Prof Dave Pritchard
This guy teaches both a campus and MOOC course on physics. He is no amateur, a world-class researcher in atomic physics, winner of four major research prizes and three students who won Nobel prizes. When he compared their learning gains, he was astonished at the results. “I had hoped that because they (campus cohort) went to our classes, they would learn a lot more”.
Given the many positive announcements from vendors and
negative reactions from academics about MOOCs, there is a remarkable lack of research on learning outcomes. Why this lack of interest? Well one feature of academic
research is that it rarely looks at itself, for fear of what it will find. The lecture is the stand-out
example. Despite many decades of research showing that lectures, and hterefore the
professional job title ‘lecturers’, make little pedagogic sense, most academics
will dive into the trenches of irrational indignity in their defence. But reson will prevail and on MOOCs
we are now seeing some wonderful research by the likes of MIT and the
University of Edinburgh.
Standout study
One standout study by MIT compares campus with MOOC students on the
same course. It tackles the key issue; do students learn using MOOCs
and how does this compare to the much more expensive campus course? If it is
true that students learn more or as much on a MOOC, then the cost differential
is such that it makes absolute sense to use MOOCs for these courses. This is a
solution to the ballooning costs in HE. Even of the students learn less, there
is still a strong argument for using MOOCs in terms of costs. Far too many
researchers ignore this key issue – the massive reduction in cost.
Enter this study on Physics. It is a introductory, review
course on mechanics with an emphasis on strategic problem solving. It starts
with straight line motion through to momentum, mechanical energy, rotational
motion, angular momentum and harmonic oscillation. The interesting addition is the
content on problem solving that requires several different concepts and
approaches leading to a single solution.
1000 students who completed the MOOC (Certificates of
Completion) were compared with their similarly scored counterparts on the
campus course. The relative progress across all groups was roughly equal across
all groups. Identical pre- and post-tests were given to assess learning gains.
Results
What surprised the researchers was that the online students
did as well as the campus students, and this is the interesting part –
regardless of previous academic experience, whether they had a PhD, Masters,
Bachelors or high-school diploma. In fact, the MOOC generated “slightly more
conceptual learning than a conventionally taught on-campus course”. But there
was a further piece of analysis that was even more surprising. When comparing
MOOC students with MIT campus students , even though
the campus students had received a lot of extra input and instruction, the
relative results were the same with “no
evidence of positive, weekly relative improvement of our on-campus students
compared with our online students”.
Conclusion
This is the only study of its type that I know but would be pleased to hear about more if they focus on learning outcomes. At last we are beginning to see some sensible research that
cuts through both the hype and defensive posturing. Good, level-headed
academics and institutions are doing what should have been done years ago –
researched the learning and cost outcomes. The researchers are now going on to
look at what caused the learning. This is good work and long overdue.
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