“Faculty can always encourage students to participate in MOOCs to supplement their courses, but we’ve steered clear of that for now,” associate vice provost for academic programs and planning Mary Pedersen said.
Laura Pezzini
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A new wave in education has started to hit universities, and may eventually affect Cal Poly students.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are exactly what they sound like — online courses open to a wide number of students. But where MOOCs differ from normal online courses is their commitment to interactivity and open access, not to mention their size — enrollment can reach hundreds of thousands of students.
“When it’s massively open, it’s open to an audience really anywhere around the world,” associate vice provost for academic programs and planning Mary Pedersen said. “The motivation and goal for creating these courses was to create access to education for individuals who normally have no access.”
MOOCs grew as a part of the open educational resources movement, which was committed to providing open access to educational materials. They were available at a few universities worldwide starting in 2008, but really caught on when Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Princeton launched courses along the lines of MOOCs, elevating the courses to an elite status.
Another interesting side to MOOCs is their commitment to interactivity, sometimes even implementing social media to create an online forum to which all the thousands of enrolled students can contribute.
Though open access to a world-class education seems like an ideal situation, MOOCs can actually be a controversial issue because of their for-profit nature.
“I think that’s always the problem, you have to look at the motivation of the group behind something,” Pedersen said. “I think like anything else there’s valuable parts of it and you have to look at the context.”
Many MOOCs are run in partnership between the university and a for-profit company that takes a portion of the revenue created by the course.
Another part of the controversy is that MOOCs could give rise to freelance professors who may or may not be affiliated with a university.
“Many professors do consulting in a variety of different fields and that’s their choice of what they want to do outside of their full-time job,” Pedersen said.
Pedersen said one of the main problems with MOOCs in a university context is getting the courses accredited.
“In order for a course to be brought in, it would have to be accepted in terms of getting credit for the course,” Pedersen said. “In order to get credit they have to pass a variety of requirements.”
MOOCs are growing rapidly, but Pedersen said there are no talks of bringing them to Cal Poly in the near future.
“Not from a big picture perspective,” Pedersen said. “Faculty can always encourage students to participate in MOOCs to supplement their courses, but we’ve steered clear of that for now. Right now we’re doing a lot of things with hybrids and online courses, but not MOOCs.”
Though no California State University (CSU) campuses are currently offering MOOCs, the idea has given rise to a new way of thinking about online education. This fall the CSU system will implement a new Intrasystem Concurrent (ICE) program, which allows CSU students to take online courses from universities within the system.
“The CSU has a new program where basically they’re offering Cal Poly students to take courses from other CSU schools, and this is the first quarter that will be available,” administrative support coordinator for academic programs Katie Tool said.
Tool said, however, that the ICE program is not to be classified with MOOCs.
“No one is doing (MOOCs) right now in the CSU,” Tool said.
Some students, however, are looking forward to seeing what the world of education will eventually offer.
“I think it’s a really cool idea that they’re so interactive,” kinesiology junior Natalie Stevens said. “Education has to move somewhere, and I think online is the place it’s headed.”