EDMT and Beyond

When I was teaching an undergraduate technology course at The University of Arizona ten years ago, I recall students were upset in the fall semester that they had to retrieve their syllabus from my web page. The next semester a sea change had occurred and colleagues were reporting that students were upset if their syllabus was NOT available online.

Now this apparent sea change, Melbourne University in Australia has announced the number of enrollments on its online courses is now higher than the amount of people signing up to campus-based education.

The online announcement was breathless but, just to clarify, the university means their free online courses run through Coursera. Often thousands of people begin these free courses then find they lose interest and enthusiasm and many do not complete.

I am not at all surprised at the uptick in registrations and factor in basic human curiosity and the draw of getting something free. I started a Coursera course last summer to figure out how essays would be graded (more on that in a later post). Companies running these MOOCs are working very hard to roll them out and develop a name for themselves (and, granted, trying to provide a high quality educational experience) but we are in early days yet. The data on the numbers of completions and a better profile of who their students are and what their intentions are in taking the courses will help to tell the full story of their success. In addition, once 12,053 eager and curious students take your macro-economics offering, how many will sign up to take it again?

On the horizon, will there be a movement for Higher Education to begin accepting these online certificates as valid credits?

With the rise of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) offered by many large universities, and now some smaller ones, an interesting discussion has been revived.

Many students bring to their higher education careers some excellent life/work experiences that, some might argue, universities have largely ignored. To begin down the higher education path they must traverse what must seem like a gauntlet of courses with redundant information and skills in order to get to more challenging topics upstream. In order to fit into a particular program, students must prove they have already mastered a set of requisite skills, sometimes quite refined skills, through requirements of their day job. They need to prove that they are not neophytes.

With over 40 million people in the US who started a post-secondary program but never completed, the theory is that adult students are more likely to earn a degree (or credential) if they receive credit for prior learning.

Online education will play a significant role

Some states, seeing enormous benefits, are taking an interest in competency-based learning, which places strong emphasis on taking account of prior learning experience. Last August, in Tennessee, a commission argued that universities should value the diversity of their students.  This diversity includes the unique experiences, interests, and intellectual pursuits that lead to the acquisition of knowledge that may be at the college level.

The trick is to figure out how to define prior learning and then assess it. My colleague from The University of Arizona, Gary Rhoades, suggested, “it cheapens a college education, cheats the student and society, and prioritizes stamping students as certified over providing them with a quality education.”

For that very reason, I think we need to keep control of the assessment piece. This area of interest will grow (and should grow) in Michigan as more soldiers serving overseas return to the work force and as more of our present work force seeks retraining through higher education. This retraining will make online education more important than ever, but our new goals should include figuring out what skills can transfer into our programs.

The discussion in higher education is now turning to the idea that students could earn credits at the beginning of their new academic career through an assessment of their prior learning. That is where MOOCs appear. These courses, open to anyone, might be the way for individuals to prove that they have mastered some of those underpinning skills.