A MOOC Point
They’re efficient, but online courses cannot deliver experiences essential to educating engineers.
By Mark Raleigh
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) let thousands of students take university-like classes for little or no money via the Internet. Their potential to save costs and expand access to education has made them a hot topic from ASEE conferences to state legislatures. Despite their appeal, however, the risks of MOOCs outweigh the benefits, particularly for engineering students and educators.
For one thing, MOOCs cannot deliver the experience of community, teamwork, and overcoming setbacks that is uniquely developed from personal interactions in a classroom or lab. On campus, students are given a physical space to articulate arguments and ideas, and to solve problems collectively. By contrast, MOOCs shift the focus from the community to the individual and from oral to written communication. Speaking, listening, and having to think on one’s feet – all vital professional skills for engineers – are not developed when asynchronous message boards and email are the main mode of communication between professors and students. Such methods do a disservice to engineering students, who typically are comfortable with technology and solving math problems alone but need practice verbalizing technical information and working on teams. MOOCs might reinforce the stereotype of engineers as technocrats who struggle to connect and communicate with the rest of society.
Another shimmering disadvantage is that MOOCs are delivered through a platform studded with a gold mine of distractions. Spend time at a campus computer lab and you will find that a student’s work constantly competes with social media, email, and the latest viral video. I am not confident students can stay focused through this medium, and I doubt MOOC lectures can rise above the digital din. Conversely, traditional classrooms bring students face-to-face with a living, caring instructor who directly engages them and commands attention. While smartphones enable students to smuggle the Internet’s distractions everywhere, the temptation to check Facebook or email is less pervasive in a physical classroom than in a virtual one.
Proponents say MOOCs are not supposed to supplant the traditional classroom but instead reshape how foundational courses such as calculus and physics are taught. An Arabian proverb illustrates the danger of this seemingly benign proposition: “Once a camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” Virtual classes will benefit students shut out of campus-based courses by capacity limits. Yet more students completing low-level classes online may increase demand for high-level classes. Thus, the overcrowding problem simply moves upstream to high-level classes. It remains to be seen how engineering departments might respond to an influx of juniors and seniors, and what impact this might have on the quality of education. MOOCs might be seen as a solution for all course levels – in other words, the camel’s body.
Greater application of MOOCs also spells bad news for Ph.D. students like me who aspire to become tenure-track professors. It’s simply supply and demand: If a single faculty member can teach 10 to 100 times as many students online as in a bricks-and-mortar classroom, universities will need fewer of them. Ultimately, however, trimming professors hurts the potential for innovation and threatens the collegiality that defines academia.
Online learning should enhance the classroom experience for students, not replace it. Yet that could happen if engineering departments and ABET don’t determine how much of the camel’s nose to allow into academia’s tent. More professors and graduate students need to join the debate, too. We must ask the central question: “What is the role of the university experience for engineering students?” I believe it has more to do with holistic development and less with mass production of engineers. When it comes to learning, I’m old school.
Mark Raleigh earned his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Washington over the summer. This is his final column.