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Massive Open Online Courses

More Ohio colleges and universities - including Ohio State - are offering online education courses to anyone, free of charge. StateImpact Ohio's Ida Lieszkovszky reports on what many are calling the year of the MOOC.  

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MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course.

“I hate the acronym actually so you can quote me on that one.”

Wayne Carlson is the Dean of Students at Ohio State University. And although he’s not a fan of the acronym, he is pretty excited about the technology. MOOC basically refers to classes that are put online, available to anyone in the world. They don’t count for credit, but they are free.

Ohio State just teamed up with Coursera, a tech company that is one of the biggest MOOC providers, an effort headed by Carlson. 

“MOOC and the emerging technology are really transformational. They have the ability to really disrupt the way we do our business. And as a business, if we don’t pay attention to those disruptive processes we’re going to lose in the long run.”

Disruptive because many in the higher ed community worry that unless they’re careful, universities will go the way of newspapers and the music industry: give their product away for free online and lose customers in the process.

“There really is no business model present in these MOOC’s yet because nobody is charging anything. There is no revenue to split.”

While the content and lectures are traditional, the learning process is not. 
Sometimes MOOC courses give tests, but often there is no assessment of what a student learns. Often tens of thousands of students start a course, but many don’t finish.

Bring up sounds of COSI

At COSI, the science museum in Columbus, OSU Pharmacy professor Nicole Kwiek is worried about all that big picture stuff, but she’s more nervous about gearing up to teach her own massive open online course next summer.

“I’m excited to see and adapt my content knowledge to this huge audience and people who have never been able to take a pharmacology class in their lives or may not see the potential of science in their own lives or why it’s important now may see an application on why it’s important and say ‘huh, now I understand.’”

Kweik works in the Generation Rx lab at COSI, which teaches visitors about the potential dangers of prescription drugs. Her class will be about the same thing.

(Kwiek explaining an experiment for :04, fade under next segment)

“…we have an experiment where they have to figure out what gave Bobby heart burn…”

Kweik’s class won’t start for another 7 months, but she’s already getting emails from potential students as far away as New Zealand and Arizona.

Fade out COSI sounds.

But using technology in college classrooms is nothing new. 

Fade up sounds of class as OSU.

Back on the Ohio State campus, chemistry professor Matthew Stoltzfus, aka Dr. Fus (FOOS) is quizzing his students on last night’s lecture.

Sounds of class, Dr. Fus saying stuff like “Okay so what would the atom look like if blah blah blah.”

Stolzfus has been using what’s called the inverted classroom model for a couple years now. Inverted classes are ones in which students watch lectures at home, and do homework in class. Stolzfus posts his lectures online, and spends classroom time answering questions and helping students workout problems.

Freshman Adam Bross admits he doesn’t watch every lecture.

“Not all of them. But a good amount. It’s hard to find time and willpower and watch every single one. Like earlier in the year I watched less, now I try to watch more now that I don’t know it.

Fade out sounds of classroom

Stoltzfus knows that, but it doesn’t bother him.

“Everybody thinks videos are going to ruin education. Well I would point across the street here to the chemistry library across the street, we have book on books on books on all of these chemistry topics. The content was out there before; we’re just putting it in a different format.”

Dartmouth professor and higher ed blogger Joshua Kim has been monitoring the MOOC movement for a while.

He says MOOC’s have a lot of promise, but he’s full of reservations.

“I do not think that MOOC’s will be the solution to the very real issues and problems of rising costs, unequal quality and limited access to higher education. MOOC’s might be part of the solution but they are not the solution. So I worry that they are being overhyped and oversold.”

MOOC’s sound great. But even its biggest cheerleaders have concerns.

Here’s Wayne Carlson of Ohio State again.

“It’s a very utopian world where you want knowledge for knowledge sake.”

But the problem with utopian ideas?

“They don’t scale to the real world.”

Employers want to see how you did in that course, universities want to make money, students want to get credit for the classes they take, and professors don’t want to see their jobs outsourced to computers