Misguided Moves in Ed-tech, yet Un-realized, Un-rectified
Neetin Agrawal
Entrepreneur | Ex-SVP Toppr & Byju's | Angel Investor | Author | IIT | ISB
In 2012, Coursera, Udacity and Edx were found with a lot of fanfare as “the next big thing”. MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) was about to enter a common-man’s dictionary.?
These companies have mostly been bleeding. Completion rate of students has been low. In this article, let's try to understand what has been the real problem.?
Doubts of Students
Obviously, in MOOCs, there is very?limited interaction with teachers compared to offline classes. Thus students can't ask their doubts that efficiently in real time. So MOOCs had to fail. This sounds logical but please wait a minute!
I took face-to-face classes in IIT along with 60 classmates. 50 odd of them never asked even a single question to the professor in the class in the entire 4 years. 6-7 of them would have asked no more than 5 questions in 4 years. (MBA classes may be different.)
Interaction & asking doubts to professors are not so well understood topics in education. They were not the true reasons for failure of MOOCs contrary to what we may be tempted to believe.
Learning: A Social Activity
When students come to class, they interact among themselves and learn-cum-enjoy with each other. Humans are social after all. MOOCs can’t imitate that. Wait!!!
But most social activities have moved to the internet on social media. Think about sports. Kids used to play traditional games with so much fun. That used to be a great social activity but now, kids find online games much more interesting. Even entertainment, like watching movies, is moving online on personal devices rather than group social activity.
Why can’t the same happen with MOOCs? So this is again not the right reason.
The Best for the Best!
“Best professors from the MITs and the Stanfords of the world will be able to teach everyone. So the best education will flow to all.” This was the very fundamental thought behind MOOCs.?
This may make sense on the surface but a deeper dive will suggest that this argument is flawed at its very root.
Over ages, these professors have tuned their style of teaching as per the bright brains they face. That’s no way going to work for less bright learners, they have different psychology, different intellect, different motivation.?
领英推荐
When you teach the top 0.1% of human brains, you just need to transfer the knowledge. But when you teach the rest, you have to do a lot more.
Give me the Zuckerberg, keep the Aristotle
Professors often complain that most students lose interest in academics once placements are done in the colleges. The practical reality is that universities today are not simply the centers of learning, they also act as a placement vehicle for students at the end of the programme.?
If an educational programme is very good from a learning perspective but fails to place students, it’s not valued by most of the students.
With this in backdrop, if employers were not to give the same weight-age to online certificates earned by students though MOOC based programmes, MOOCs were bound to tumble.
Dating Netflix, Hating MOOCs
Discipline is necessary when you don’t love doing something.?
In an offline college environment, you have to come to class on time, attendance is a must, you can’t leave the class in between. This discipline works well to hold students even if the lectures are so so.
In MOOCs, the very basic idea is freedom of the learner. There is no rigid structure of discipline here. So, for MOOCs to work, lectures had to be mind-blowing so that students would find them to be as sticky as a Netflix series. If not that much, then at least somewhat.
But it’s sad that the money & effort which goes in making learning modules is nowhere in comparison to what goes in making entertainment series.
That’s It.
Despite all this, MOOCs will eventually succeed in a big big way. We humans know how to learn from mistakes and get it corrected.
There are some other important points related to MOOCs which I have not mentioned in the interest of keeping the article short. Please share your thoughts and comments. Do you also believe MOOCs will eventually rule?
Mcl employee at MCL
2 年Yes it's absolutely true.
Head BD & HR Leader, Altruist BPO
4 年I believe that MOOCs will come up the curve and become mainstay in open learning because there is true need for it now,? and it has become a viable business. The happiest thing of course, would be when a pure play entertainment company invests in an edtech company. I am sure that day will come.
CFO at Sterling Accuris Diagnostics
4 年Good thought especially the one about expert+psychologist+performer... The education system has been evolving since ages and it has always evolved to serve larger population and has added a lot of burden on itself with time. What we learnt in 3rd or 4th class is being taught to children in early years of school. In old times education was about learning social and fighting skills while today it is about technology. I think the flaws mentioned by you have always existed since ages, that is why we had Ram and other students in same group wherein Ramji excelled like anything. I believe every student is different while you cannot mould education for every student. Everyone should learn some basic things and take their own career and path of life.
Vice President Finance at PepsiCo
4 年Great article.. MOOC will indeed succeed. It’s a matter of time and in fact the last 6 months has changed lot of our perception around on premise working and learning. The world is changing - and this time the pace of change is really fast!
Architecting the Cloud @ Google | IIT Roorkee
4 年Nice article! Gave a different perspective to look at MOOCs!