Great critique by Tom Worthington of an alleged for-credit MOOC from MIT that was anything but a MOOC. As Tom rightly points out, two instructors, 31 students, and online materials from EdX do not a MOOC make. As he notes, this kind of instructional process has been working pretty well for decades, including at Athabasca, as it happens. What is relatively novel, perhaps, is that the fact that the course itself was supplied at no (extra) cost to the institution. Effectively (though not quite in this case as it was an MIT course in the first place) this was a typical use of an OER course with accreditation and tuition wrapped around it, following a practice that has been common in many places - especially in developing countries - since the earliest MOOCs in 2008. Tom himself has created a great OER course on green computing that we use here at AU, which follows much the same pattern (though we have lightly adapted the Australian course for local use).

Less stress in online learning?

Tom observes that in this intervention, as in his own teaching, students tend to take the online option due to scheduling difficulties, not by preference, but that they are less stressed by the process than their face-to-face counterparts. This makes sense because there's a lot more teaching presence in a course that is a) designed for online delivery (usually with great care and attention to detail) and b) supported by live teachers. Online learners in this kind of set-up are getting a huge amount of support for their learning, both from course designers/developers and from their own professors. Technically speaking, some of that exuberance of teaching will cancel out due to the inevitable tension between structure and dialogue implied by transactional distance theory, but the opportunities for feedback on coursework, at least, more than compensate for the high transactional distance caused by the industrial teaching approach of a pre-prepared online course. At least, I hope so, because (though mainly with courses we have developed ourselves and only rarely with OERs) this is exactly what Athabasca University has been doing for nearly 50 years, apparently with some success.

More stress in online teaching?

Personally, I have to admit, I normally hate teaching other people's courses, although it is something I have often done. However well-developed they might be, there are always things I disagree with, factually and pedagogically, and I deeply dislike the strait jackets such structured courses create. This is perhaps a little hypocritical of me because I expect tutors on my courses to do exactly that, and routinely allocate my own faculty to teach courses that others have written, putting them in exactly that position. Whatever. Few seem to suffer my aversion to the same degree and many seem to positively relish it. I guess it makes it easier, with fewer choices to make. To each their own. But even I am very happy to take an existing OER (like Tom's) and alter it to my own purposes, and am even happier to offer alternative OERs for my students to use within a pedagogical framework I have created. I think this is just common sense, giving both me and my students plenty of freedom to do what suits us best. Either way, re-use of existing well-designed courses is at least as great an idea as it was when Otto Peters came up with his industrial model of distance learning some decades ago.

The reputation of online learning

Tom notes that online and distance education has a bad reputation: to some extent, yes, sure, some people feel that way. Yes, there have been some bad examples of the modality that have resulted in bad press (ahem...Phoenix) and naive folk that have never experienced online learning do tend to believe that there is some magic that happens face to face that cannot be replicated online. They are right, as it happens: some things are difficult or impossible to replicate and it is a kind of magic. But the converse is also true - great things happen online that cannot be replicated face to face, and that's a kind of magic too. And, just as not everyone gets a great online experience,  for many 'face to face' learners the experience is uniformly dire, with large impersonal lectures, ill-conceived pedagogies delivered by untrained teachers, and considerably less human interaction than what would typically be found online. On balance, while it is not quite correct to say that there is no significant difference, because there really are some basic differences in the need for self-management and control, there is no significant difference in the outcomes we choose to measure.

But, to return to the point, although some look upon online degrees less kindly, there are many employers who actively prefer those that have learned online because it is strong proof of their self-determination, will-power, and desire to succeed. I can confirm this positive perception: our students at AU are, on average, streets ahead of their traditionally taught counterparts, especially when you consider that a great many do not have the traditional qualifications needed to get into a conventional institution. I am constantly amazed by the skill and perseverance of our amazing students. On my own courses, especially in graduate teaching, I do everything I can to enable them to teach one another, because they tend to come to us with an incredible wealth of knowledge that just needs to be tapped and channelled.

A workable model

Though Tom is a little critical, I see value in what MIT is doing here. For some years now I have been trying to make the case at AU that we should be offering support for, and the means to credential, MOOCs offered elsewhere. This would give freedom to students to pick ways of learning that suit them best, to gain the benefits of diversity, and allow us to provide the kind of tutorial support and accreditation that we are pretty good at, at only a fraction of the (roughly) $100K cost of developing a typical course. It would give us the freedom to extend our offerings quite considerably, and avoid the need to keep developing the same curricula that are found everywhere else, so that we could differentiate ourselves by not just the style of teaching but also the subjects that we offer. This can in principle be done to some extent already through our challenge process (if you can find an equivalent course, take it, then take our challenge paper for a lot less than the price of a full course) and we do have independent study courses at graduate level that can be used much this way, with tutor support. But we could make a lot more of it if we did it just a bit more mindfully.