If MOOCs don’t work, what does?
Practically anyone with a skill can create a MOOC. There are many free platforms to host your MOOC. There are millions of people across the world who wish to acquire new skills, and join to learn through MOOCs every day.
If MOOCs are so popular, why hasn’t traditional education been disrupted by it? Why haven’t MOOCs brought universities to their knees?
You’ve probably heard the answer before.
MOOCs. just. don’t. work.
“96% of people who register for a MOOC fail to complete them.”
If you’re a passionate teacher who wishes to offer impactful learning and deliver outcomes for your students, you’re already aware that MOOCs simply don’t deliver those results. While MOOCs can help you reach millions by scaling you as a teacher through videos, it’s often at a big cost - most students don’t achieve the outcomes they are looking for.
Austen Allred of Lambda school realised this very early on and built an entirely new company to teach coding out of that insight - Lambda School - an outcome-oriented coding school that only gets paid if the students get a job that pays above $50k annually.
Why don’t MOOCs work?
The modern MOOC — without live and interactive teacher engagement — is essentially an online version of a book. When it comes to mass adoption, it faces the same problems books face - few are able to finish reading a book. Lack of human engagement adversely affects most course takers.
The MOOC format does not encourage the exchange of thoughts and ideas among learners. The lack of instructor involvement also means that there is no follow-up with the student, or any assurance along the way that the student’s learning trajectory is headed in the right direction. At the course’s conclusion, only the learner can determine if he or she was successful.
MOOCs work only for the motivated self-learners - a minority among the ones who wish to up-skill themselves. The majority need help; they need guidance, not just in terms of lessons and structure, but in terms of human-interaction, validation and motivation.
Self-paced MOOCs are a failed promise and it’s time to move on.
So, what works?
Let me speak from my personal experience running a one of kind online school in India.
At Startup Village, while running online learning programs to help undergraduate students launch startups and acquire skills, we experienced the problems students and teachers face first-hand. Through many iterations, we arrived at a fine-tuned process and tooling to produce true learning outcomes for undergraduate students in India. These were our learnings:
MOOCs were built around the idea of scalable content, and massive reach. While the intent was good, it simply didn’t work in the real world.
Rather than optimizing for scale, optimize for a good learning experience. To do that, focus on:
Hands-on tasks, that let students learn-by-doing.
Teacher-student interactions that allow students to reflect on their mistakes, and grow.
Optimize for learning experience, but allow teachers to scale their efforts online.
What does a learning program designed around hands-on tasks and teacher-student interaction look like?
These are its building blocks:
Rich content that forms the basis for the skills that a student will learn.
Tasks that require students to perform specific actions and report their results.
Personalized feedback from teachers, after reviewing the student submissions.
Live sessions from teachers that explain and expand on course content.
Enabling discussion of challenging concepts among peers.
Acknowledge that a teacher’s time is expensive. Enable asynchronous and efficient communication between teacher and student.
At Pupilfirst, we started building technology and processes around the above tenets. It took us 4 years, and many iterations through first-hand teaching experience to arrive at its current form. As a team, we don’t believe in the use of proprietary software in the field of public education, which we’re involved in. As a result, we decided to open-source the entire platform. You can look it up at git.pupilfirst.com.
Lambda school arrived at the same conclusions as above. They offer an intense 30-week program for total beginners to become industry-ready developers. Rather than expecting students to mindlessly consume content, they built their program around all the hands-on support it gives students to learn and complete the curriculum. Kudos to them for innovating on their fee structure too.
Using Pupilfirst, the open source LMS, you can launch a Lambda-esque school of your own, with your own brand and on your own website.
To know more about my experience helping students achieve real learning outcomes, find me on Twitter at @g3Mo or send me an e-mail.