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Sink or swim: students who struggle may be ¡®just left behind¡¯

Massive open online courses (Moocs) fail to support students, offer outdated pedagogy and should not be run by for-profit companies, a conference has heard.

Speaking at the Online and Open-access Learning in Higher Education: Moocs, New Pedagogies and Business Models event in London on 5 February, Josie Taylor, professor of learning technology and director of the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, said Mooc providers had not done enough to help struggling students.

¡°If you think the target audience for the Mooc you are about to launch could include a lot of inexperienced learners, then as a teacher, as a pedagogue, you have an obligation to provide for them ways in which they can be supported,¡± she said. ¡°If you don¡¯t, you are abdicating your responsibility to the people you are encouraging in - and ethically that is not a good thing to do.¡±

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She said feedback from some Moocs suggested that participants are ¡°just left behind¡± if they do not understand the course content.

Professor Taylor expressed opposition to Moocs being run for profit, despite the fact that Futurelearn, the UK-based platform announced by The Open University in December last year, will be profit-seeking.

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¡°What are the ethics of driving these developments for profit? In the UK- based education system I would like to keep them as not-for-profit¡­the ethics of collecting data on students and using it for institutional gain, I would question,¡± she said.

Of the ¡°big three¡± US platforms, Udacity and Coursera are run for profit, while the third, edX, is run as a not-for-profit organisation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Also at the event, Diana Laurillard, professor of learning with digital technologies at the London Knowledge Lab - a collaboration between Birkbeck and the Institute of Education, both University of London - questioned the motives of organisations offering Moocs.

She singled out Coursera, which offers 221 courses from 33 universities including the University of Edinburgh and the University of London International Programmes.

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¡°The reason why venture capitalists are putting $22 million (?14 million) behind Coursera is not because they believe in the importance of nurturing the individuals. It¡¯s because they see all that data they can use,¡± Professor Laurillard said.

She questioned Moocs¡¯ quality of teaching. ¡°They are not a revolution. So much of the pedagogy is this presentational, talking heads sort of thing. We¡¯ve been telling ourselves for years we need to get away from that pedagogy, and now here it is slamming back at us again.¡±

chris.parr@tsleducation.com