14. 3000
2000
1000
0
active
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Number of students
Week
A forum
A lectures
A quiz
3985
enrolled
MOOC Participation 10209
809
599
92
Editor's Notes
Intro: explore 4 concepts, use data to illustrate points. We do know some things, even if we don’t know that future.
Scale
Concept of Scalable education is important: First was the book
Question: when does it work?
Traditional lectures e.g.
Note the difference between traditional online courses and MOOCs, former don’t scale
Role of open source
Revenue
What are the costs and benefits
Costs (instructor time, wordcloud of people, graph of different estimates, me, MS, MIT, texas etc.)
Benefits (no money! Sweaters…, PR (joke), loss-leader)
But if there’s credit in the future…
Big benefit is being on top of developments – institutional and individual knowledge
Students
Ask audience to imagine. Daphne quote? Imagine vs reality. Not young, male 3rd world striver. Middle-aged, educated, women, european or euro-descent.
MOOCs work for people who are intelligent and motivated, and can handle academic work (track record!)
Future
Geosciences is behind the curve on MOOCs, just as it is in online education generally
Media doesn’t help – continually confuses scalable MOOCs with non-scalable traditional online education
Pandora’s box!
Georgia Tech MS degree
Credit for MOOCs (students do as well on assessments, show results)
Future universities: will we be forced to unbundle our money making GEOL 101 classes from our loss-making labs and graduate programs? (images of lectures vs one on one teaching)
Disaster for budgets?
Only 10 universities
These data are from the ninth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education.
Total and Online Enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions (higher education) from 2002 - 2010; Every year since the first report in this series in 2003 the number of students taking at least one online course has increased at a rate far in excess of the growth for the overall higher education student body. This year is no different. The most recent estimate, for fall 2010, shows an increase of 10% over fall 2009 to a total of 6.1 million online students.
The growth from 1.6 million students taking at least one online course in fall 2002 to the 6.1 million for fall 2010 translates into a compound annual growth rate of 18.3% for this time period. For comparison, the overall higher education student body has grown at an annual rate of just over 2% during this same period - from 16.6 million in fall 2002 to 19.6 million for fall 20103.
Many introductory geoscience courses are taught online (e.g. physcial geology, natural hazards, introductory atmospheric science, etc). Very few higher level courses.
Atlantic International University has a geology BS (https://www.aiu.edu/Bachelor%20of%20Geology.htm) allegedly – not accredited.
Many environmental science related programs in which you can get an entire Bachelors (Penn, Wisconsin system, Illinois, in my part of the world) or Masters
Does it work? Here is the opinion of Academic Leaders
~2/3 say online is ‘‘at least as good’’ -- those who rate online as either the same or superior to face-to-face.
Students have essentially the same approach. About ¾ say it is about the same or superior
Research indicates that learning outcomes are about the same.
Discussion Forum - Examples from ESE 445
Questions for thought (energy), initial posting, 2 responses, e.g., peak oil -big event or ho hum; opinion on hydrofracking + shale gas, oil sands and Keystone pipeline, “clean coal” technology, carbon sequestration and other geoengineering activities, future of nuclear energy, Yucca Mountain -yes or no?
Sustainability tip, news story, Web site, journal article; most valuable Sustainability feature
From Eileen’s GEOL 100 - Comment on Durant quotation, rejection of continental drift, volcano prediction
16 on Coursera – 7 are on global warming!
0 on Udacity
3 on edX (2 energy, 1 global warming)
The first geoscience MOOC
70,000 enrolled students so far aboput 5K finished “passed”)
Closest on campus equivalent class has finished 160 over the same period of time.
Can do this as MOOCs scale: adding a marginal user is negligible in terms of additional work, and actually helps the course community.
70,000 enrolled students so far aboput 5K finished “passed”)
Closest on campus equivalent class has finished 160 over the same period of time.
Can do this as MOOCs scale: adding a marginal user is negligible in terms of additional work, and actually helps the course community.
70,000 enrolled students so far aboput 5K finished “passed”)
Closest on campus equivalent class has finished 160 over the same period of time.
Can do this as MOOCs scale: adding a marginal user is negligible in terms of additional work, and actually helps the course community.
70,000 enrolled students so far aboput 5K finished “passed”)
Closest on campus equivalent class has finished 160 over the same period of time.
Can do this as MOOCs scale: adding a marginal user is negligible in terms of additional work, and actually helps the course community.
From WSJ, Some interest statistics: To graduate, they will never have to step foot on campus and will pay about $6,600, compared with about $44,000 for residential students. (From Rutenbar, October 2013)
2X more people applied in the last 3 weeks than they received all last year. 14X increase in US residents (1854, which is 79% of the total 2359 applicants) MIT is also starting an edX course seqeuence called the "Xseries" in subjects like Computer Science and Supply Chain management, where students can take a proctored test after the MOOC and get a "verified certificate".
Future universities: will we be forced to unbundle our money making GEOL 101 classes from our loss-making labs and graduate programs? (images of lectures vs one on one teaching)
http://arbiteronline.com/2010/09/27/to-go-or-not-to-go-class-attendance-affects-success/
Disaster for budgets?
Only 10 universities.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruined_Tower_-_geograph.org.uk_-_32550.jpg
State-of-the-art instruction now typically blends technology with f2f teaching
SotA instruction involves active learning and engagement.
Many of these techs are online related – video pre-lectures, pre-quizzes for reading, online portfolios, blogging.
