve
the fact that about 3 in 4 MOOCs students are
from outside the U.S. It may be difficult for
MOOC participants who do not speak English
as their first language to stay with a course. A
leading challenge for MOOC participants lies in
overcoming the lack of social presence and the
high level of autonomy. Without the ability to
work alongside a teacher and fellow participants
on problems and projects that involve collabo-
rative explanations, MOOC participants may
have less incentive to bother with courses.
We must also consider, though, that perhaps
completion rates are not the most useful tool
with which to measure MOOCs. While the tradi-
tional educational structure of the brick-and-
mortar classroom renders completing a course
and earning a degree vital for employment, the
ultimate purpose of MOOCs may prove to be
imparting information to as many participants
as possible. But, at the same time, in January,
Georgia Tech will offer its highly-ranked Mas-
ter’s Degree in Computer Science entirely
through MOOCs (and at a discount of $34,800).
This ground-breaking move could be the first
sign that education administrators view MOOCs
on the same level as traditional classroom
courses. We should pay attention to how many
students enroll in the program—but we should
be far more interested in how many complete it.
Aleksandr Rusinov is a Math

15
15
Percentage of Participants byType of
Learner in 3 Stanford MOOCs
Auditing Completing Disengaging Sampling
High school 6% 27% 28% 39%
Undergraduate 6% 8% 12% 74%
Graduate 9% 5% 6% 80%
Total number of participants: 2.9 million
Total number of countries: < 220

16
F
or curious individuals interested in tak-
ing a live dive into a MOOC course, this
article aims to offer a thumbnail view of
four major MOOC providers: Coursera, edEx,
MIT Open Courseware and Udacity. I had not
heard of MOOCs before our Luminaria issue,
and I hope my first impressions will offer a
starting place for your explorations of this new
learning format. If you head out into MOOC
territory, I’d like to know what you find.
Udacity
Udacity has blossomed in the last two years,
and its partnership to San Jose University
shows its Silicon Valley affinities, that is, a di-
verse engagement with all things Internet. In
terms of breadth of subject, Udacity courses
focus on five areas, all somewhat technology-
oriented: business, computer science, mathe-
matics, design and science. Courses such “How
to Build a Startup” or “Web Development—
How to Build a Blog” could spark an MCNY
student’s interest.
Like most MOOC providers, courses are free. If
one wants to get credit or certification for job
purposes, “modest fees” apply. All courses have
open enrollment, and often have quizzes along
what seems to be an adjustable timeline. Look-
ing over the list of available courses, there ap-
pear to be 28 classes at the time of this writing.
Courses are helpfully divided into beginning,
intermediate and advanced levels. Courses are
close-captioned in English, and can have subti-
tles in Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese,
and even Latin! To help students transition
into a new learning format, they often offer
videos and self-assessments.
Coursera
Among its 82 “starting soon” courses at the
time of this writing, Coursera offers classes
across a wider spectrum of subjects than Udac-
ity. Coursera has a greater offering in the hu-
manities, with classes such as “Modern and
Contemporary Poetry” or “9/11 and Its After-
math.” Stand out social services courses in-
clude “Saving Lives Millions at a Time: Global
Disease Control Policies and Programs,” “Care
of Elders with Alzheimer’s Disease” from The
John Hopkins University, “Introduction to
Sustainability,” “Disaster Preparedness,” or
even “The History of Rock.”
Coursera currently has 433 courses listed, alt-
hough it is unclear how many are currently
available. Coursera attempts to stand apart
from the herd pedagogically through interac-
tive exercises and use of peer review for stu-
dent work which could be useful particularly
for humanities courses. In fact, it could be said
that peer-to-peer feedback is one of the most
beautiful possibilities in MOOCland; unlike
classes bound by time and space, you have the
chance to bounce ideas against others—
literally—around the globe. Coursera boasts
courses from universities such as Columbia,
Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Museum of Modern
Art, Caltech, and the University of Pennsylva-
nia. Having established relationships with
First Walk on the MOOC: A
Brief Tour of MOOC Providers
16
By Yasmine Alwan

17
global universities, Coursera also offers classes
in Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Italian
and German.
The descriptions of courses are smoothly-
packaged and more consumer accessible to this
potential customer. Is sum, my visit to
Coursera stood out among providers. See Polly
Bresnick’s article (Page 3) for an account of her
experience taking a MOOC through Coursera.
MIT Open Courseware
In 2002, MIT Open Courseware began as an
impressive not-for-profit initiative by Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to place
all undergraduate and graduate course materi-
al online for global accessibility across time
and space. Currently, more than two thousand
courses offer a range of materials, reading lists,
lecture notes, and, in some cases, complete
textbooks by MIT professors, a lure for this
writer! Fewer courses are provided in a more
structured format, with video lectures.
Courses are given in English, Chinese, Dutch,
French, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese, Span-
ish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Courses
tend to be science-oriented, such as
“Innovation and Commercialization,” “A Glob-
al History of Architecture: Part 1,” “Classical
Mechanics, Introduction to Aerodynamics,” or
“Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics,” “Introduction
to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Conscious-
ness.”
There is a different feel moving through the
Open Courseware’s site, in part due to MI-
TOC’s different purpose and history. Rather
than a start-up channeling an innovative edu-
cational product, MITOC unfolded specifically
as a university’s attempt to turn itself inside
out as a public resource. I am struck by the
generosity and boldness of this first move by a
university so nationally and globally esteemed.
edEX
An offshoot of MIT Open Courseware, edEx is
a joint effort of MIT and Harvard. Course sub-
jects spanned the humanities, medicine, law,
nutrition to name a few. My walk-through of
the site yielded 51 new and current courses and
17 past courses. Courses that dovetail with LEC
student interests include “Statistics,”
“Descriptive Statistics,” “Introduction to Bio-
ethics,” “Ideas of the Twentieth Century” or
“Introduction to Global Sociology.”
The edEx user experience appears very
smooth; they include a demo MOOC course,
and a fairly similar set of supports that other
sites offer; their meet-ups around the world
seemed a stand-out feature.
I wish you a dynamic expedition into the thick-
ets and wilds of a new learning form that is
likely to innovate and proliferate even more
than we can yet imagine.
17
7 intriguing MOOCs from all over the world!
1. Begin Programming: Build Your First Mobile Game, University of
Reading (United Kingdom), Future Learn
2. The Future Of Storytelling, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
(Germany), iversity
3. Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works, California
Institute of the Arts, Cousera
4. Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction, Uni-
versity of Virginia, Coursera
5. Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead,
University of California, Irvine, Canvas
6. Dark Matter in Galaxies: The Last Mystery, International School for
Advanced Studies (Italy), iversity
7. Canine Theriogenology for Dog Enthusiasts, University of Minneso-
ta, Coursera
Yasmine Alwan is a
Writing Specialist in the
LEC.

