Both are important. There are multiple questions to be asked.
For extremely self motivated people, MOOCS are a win, no doubt. Again, MOOCs are definitely better than no MOOCs.
But the promise was that MOOCs can just replace college to a large degree, because the content you get in college will be online. In that instance the question becomes "do MOOCs work for most people?" For what we'll call the "average" person, studies have shown that just isn't the case. Most people don't learn well from MOOCs, unfortunately.
Therefore what we're learning is that a non-trivial amount of what makes a college education successful is some combination of the following things that MOOCs don't have: external pressure, scheduled courses, due dates, a community of learners, a physical campus, etc.
As such, I view part of the next step to figure out which of those aspects MOOCs are missing that are vital to the mix in order to help average people learn the things they need to know. Traditional education just says all of them are necessary, but I'm not convinced that's the case.
Do most people learn well from traditional methods though?
If dropping out of a MOOC involved a big financial hit, social humiliation, and the loss of a great deal of personal freedom, the completion rates would skyrocket. Completely different incentives.
The reasoning that traditional education is successful because it has high completion rates because of external pressures is a bit circular, isn't it?
It also works the other way. It's socially/professionally acceptable to stop working for 3/4 years to go to university, somewhat less so to stop working to take a bunch of MOOCs. Therefore, most people taking MOOCs are also working full time/studying/looking for a job, and they're also likely to be older and have more life commitments than most students. So MOOCs are naturally going to take a back seat to everything else going on in a person's life. They also don't carry the same recognition as having a degree.
MOOCs also come with a number of unique advantages compared to traditional universities:
- They widen access to education to people that aren't able to attend university
- People can take courses they know they might struggle with without fear of flunking them and harming their academic record
- Mature students don't need to make life sacrifices in order to take a MOOC. They don't have the dilemma of whether to up roots and move to attend a prestigious university
Perhaps. The question is which of those things really move the needle; can you have some, not all? For example, our completion rates are 90%+ - better than universities, but there is no social humiliation, loss of personal freedom, or financial hit.
What is the typical demographic of your cohorts? How do you compare to college programs that have similar cohort demographics?
I think all educational outcomes should be measured with respect to the answers to these two questions.
K12 schools in extremely wealthy areas can compare themselves to like peers, but comparing themselves to high-poverty areas is a useless comparison. Neither institution would do well under the other's constraints.
Could you cite the studies that say "MOOCs don't work for the average person"? While it is certainly an intuitive statement, I find it hard to empirically verify because the population of people who take MOOCs are very different from those who attend colleges.
For example, those who take MOOCs are probably working full / part-time, trying to pick up some knowledge on the side. They will obviously have less time for learning than full-time students.
While "average person" is not the term I'd use, the question you're asking is a bit loaded. What measure is used to say a MOOC "works"? If we are saying completion, then high drop out rates are an issue. If we say high interactivity among those that don't drop out, this is where the current field of research in MOOCs is at. While I do not study it, colleagues in my lab are.
My point is that quantifying the effectiveness of a MOOC is an ill-defined domain. Instead, we acknowledge the attrition rate and do analysis on those that pursue the course. Current research looks at system interactions, the social networks of MOOC forums, etc. to identify student behaviors that show higher "gains", be it course completion or grade.
If a student leaves a MOOC, there is no way to identify why they leave. Likewise, unless asked, it is hard to identify why a student joins a MOOC. Students enrolled in a MOOC can come from a variety of culture, geographical, sociological, motivation, etc. backgrounds. As such, assuming traditional student behaviors is ill advised. However, in the process of learning, access to material is not enough to learning the material and additional effort is needed by the student to build the necessary mental models in their head. If a student drops out of a MOOC, it is hard for the runners/analysts of the MOOC to appropriately say the student learned the material.
As austenallred mentions, current education research is looking at the motivation of learning, as well as what constitutes motivation (and learning for that matter).
> If I ran a MOOC with a 95% fail rate, how can I label it successful.
How is the completion rate a better measure of value added than the absolute number of finishers?