Confessions of an online course completer

Last update: Saturday 7/21/18

DLL Editor's note -- I am an online course (a/k/a MOOC) completer, one of the nerdy five percent. Better still, I am also a compulsive completer of multi-course certificate programs, one of the super nerdy one percent; but I wasn't always this way.



From dropout to course completer
Five years ago I was an online dropout, one of the 95 percent who dropped out of most of the online courses they took. So what changed me?  Did I have a near death experience? No ... yes ... well, sort of ... I was involuntarily "retired" in early 2014, which seemed like a near death experience at the time, very, very near.

What to do with the rest of my life? That question had been too big for me to answer as a high school senior three score years ago and, to my surprise, it was still too big for me to answer four years ago. So I reframed the question the same way I had reframed it in high school: What did I want to do for the first five to ten years after I completed my studies? 

It didn't take long for me to determine that what was now called "data science" neatly matched my life-long concern about the status of Black Americans in higher education (especially in STEM fields) and in the careers for which higher education is the primary gateway (e.g., STEM fields). If I acquired the right mix of data science skills, I could apply my new skills to publicly available data to produce reports that could make useful contributions to our understanding of these complex issues. 

At that point my long-held notions about online education underwent a radical disruption: 

• In times past I had been one of those "progressive" educators who promoted online education as a way for "them" to continue "their" pursuit of lifelong learning. But now that I had become one of "them", I realized how shallow most of my previous thinking about online education had been ... my thinking, the thinking of most of my colleagues, and the thinking of most of the nation's online education experts.
   
• Twenty-somethings with newly minted bachelors or masters degrees from a Great University might receive lots of job offers. But recruiters don't care where newly certified 30-40-50-60-or-here-I-come-70 somethings obtained their non-degree certificate programs. What they really want is tangible proof that newly certified older applicants really have the skills they claim they acquired via their online courses.
   
• This insight meant that I should not enroll in a job-oriented certificate program unless I was convinced that the program was the "best" available program for me, i.e., the one that best matched my prior knowledge and experience and my new career ambitions. And it meant that once enrolled, I would be playing for keeps, i.e., fully committed to learning as much as I could from every course. Dropping out of a course would only be appropriate if I decided drop out of the entire program.
   
• Finally, the shift in my motivation from taking online courses in order to satisfy my intellectual curiosity to taking courses in order to enhance my employment opportunities meant that I should be willing to pay for the "best" program. How much? It all depends. Suppose my completion of a two-semester program might enable me to earn an additional $20,000 during the next 12 months from my new skills. I should pay less than $20,000 because nothing in life is guaranteed, but surely a lot more than $100, $500, or even $2,000.

Shallow thinking
The introduction of free "MOOCs" -- massive open online courses -- by professors at Stanford University in 2012 was quickly followed by MOOCs offered by their colleagues at Harvard and M.I.T. Unfortunately, this innovation was accompanied by a lot of silly predictions based on a lot of surprisingly shallow thinking by some of the MOOCs' most prominent pioneers and by their allies in the press. Sensible observers ignored the hype and focused on the demonstrable benefits.

• In years past, 70 to 80 percent of online courses offered by American universities had been offered by public universities, but usually not by the flagship campuses of the best public universities. Top tier universities -- private and public -- held online courses and programs in undisguised disdain ... But when MOOCs were offered by Stanford, Harvard, M.I.T., plus a rapidly expanding cohort of other elite universities, all online courses and programs obtained substantial boosts to their respectability and credibility.
   
• Previously, most online courses had been offered to students who had been admitted to degree programs offered by (mostly) public universities. By contrast, MOOCs had no admissions procedures, so they were open to anyone who wanted to take them.
   
• The initial MOOCs were free, which made them financially accessible to anyone on the planet who had access to the Internet.

The last two conditions were obviously unsustainable. If there were no prerequisites for MOOCs, then MOOCs would be confined to introductory treatments of whatever subjects they covered.

More importantly, MOOCs could not remain free. When pressed as to how MOOC sponsors would recoup the costs of developing, operating, maintaining, and updating their courses, the pioneers usually deflected the focus to some unspecified future time frame wherein this financial obstacle would be overcome. How? Only two strategies have been developed for making online applications self-sustaining and/or profitable:

• Charging substantial purchase or subscription fees
• Selling ads on the application's Internet pages

SAS and Wolfram charge substantial purchase/subscription fees; Facebook and Google are free because they sell ads. Correction. They sell ads and they sell information about their users to their advertisers. The top tier colleges and universities who offered their courses on Coursera and edX shied away from selling ads or user information. So their only alternative was user fees. 

Here's where my own shallow thinking ran aground. I was pleased that Coursera and edX were charging enrollment fees by 2015/2016. But for some reason it took me almost two years to realize that their fees were nowhere as high as they should have been if their college and university partners were to obtain the revenue they needed to offer the kinds of programs that I needed to make a successful pivot into data science. Let me explain.

• It isn't enough to learn how to apply data collection, data wrangling, and data exploration techniques to classroom problems that have "right" or "wrong" answers. Real world problems are open-ended.
   
• Course projects and capstone projects at the end of a certificate program are proven methods for providing the kinds of summative learning experiences that enable students to synthesize the disparate components of what they have learned. But realistic classroom projects must be assessed by practicing professionals whose employers and clients can attest to their status as exemplars of the field's current "best practices". 

I obtained my first data science certificate from Johns Hopkins via Coursera. Students assessed each others' projects using rubrics provided by the instructors. Much better than no assessments, but not good enough. 

When I took the time (in 2017) to conduct a close examination of all of the job-oriented certificate programs offered by four leading platforms for these kinds of programs -- Coursera, edX, Udacity, and DataCamp -- I was surprised to find that Udacity was the only platform that guaranteed that student projects would be assessed by practicing professionals. But I was not surprised to find that Udacity's enrollment fees were much higher than the fees charged by the other platforms. No doubt a substantial portion of the higher fees was used to pay the professionals for their assessments. You get what you pay for. 

I got my money's worth from Coursera's inexpensive certificate program, but I didn't get as much as I needed. I would have paid a lot more if higher fees had entitled my projects to receive professional assessments.

Roy L Beasley, PhD

DLL Editor

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Related notes on this blog:

• No More "MOOCs" ... June 2018
• Job-Oriented Online Programs (JOOPs) ... July 2017