Can MOOCs make learning scale?

One of the big challenges of education is that it doesn't really scale well. At primary and secondary level, pupil teacher ratios are political hot potatoes with good reason. At big ratios students don't get individual attention. Bump classes up beyond any small number and the teacher can't keep a handle on who is or isn't up with the play, can't dip down and interact one to one with the students to work through a difficulty. They can't teach, basically. They fall back on lecturing and crowd control.

Lecturing now, is a different story. Lecturing scales really well. You can lecture a million almost as easily as 10. People (usually lecturers, as you would imagine) often mix up lecturing, as the signature pedagogy of the University, with teaching. Ideas like iTunesU and Youtube.com.edu are great for disseminating lectures, but that isn't teaching and learning. It should be called iTunesLectures, not iTunesUniversity.

Technology has not, so far, been able to solve this problem. People in technology circles who have never taught anything, and evidently, haven't learned much either, often miss this point. The same webtech wheezes that have ripped up conventional media can't rip up Education. Education isn't media.

MOOC, or Massively Open Online Courses, are one fair effort at leveraging technology to make education scale. There's a good paper about the format and the issues involved online now "The Ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC" which gives a good overview of the model, and the issues encountered. It's worth a read. Basically in a MOOC the course is online, it's somewhat unstructured, the format uses pretty much any kind of web tool you can think of to facilitate a big networked conversation on the topic. Courses can have thousands of participants, some for credit, other not, some engaging, some not. The first instance ran in 2008, led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, key thought leaders in the field.

Personally, I found the format hard to engage with and commit to, but that's probably more to do with me than it. I'm slow to pan the format, because it's early days, and only a handful of MOOCs have run, but the paper linked above seems to resonate with my concerns about it. I don't think it's going to solve the problem as it stands, but it's probably as close as we've gotten.

Learning comes, in part from a dialogue.  That dialogue is one to one, between someone who knows a lot about it, and someone who wants to know a lot about it. Lecturing (or reading) is only half of it, it's a monologue. It's often hard to ask questions in a lecture, impossible in a book.

A core part of the concept of a MOOC is peer to peer learning, through dialogue. But it's a dialogue between 2000 people who all know a little bit about the topic, with the course leaders piping in from time to time. It's as likely to confuse as enlighten. A big online course, with some lecture/readings, some student chats is a good effort at a fusion, but even the most hyperactive educator isn't going to be able to run around and engage with more than a few dozen students, or have any clear idea of who knows what.

I think perhaps the MOOC a stronger model for the humanities, where there is often no single clear answer (I squandered my college years in the hard sciences, where we pretend there is). It's certainly a better model than everyone sitting in a lecture hall taking notes. On balance, until something new comes out on the technology side, it's probably one of the best models around for mega scale cost effective learning. If you teach in University, get on one if you have a chance, and see how they work. If I hear of another coming up I'll let you know.

The Quantum of Knowledge

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but just how little is a bit of knowledge?

The question matters for the future of Universities as their structure is determined by the scale they use as a measure of knowledge. Shipbuilders, planemakers and carmakers do fundamentally similar things, but on such wildly different scales that they appear to have little in common. A shift in the scale could have seismic implications for how Universities work.

University administrators measure knowledge in credits. In Europe, these are standardised according to the Bologna Framework as the ECTS, full time students are loaded up with 60 credits a year, 180-240 for a Primary degree, another hundred or so for a Masters. They are usually lumped into standard 5, 10 or 15 credit modules - the 40 foot shipping containers of knowledge. Academics would denounce it all as a 'Fordian Construct'.

("What's that?"

"Who cares" shrugs the College Registrar.)

Just like the shipping container, it's a powerful concept. Standard sized blocks on knowledge can be compared, mixed and matched across countries. Just like a coastal container ship, learners can in theory load up on modules in different Universities and, once enough have been loaded, have them signed off as degree. Another analogy is the invention of money. Money provides a standard commonly accepted measure of economic value, as the ECTS does for learning. It is nothing less than the monetisation of knowledge. The infrastructure of the University, from it's timetables, lecture halls to it's Virtual Learning Environments are bent around this idea. The modern VLE, focused on who has access and control over blocks of content 15 credits wide and one term long, has more in common with the software running a container port than a learning tool.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Connectivists. Echoing the structure of networks and synapses, they would see the quantum of knowledge as a useful connection between pre-existing pieces of knowledge, people, facts or systems. The quantum unit of knowledge is very small. It might be measurable, but it isn't fungible, no more than wheat can be traded grain by grain. It's more useful for teaching and understanding how to transfer and create knowledge than the administrators ECTS containers. In practice, this idea of knowledge acts more like a continuum, without the artificial boundaries of the credit unit. Tools like like Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) are conceived as frameworks for guiding it.

("Can we get a PLE from Microsoft?" asks the University IS manager.

"I dunno. Maybe we could figure something out with Sharepoint" mutters the underling.)

These two conceptions of the quantum of knowledge are as far apart as the kilogram and the electron mass. They are framed for very different purposes, driven by different logics. Neither is wrong, both are useful, in their place

But just because neither side is wrong, doesn't mean that one might not displace the other.

Currently the module, made up of credit units, is economically dominant, and Universities are shaped around them. But the Internet allows a much greater granularisation of knowledge.Instead of getting omnibus newspapers each morning, we get the news we need instantly when we need it. This will likely evolve to include more sophisticated tools to manage and measure knowledge as the century progresses. This granularisation presents a potential existential threat to the current model of the University towards the mid 21st century.

With no real competition, Universities ruled the roost. Credible knowledge came in degrees. But where the half life of modern knowledge is increasingly short, the logic of buying it in 200 ECTS degree sized chunks weakens. Indeed, the emergence of modules and credits as sub components of degrees is themselves a reflection of this process, as whole degrees are atomised into more bite sized chunks. As the internet facilitates this granularisation, Universities must reinvent themselves to reflect it, become less like container ports of knowledge, and more like Sushi bars or supermarkets of knowledge, where students pick up exactly what, and how much they need. That might indeed be a dangerous thing.