teacher survey

MOOCs charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access. The average number of students per class is 33,000, but classes can surmount 80,000. Originally, state universities and community colleges were the ones to offer these classes, but institutions such as Stanford, Princeton, and Duke are also embarking on this new approach to education.

Most professors agreed that their interest was motivated by their belief in more economically accessible education. Others, however, found globally sharing their subjects more appealing. In addition, some claimed that online teaching helped them reconsider their own pedagogical methods and believed that it improved them. Overall, the survey concluded that most argued in favor of incorporating these types of courses into traditional education.

MOOCs decrease the cost of earning a degree and make college experience less expensive. John Owens, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Davis, teaches parallel computing, a method that allows computers to multitask at once. 15,000 students enrolled for his class at absolutely no cost and were able to learn in a flexible and personal way.

These courses are also readily available to anyone across the world. Princeton University professor Robert Sedgewick co-lead an online class on algorithms, which he had taught for forty years in a classroom. Initially skeptical about online education, he nonetheless was intrigued by the idea of reaching a global audience of over 80,000 students. He signed a deal with Coursera, an upstart company offering MOOCs, and spent copious hours preparing and videotaping his lectures. The experience was rewarding, he feels, and he is now enthusiastic about including online components to his teaching.

Online platforms also grant the chance for instructors to acquire teaching tips. Computer programs collect data that track each student’s success and failures and most professors are attracted to this quality since this information cannot be gleaned so precisely from traditional classroom participation. An associate professor of physics at Duke University, M. Ronen Plesser, found that videotaping lectures also forced him to reevaluate his pedagogical presentation in class. His style is much more rigorous and demanding than it was before he taught a MOOC since “producing video lectures spurred [him] to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus.”

MOOCs are transforming higher education by make learning less expensive, more accessible, and educationally rewarding. Society increasingly prioritizes technology and many professors admitted that not adapting to this would imply lagging behind professionally. Mr. Owens acknowledged that he “would rather understand this at the front end than be forced into it on the back end.”