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November 2, 2012

The Year of the MOOC

By LAURA PAPPANO

IN late September, as workers applied joint compound to new office walls, hoodie-clad

colleagues who had just met were working together on deadline. Film editors, code-writing

interns and “edX fellows” — grad students and postdocs versed in online education — were

translating videotaped lectures into MOOCs, or massive open online courses. As if anyone

needed reminding, a row of aqua Post-its gave the dates the courses would “go live.”

The paint is barely dry, yet edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing.

Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million — growing “faster than

Facebook,” boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called

Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr.

Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher

education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and

now we have 40 employees full time.”

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is

not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the

year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now

offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton,

Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and

Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one

with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of

this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.” Casually draped over

auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this

MOOC stuff works.

“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.

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WHAT IS A MOOC ANYWAY?

Traditional online courses charge tuition, carry credit and limit enrollment to a few dozen to

ensure interaction with instructors. The MOOC, on the other hand, is usually free, credit-less

and, well, massive.

Because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll, faculty can’t possibly respond to

students individually. So the course design — how material is presented and the interactivity —

counts for a lot. As do fellow students. Classmates may lean on one another in study groups

organized in their towns, in online forums or, the prickly part, for grading work.

The evolving form knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social

networking. Unlike its antecedent, open courseware — usually written materials or videotapes

of lectures that make you feel as if you’re spying on a class from the back of the room — the

MOOC is a full course made with you in mind.

The medium is still the lecture. Thanks to Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional

videos, MOOC makers have gotten the memo on the benefit of brevity: 8 to 12 minutes is

typical. Then — this is key — videos pause perhaps twice for a quiz to make sure you

understand the material or, in computer programming, to let you write code. Feedback is

electronic. Teaching assistants may monitor discussion boards. There may be homework and a

final exam.

The MOOC certainly presents challenges. Can learning be scaled up this much? Grading is

imperfect, especially for nontechnical subjects. Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20

people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the

University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at

such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.

Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing

up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming

you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr.

Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and

earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

That’s still a lot of students. The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best

education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers,

and expand intellectual and personal networks. Three-quarters of those who took Dr.

Patterson’s “Software as a Service” last winter on Coursera (it’s now on edX) were from outside

the United States, though the opposite was true of a course on circuits and electronics pilotedMa1s1s/2iv9e/1O2pen Online Courses Are Multiply ing at a Rapid Pace - NYTimes.com

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last spring by Dr. Agarwal. But both attracted highly educated students and both reported that

over 70 percent had degrees (more than a third had graduate degrees). And in a vote of

confidence in the form, students in both overwhelmingly endorsed the quality of the course: 63

percent who completed Dr. Agarwal’s course as well as a similar one on campus found the

MOOC better; 36 percent found it comparable; 1 percent, worse.

Ray Schroeder, director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the

University of Illinois, Springfield, says three things matter most in online learning: quality of

material covered, engagement of the teacher and interaction among students. The first doesn’t

seem to be an issue — most professors come from elite campuses, and so far most MOOCs are

in technical subjects like computer science and math, with straightforward content. But

providing instructor connection and feedback, including student interactions, is trickier.

“What’s frustrating in a MOOC is the instructor is not as available because there are tens of

thousands of others in the class,” Dr. Schroeder says. How do you make the massive feel

intimate?

That’s what everyone is trying to figure out.

Many places offer MOOCs, and more will. But Coursera, Udacity and edX are defining the form

as they develop their brands.

THE FLAVOR OF THE MOOC

Coursera casts itself as a “hub” — Dr. Ng’s word — for learning and networking. The learning

comes gratis from an impressive roster of elites offering a wide range of courses, from computer

science to philosophy to medicine. Not all are highbrow or technical; “Listening to World Music”

from the University of Pennsylvania aims to broaden your iPod playlist.

While Coursera will make suggestions, Dr. Ng says, “ultimately all pedagogical decisions are

made by the universities.” Most offerings are adapted from existing courses: a Princeton

Coursera course is a Princeton course. But the vibe is decidedly Facebook — build a profile,

upload your photo — with tools for students to plan “meet-ups” with Courserians in about

1,400 cities worldwide. These gatherings may be bona fide study groups or social sessions.

Membership may be many or sparse.

No one showed at the meet-up that Stacey Brown, an information technology manager at a

Hartford insurance company, scheduled for a 14th-floor conference room on a Thursday after

work, despite R.S.V.P.’s from a few classmates in the area. He’s taking three Coursera MOOCs,

including “Gamification” from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. In addition toMa1s1s/2iv9e/1O2pen Online Courses Are Multiply ing at a Rapid Pace - NYTimes.com

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the learning — and dropping to bosses that he’s taking a Wharton course — Mr. Brown says, “I

hope to get a network.”