18
M
any of my favorite math courses—
calculus, differential equations, line-
ar algebra—are offered online, for
free, for anyone in the world, and are taught by
distinguished professors from elite universities
like MIT and Harvard. I believe MOOC math
courses are appropriate for enhancing learning
across all levels, from basic skills to advanced
disciplines. But many advanced math courses
assume that a student has taken prerequisites,
which many colleges, including MCNY, do not
offer. MOOCs could efficiently tackle the pre-
requisite problem, though how well they will
prove as a math teaching tool is unknown.
I find that students fear math in a way they do
not fear writing. Writing is similar to speaking,
something we do all the time. Math, however,
is similar to little we do in our everyday lives,
and it involves formulas and calculations many
students find scary and confusing. To succeed
in math, one must become fluent in a discipline
before moving to a more complex one. Finance
classes ask students to calculate the risk of an
investment. But to do that, students need to
know how to apply standard deviation, which
means they have to take statistics—otherwise
they must play catch-up. I see a lot of this at
MCNY.
A classroom is an ideal place for math teach-
ing. In math, students do best in participative
learning environments, where they can speak
out and share information. But instructors
have a lot of information to get across in a class
session, and this doesn’t always leave time for
questions. Many math students need tutoring
so that they can ask how to get from Point A to
Point B at the moment an equation is being
presented.
Many MCNY students, who balance school
with jobs and families, don’t have the time for
independent tutoring. Eventually, students
most pressed for time will need to learn math
online. MOOCs could prove a viable alternative
to in-class instruction. Until the advent of the
MOOC, many math professors taught online
classes by Xeroxing textbook chapters and
posting them online. This was not necessarily
the instructors’ fault, as there had not been
great formats to post lecture videos, but it
made online math learning difficult. MOOCs
are changing these online platforms by allow-
ing professors to post videos of their lectures,
where they patiently explain topics using
whiteboards and additional graphics.
I am considering taking a Stanford MOOC
called “Statistics in Medicine.” I’m excited to
see how the instructors will use standard devi-
ation, test hypotheses, and correlate variables.
Without a doubt, I will rely on my statistics
background for support.
Barrington Scott is a Math
I travel home to Turkey. With MOOCs, if
I still want to attend my classes, I can. If
my visa expires, I can take my classes. If I
could meet with my professor over
Skype, that would be great.
—Seving Senol
MOOCs And Math
18
By Barrington Scott

19
They make you more accountable. I like that. I don’tlike to be micromanaged: assignments or expectations
can get miscommunicated, though webinars or voicechats diminish those instances.
—Dawn Mulcahy
19
Barrington Scott shows Maka Nadarovna Makharashvili (AS Business, 2014) how to calculate manufacturing costs.
Scenes from the LEC

20
Coordinator
Dwight Hodgson ext. 2437 dhodgson@mcny.edu
Office Manager
Sandra Ariza ext. 2438 sariza@mcny.edu
Writing Specialists
Nathan Schiller* ext. 2418 nschiller@mcny.edu
Yasmine Alwan ext. 2416 yalwan@mcny.edu
Polly Bresnick ext. 2429 pbresnick@mcny.edu
Math Specialists
Barrington Scott ext. 2449 bscott@mcny.edu
Aleksandr Rusinov* ext. 2446 arusinov@mcny.edu
*Available in the Bronx
About the Learning
Enhancement
Center (LEC)
The LEC, which publishes this news-
letter annually, offers a wide range
of services, at our Manhattan and
Bronx centers and online, to help
students develop their writing, math
and other skills necessary for aca-
demic success at MCNY. All MCNY
students can receive FREE one-on-
one tutoring in math and writing.
To schedule a session,
call, email, or visit us in person.
Website and Blog:
www.mcny.edu/academic_support/lec.php
www.mcny.edu/student_serv/lecblog/
Hours Locations Phone Email
Manhattan Campus: Manhattan Campus: Manhattan Campus: lec@mcny.edu
Monday-Friday: 9-7 Room 1293 (212) 343-1234 ext. 2438
Saturday: 10-4
Bronx Extension Center: Bronx Extension Center: Bronx Extension Center:
Hours vary by semester Room 508 (212) 343-1234 ext. 4011
LEC Staff
Editor’s Note
Our previous two
issues were published
on our blog, The Spe-
cialist. Although this
issue will be published
there as well, it marks
Luminaria’s return to
print—hence the be-
ginning of Volume 2.

Luminaria 2013: Rise of the MOOC

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