"I often see people talking about how great they personally found a MOOC course, but that self-assessment is largely useless. To put it bluntly: you don't know what aspects of a topic you don't understand, were not told about, or whether the information you received was at all accurate, because you lack the expertise to determine that."
And? This also applies to to normal educational environments, not just MOOCS. Why do people assume that courses delivered on premises by an average teacher is going to be better than a MOOC delivered by world class guy. I'd wager that on average on premises course has more gaps/problems/mistakes than a MOOC. These on-premise courses will never be exposed to criticism, mistakes never seen. Moocs are exposed to every educational 'expert' there is, so lots of criticism pops up. That's a good thing. Normal courses don't have so many 'experts' looking at them.
You're dead on. Whether or not MOOCs reach the standards we want today, they allow far more scrutiny than the closed courses they'll end up replacing. Over time, this will help them improve, a great boon to everyone.
I like to think of Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity as raising the lower bar for everyone. If your course / institution / whatever is worse, you can easily draw on them materials as a supplement. It you can find better, well, no harm done.
>Why do people assume that courses delivered on premises by an average teacher is going to be better than a MOOC delivered by world class guy.
Assume? I just gave you an example of a shit course delivered by a 'world class guy'. I've done plenty of real life classes in statistics and none of the teachers/professors were startlingly brilliant communicators but at least they were able get over the basic principles of the subject. They also didn't waste my time telling me how great they were.
You guys may be delivering good stuff, but there are a lot who are not. Remember how many community colleges/for-profits/universities/high-schools there are in the world. The majority of the teachers recruited were probably averagely talented. These courses will never be exposed to criticism, but moocs are. That's a good thing.
If you understand statistics you should understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistical data. You have one online course you're comparing to a handful of in-person courses you, personally, have taken.
There are hundreds of online courses and hundreds of thousands of in-person courses. You should know it's not a good idea to make inference about ALL MOOC's based on one example or ALL in-person courses based on a handful of classes.
If your statistics classes didn't teach you this concept, I'd say it was those classes that did a poor job.
It's interesting that in a thread about inferential statistics you are asserting inferences based on anecdotes with very small sample size, rather than statistics. It's possible that there haven't been enough MOOC statistics classes to really make a significant inference, but that seems to suggest "we'll have to wait and see" rather than "they're all shit".
And? This also applies to to normal educational environments, not just MOOCS. Why do people assume that courses delivered on premises by an average teacher is going to be better than a MOOC delivered by world class guy. I'd wager that on average on premises course has more gaps/problems/mistakes than a MOOC. These on-premise courses will never be exposed to criticism, mistakes never seen. Moocs are exposed to every educational 'expert' there is, so lots of criticism pops up. That's a good thing. Normal courses don't have so many 'experts' looking at them.