Time for nanodegrees?

 by tncountryfan

Last year Sebastian Thrun, head of MOOC-consortium Udacity caused quite a stir by announcing that his company would be changing focus; leaving the higher education MOOC market and focusing on corporate training (see article). This change provoked a lot of "I told you so" rhetoric from the MOOC skeptics; evidence that the concept was not compatible with higher education. Now after a few quiet months Udacity are launching the concept of nanodegrees which offer highly practical MOOC-like training in cooperation with a number of high profile companies like AT&T. The MOOC format is still recognizable but the focus is on helping learners get necessary work-related skills to make themselves more attractive to employers. The nanodegrees will take 6-12 months to complete depending on the pace the learner chooses. As described on the Udacity blog, Announcing nanodegrees: a new type of credential for a modern workforce:

We are designing nanodegrees as the most compact and relevant curriculum to qualify you for a job. The sole goal is to help students advance their career: whether it’s landing their next job, their next project, or their next promotion. It should take a working student about 6-12 months to complete without having to take time off. We will teach all the necessary skills together with why those skills matter along with career guidance. In other words, you won’t just learn *how* to code, but also *why.*

The first courses have just been announced and you can already sign up to receive further information as it becomes available: Front-end web developer, iOS developer, Back-end web developer and Data analyst. I'm not sure what sort of business model they have in mind but I can imagine that there will be the familiar layered approach already used in higher education MOOCs; free to participate but tuition, assessment and credentials at a fee. It's interesting that although these nanodegrees will have no academic validity they have chosen an academic name for the concept. If there are no university credits involved why use the term degree? Academics may object to the concept on the grounds that a degree involves long-term in-depth study and that if you shorten this process as radically as Udacity do it cannot be called a degree. It's like calling a 5 km race a nanomarathon. Let's see how the debate goes.

The big question is whether employers will accept new credentials like these nanodegrees or similar initiatives. It would be interesting to see if Udacity would consider using Open Badges in their forthcoming courses since that would give added impetus to the initiative. They have been working closely with some major companies who plan to offer internships to selected nanodegree students but the crunch will come when such qualifications square up to regular degree certificate on a candidate's CV.

The validity of open learning is questioned in an article in the Guardian, Will a degree made up of Moocs ever be worth the paper it's written on? and the main criticism of open learning here is that it lacks the dialogue and personal contacts between teacher and student that occur on a campus programme. Here I think there is a danger of over-estimating campus education. Many universities have extremely large undergraduate courses and quality interaction with a faculty member can be as minimal as on many MOOCs just as there are many examples of online courses with extensive teacher-student interaction. Education at scale is not feasible on campus but is clearly possible online and the fascinating side of the MOOC movement is how different actors are trying to find ways of providing interaction, assessment and feedback. A degree (or even nanodegree) made up of MOOCs can and probably will be worth the digital badge it's written on but may not be equivalent to a full-time campus degree. It's not a matter of either ... or ... but different qualifications for different needs and target groups.

MOOC assortment

  by camknows

An assortment of MOOC thoughts inspired by this week's news feed.

There is some concern that many MOOCs are simply repositories of content in the form of lectures, reading and automatic tests and are not even really courses at all. This is the main point behind a post by Justin Reich, Is a MOOC a Textbook or a Course? Yes there's plenty of good material there and you can certainly learn a lot but you're largely on your own and the question is whether this can be considered a coherent course. I feel that such types of MOOC are perfectly valid as long as they don't pretend to be any more. It's vital that every MOOC describes clearly and upfront exactly what type of course it is (or not) and explains what types of study the student should expect. That can be one quality criterion; a clear statement on what's in store for the learner, the type of course, pedagogy and demands. All I've seen do this well but maybe we also need to know what the MOOC doesn't offer, just to avoid any misunderstanding.

Then there's the excellent report from the University of Edinburgh on the results of their first MOOCs under the Coursera banner. As Donald Clark reports on his blog, Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises, students were clearly satisfied with the courses on offer with only 2% responding that the course did not meet their expectations. The report also confirms that very few MOOC students are motivated by certificates or credits and that attempts to provide a social aspect to the courses via course forums seldom work. Somehow the key element of the connectivist cMOOCs, networking and collaboration, do not translate well into the xMOOC paradigm (my wish for 2014 is that we find a new terminology for all this). Forums tend to be confusing, overcrowded and not always particularly interactive and most students seem to go it alone.

Maybe the reason for the cMOOCs succeeding in creating a dynamic learning network was that the participants were usually digitally literate academics who were already used to such an environment. The xMOOCs however attract a much wider range of participants, many of whom may not be used to online learning at all. Many sign up expecting a fairly traditional course and expecting it to be largely self-study even if the organisers might wish it to be otherwise.

So how do we get learners more involved in MOOCs and how can we foster collaboration and networking? Peer review may be the best bet and already some courses are use peer assessment as a powerful teaching and empowerment tool as well as providing meaningful feedback. Students need training to be able to offer meaningful feedback to each other and this can be built into the course at an early stage. If a set of assessment criteria for a task is given to students and they can practice on a test case first they can then assess each other. Studies indicate that peer assessment often comes very close to the grades given by experienced teachers, though the feedback may not be as insightful.

There's an article on MOOC News and Reviews,Massive MOOC Grading Problem – Stanford HCI Group Tackles Peer Assessment, that describes peer assessment in MOOCs and gives examples of how this can lift the learning experience of the MOOC to new levels, without involving faculty at all.

"I recently completed a two-week video production course on the Skillshare platform that used peer reviews. While the course was not for college credit and the only rubric used was to foster positive comments even while pointing out areas for improvement, knowing I was commenting on the work of my cohorts made me dive into the course more deeply. I felt a certain sense of fairness at play: I was going to make my project live up to the standard I set for others. In the end, I put in more hours reviewing comments and working on my projects than I spent watching the instructor’s videos and engaging in other assignments. The comments I received from my peers spurred me to rethink, revise and improve my project."

Finally this is exactly the approach being offered by NovoEd, yet another new kid on the MOOC block.
They divide students into groups of up to ten, based on location or interests and those groups then support and assess each other through the course. Creating group loyalty and a small scale study environment even in the vast sea of a MOOC could well be the road to follow.

Read more about NovoEd in an article on TechCrunch,Stanford’s NovoEd Brings Collaboration And Group Learning To MOOCs To Help Fight Attrition.