Anyway, what I wanted to reflect on today was COMMUNICATION - specifically, communication TO STUDENTS (I'll say something more about other kinds of communication in another post). I would have to say that it seems to me that Coursera is doing a really poor job with communication, and that the poor communication is a serious problem with the class, even though that would be something really easy to fix. From many years (10 years!) of teaching online courses, I have concluded that there is little or nothing that is obvious about an online course; as a result, it is really important to communicate both the big picture and the little details very clearly. Students often have very little experience, or no experience at all, with online courses, and they may be operating with assumptions that are totally inapplicable. As a result of their lack of experience, they are often worried and anxious. Lots of clear communication is the best way to dispel that anxiety and help everybody aim for a successful course. In the case of a MOOC, it is an even more unusual type of online course, requiring - in my opinion - even more communication from the organizers to the students, yet instead we have had very little communication at all.
For example, in my online courses, I do daily announcements, including some fun or intriguing item in each day's announcements, always with an image (or video), in addition to specific information about the class. Here's a typical week's worth of announcements: April 2 2012 - April 8 2012. I know that the students are not necessarily reading the announcements every day, so I repeat important announcements - but by including something fun and new for each day's announcements, I try to entice people to take a look at the announcements every day (they can also sign up for an email subscription). The students who are aware of just what is going on in the class at any given time obviously have a better learning experience, and these announcements are also a way for me to reduce the amount of email I receive. It is my goal to make the communication channels as shared and public as possible, reserving email for things that require for some reason a real level of privacy (grades, reminders about deadlines for people who need reminding, etc.).
At the Coursera course, however, there are just two announcements on the homepage, although the class has been going for 11 days now. There is a welcome message from the instructor, and then there is an announcement for today in which he remarks about the serious technical difficulties from this morning (but without apologizing for them…), along with the announcement that he will no longer be responding to emails. It is totally understandable that the instructor in a massive class like this would not be responding to emails, but apparently that means that the instructor's only involvement will be in the delivery of lectures to the class. He said he is keeping an ear to the forums although I don't think he is actually participating… again, understandable - but I better not start talking here about the shortcomings of the Coursera discussion forums or else I will never finish this post. There have also been emails, but the emails have not been posted on the announcements! That, to me, is also a big mistake. People can lose track of email easily - so, since everybody's email inbox is more or less total chaos, it seems to me very important to post the contents of any course-wide emails on the homepage (announcements page) of the course website, but that has not been happening.
In my own courses, I teach only 100 students per semester… not 5000. I was really hoping to learn some good methods for scaling a class up to a massive size - and I think communication, excellent communication, would be a key element in scaling up. Unfortunately, I would rate the communication I have seen in this Coursera course as quite poor… but it does inspire me to try to do an even better job of communicating in my own classes this Fall!
Meanwhile, I wait to see how things evolve at this Coursera course ... and I am excited to have an excuse to spend some time this weekend with Lewis Carroll!
Sorry to hear that. I am slated for one .... this fall maybe? Whenever they offer it. I agree that communication is key. Weekly announcements and at least one comment on the discussion boards would be standard...
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that a daily announcement, even just very brief, is better; I would call discussion board participation optional - in my classes, the students basically have the Ning to themselves after the first week, and that works out just fine. But the daily announcements let the students know that I am thinking about the class every day and even if they are not doing coursework every day, it's good to have it in your thoughts. For this course, we were told to expect to invest something like 8 hours per week, which is at the max. end of what I ask of my own students... I wonder if people really are spending that much time (Coursera is, strangely, not collecting any self-assessments like that - you'd think they would be very curious to know more about us, but apparently not...)
ReplyDeleteIt's disappointing that Prof.Rabkins won't be answering us anymore, though it's quite understandable. Perhaps his mailbox suffered a massive onslaught this week. Funny enough, I don't even know his email address.
ReplyDeleteCoursera is just a platform. Every class has its own rules and terms, depending to the teacher. When I was in Introduction to Cryptography, Prof. Boneh participated directly in the forum. In my CS101 class, Prof. Nick sometimes chimed in the discussion, but most often it's his assistants who help us in thw forum.
For FSFHMOMW, I never see any post made by the staff, so it's more student-driven.
Some students don't like daily announcement, even to the point calling it spam.
There are a lot of shortcomings, but I'll stick, since the peer reviews are so valuable to sharpen my writing skill and it has a nice reading list.
I do agree with you on most of things, though. It's nice if the lecturers pay more attention to their students. I like your daily announcement.
DeleteHi Lisa, I always feel overwhelmed by email, which is why I let the students decide if they want to subscribe to the email version of the announcements or not (Blogger handles the email option automatically). About two-thirds of the students do choose to get the email, which always surprises me - but if it's their choice, that works for me. I never send out emails to the whole class unless there is some kind of technical breakdown with the course software; usually there is at least one serious outage, and I figure that's worth an email.
ReplyDeleteWith the course, I think it has the potential to be such a great course; that's why I am disappointed with the poor communication. It would be such a shame if students are dropping the course just because they are confused (as some of the students clearly are), or because they just need a little bit of personal encouragement on a daily basis, esp. the folks who are finding the experience stressful.
Some students feel the schedule to be intimidating. There's huge workload if one doesn't prepare accordingly, i.e reading some titles in advance.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad there are many helpful students sticking in the forum. They offer consolation to many through encouraging posts; check out the 'Do you feel like dropping...' thread if you have time. Of course, there's no substitute to teacher's concern. Whenever an email from the course reaches my inbox, I'm always happy to read, since, like you have stated, it indicates the lecturer(s) do monitor our progress.
I take this unprofessional treatment somewhat more lightly as this is their first attempt in offering online courses (There were only a couple of Stanford courses in Coursera a year ago). Hopefully they'll be better when they offer this course again so the 2nd batch wouldn't be as disappointed as us.
What's been really encouraging to me as an online teacher is discovering that students value GENERIC concern by the teacher, in addition to individual attention. So, if the students know that I am working on the class, doing the daily announcements, looking for ways to do a good job as a teacher, they feel taken care, even if I am not interacting with them one on one. Thank goodness: because even with just 100 students I cannot interact with every student every day. :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree, communication is very poor. But it's not Coursera's fault per se. I'm taking two other classes and they're very different. Both of them have regular updates from the professors and one of them is very interactive. So it very much depends on the owner or manager of the course, not on the platform.
ReplyDelete- andrea
I too, enrolled in other classes and experienced varying degree of attentiveness from the professors. It's like real school. Some teachers ask their student everyday what were they learning so far and the other carry on teaching the subject without much conversation...
DeleteVery interesting to hear the comparison, Andrea! Still, Coursera needs to be helping the faculty to find their way - if there are faculty members who have not taught online before, for example, or who are not sure how to proceed, there should be some basic guidelines, for the good of the class and for the good of the students. This is a big problem at my school; I'm able to take care of my own online classes pretty efficiently because I teach only online. In the case of the faculty who split their time between the classroom and online, they really need some institutional help and guidelines for how to manage the very different environment of an online class. That institutional help would need to come from Coursera staff who work with the faculty members on developing and deploying each course.
ReplyDeleteDon't be so hard on them, I'm not entirely sure they've the resources to deal with each professor individually. But I might be wrong of course and it can be just ignorance from their side :)
ReplyDelete- andrea
Coursera is just a startup. I don't think they're able to monitor each professor. Instead, the responsibility is given to the universities that offer the courses to maintain their big names and quality
DeleteThat's a good question, Lisa - I've been reading up on Coursera and impression was that the technology and administrative matters stay with Coursera. Either way, by "Coursera" in my remarks above, just replace it with "the powers that be" or "They" (with a capital T). In any case, it's almost always true that faculty members who are teaching an online for the first time, esp. in a massive online course like this one, need some kind of help; there is just no way that teaching in a classroom, even teaching a large lecture course, prepares the faculty member for a totally new experience like this. It is a very interesting question what kind of relationship Coursera and the universities have - basically Coursera is building on the reputation of these universities, but since none of these universities has ever offered courses like this before, it's all very new for everybody, both Coursera and for the schools.
DeleteCoursera has, perhaps, scaled up too fast. By adding so much content, it has been unable to monitor classes to understand the dynamics that form, what works and what doesn't, how faculty could best respond, etc.
DeleteThis particular course has very interesting material but I don't think it has been well adapted to the online environment. The workload is quite high, considering that most students are not dedicated full time to education. The forums are a mixture of helpful, insightful, snobbish and crazy. They are hard to follow, difficult to winnow out the relevant discussion and generate massive inbox spam. A lot of students are feeling lost, which is not good.
Beatriz, that is my impression also - some of the people at participating at the forums do seem lost... and those are the people who have the initiative and wherewithal to visit the forums! What about all the thousands who have not done that...? I continue to be baffled that Coursera is not gathering any data from us, about our background and goals, our experience week to week with the class. Without that kind of feedback from us, the students, Coursera will not be in a position to interpret the dropout rate in order to figure out just which students persist and why, and how to best help those students who do drop out. We all know that the dropout rate is high for courses like this, but surely Coursera has some goals in that regard (for example, if the dropout rate in the first offering of a class is 90%, surely they would want to try to improve the class for the next time by getting the dropout rate down to, say, 75% or some other measurable goal...). Without information from us, though, they are not going to be able to identity the leading factors in people dropping out.
DeleteThere's a lot at stake here, Andrea - this is the first time that online courses have gone really "public" because most universities are privacy-obsessed and do not share their online courses publicly (I'm the only instructor at my school who shares all my stuff publicly so people can see just what students do in the classes I teach). With the MOOCs, all of a sudden people are going to get a chance to see what online learning is about... but it is going to be a huge setback for online education if the quality of the MOOCs is not very good. Ignorance is no excuse, ha ha. :-)
ReplyDeleteReading your post and the comments here, I suspect that you have the kind of feedback that Coursera.org could really benefit from. As a startup, the may be scrambling, but they will also (or, at least, *should* also) be receptive to feedback that can help them to create a better product.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there needs to be better communication and it sounds like the instructors and their assistants should have better guidance regarding what works and what doesn't. But, maybe there just aren't enough experts in the field of MOOCs?
What I'm worried about, Pamela, is that I see them repeating the MISTAKES of traditional college classes... instead of using the MOOC as an opportunity to do this differently, and much better, than in a traditional class. So, in a traditional class, you don't get any feedback from the students until the last day of class when you hand out a survey and get their feedback. In a world of paper-and-pencil, that made sense... but in the online world, you can be gathering feedback from the students all the time, and it's really important to do so since, honestly, nobody has any idea just what works best, for which students, etc. I am really disappointed in what has been so far a total failure to get any feedback from the students. Someone mentioned that in another Coursera class they took, the professor did a survey with SurveyMonkey to get feedback at the end of the class... suggesting that Coursera has no feedback mechanisms at all, so that the professor had to go improvise with his own thing. Definitely not good if that is really the case. I very much admire the people at Coursera for what they are trying to do, but I wonder if they have not got a bit of missionary hubris that makes them thing they have all the answers and don't really need to find out from the students who things are going...
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