Computers replace instructors, not teachers

CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by btobetun

"Teachers who can be replaced by computers deserve to be." This often quoted statement leads into an excellent article by Tony Bates, My summer paranoia: computers will replace teachers in higher education. The present expansion of content-based MOOCs from EdX, Coursera and co point to an increasing automation of course delivery and even assessment. This leads some people to draw the conclusion that the teacher's role is threatened and others see great opportunities for cost-cutting in higher education.

However Bates points out an essential distinction between instruction/lecturing and teaching. The delivery of information in the form of lectures can easily be recorded and offered on the net. Tests based on checking knowledge of facts can also be automated very effectively and you can then offer a fully online automated course. However the missing ingredient is actual teaching; inspiring, guiding, giving feedback, advising, providing context and all the other less tangible skills that lead to real learning.

"It is very hard to replicate the complexity of a skilled teacher who has to deal with many different variables and factors in real time. It is not just about processing speed and data management, but also about building relationships with students, making intuitive judgments, and being able to handle qualitative issues such as beliefs, values, and the personal feelings of students. Computers are not good at this."

If education was really only about learning and remembering information then we can easily automate it and offer it to the world on demand. That's what's happening today with the growth of online courses. That can work for self-motivated learners with good study skills but does not work for the majority who need guidance, motivation and assistance. That's where teaching comes in and these are not skills that will be automated any time soon. The teacher's role is more important than ever as long as we move away from confusing teaching with lecturing. The internet does not replace the teacher but offers teachers a chance to teach students in new ways. As usual it is not a case of either ... or ... but using computers wisely to enhance learning.

Rethinking assessment

I'm heading down to Granada in Spain next week to attend the EFQUEL Innovation Forum, which I'm also involved in organising. I'm looking forward especially to hosting a session on Thursday afternoon (6 Sept) entitled Rethinking Educational Assessment which you are welcome to join as a web conference via Adobe Connect.

The widespread use of open education today with all the flavours of MOOC as well as many informal learning arenas is changing our conceptions of education. The use of open educational resources and collaborative learning tools offer us the chance to escape from the restrictions of the traditional classroom and move the focus from content delivery to context creation. New educational models demand a rethink of how we assess learning. In a content delivery model assessment is mostly based on processing that content and knowledge acquisition can be relatively easily tested.

However employers are often more interested in soft skills than hard qualifications. The key employability factors are teamwork, initiative, problem solving and engagement and if you can show that you have these skills they will often trump qualifications (though obviously qualifications are still necessary). Is it possible to assess these soft skills and how can you do so? How can we move assessment and examination from showing what you know to how well you can do things? One recent development in this direction is the use of open badges as described here several times in the past year or so. Badges can be awarded to people who show a clear mastery of a skill in the eyes of their peers as well as teachers or mentors. Is peer review the future of assessment and if so how can we provide quality assurance?

In the session I'll be joined by two authorities in this field: Preetha Ram from OpenStudy and Anka Mulder, president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (read more). They'll be offering their ideas on alternative assessment and have three questions for everyone to consider before and during the session:

• Traditional educational institutions are very well placed to provide campus as well as online education. At the same time they have to find ways to monetize open online education to cover their expenses. Which are the business models they can develop? 
• Students as well as employers still rely heavily on formal certificates and diplomas provided by accredited institutions. In order to become successful, recognition of informal certificates by employers is essential. What can be done to encourage this? 
• Verification of a student’s identity is essential in assessment, notably for institutions that provide accredited diplomas. How can we make online assessment more reliable? 

See the recording of the webinar.

Education, but not as we know it

The market place for free online higher education has become rather crowded during the last 9 months or so. Established actors like Peer2Peer University and University of the People have been joined by heavyweights like Coursera and EdX with the clout of some of the world's most prestigious universities behind them. Throw in other players like Udacity, Saylor Foundation, Course Hero and Faculty project and you have a vast range of online learning available for free. Then there are numerous  "free-range" MOOCs run by comitted professors on the principles of collaborative, student-driven learning. Each of these actors has their own approach to learning, their own interpretation of concepts like free, open and learner-centred and are run on varying business models.

So just when you think the room is pretty crowded, in comes another major initiative to stir things up even more. Enter World Education University! Known to friends as WEU (We-you) they have an interesting new angle on providing free education to the world. The basic concept is familiar with content being pulled in from open sources as well as custom-made content from teachers belonging to estblished universities. Students can do a self-test of learning preferences and content can be adapted to suit different styles. Mentors are available to provide support but, as always, students are expected to do a lot of self-study and peer review of each other's work.

However one interesting feature is that WEU aims to offer real qualifications by teaming up with or acquiring existing colleges. They also aim to offer tailor-made degree programmes in association with companies of professional bodies to ensure that students get the skills they need for careers in those organisations.

The twist in the tail, as always, is how all this is financed. Obviously the founders are investing heavily and they are also attracting sponsorship from large companies too. But if the courses are free where's the revenue coming from? As ever on the net the answer is advertising. According to an article in Campus Technology, New Global University To Be Both Free and For-Profit, there are plans to allow advertising on the course site that will be adapted to the students' interests. The advertisers will be subsidising the students' education in return for the opportunity to advertise direct to their target group. Another avenue is making students available for marketing research and surveys. Students can, say, win points for tests on their course or responding to marketing surveys and then qualify for discounts and free merchandise. A third potential revenue stream is to encourage course material authors whereby their e-books can be published, marketed and sold by WEU with a revenue share scheme as incentive.

It's education, but not as we know it. Academics may be very sceptical about the commercial aspects of WEU but for millions of people around the world without any prospect of raising the money needed to go to a regular university this will be an enormous opportunity. The presence of a few adverts is a minor irritation if you can study for credible qualifications without debt. It's already certain that no matter how many universities are founded in the next few years they can never keep pace with the exploding demand for higher education. New avenues are needed. Watch this space.

Cut and paste

  by  Will Lion

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that many cases of plagiarism have been discovered on free, open courses run by Coursera: Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera's Free Online Courses. This is no real surprise since the nature of massive open online courses is freedom and flexibility and of course the opportunities for cheating would seem to be enormous. The puzzling point here is that these courses do not lead to university credits so what's the point of cheating?

However some students are cheating and one professor has already made a plea to curb plagiarism and there is talk of using plagiarism-detection software in the future (as is standard at many universities already). The main point of the Chronicle article is that the these cases have been discovered by other students through peer assessment rather than being left to the teachers to detect. Students have raised suspicions of plagiarism and taken them to the professors but instead of dishing out punishments many teachers see this as a teachable moment:

In an interview this week with The Chronicle, Mr. Rabkin, who is also an English professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said he sees the plagiarism incidents as a "teachable moment." He said one student wrote him soon after he posted his letter and confessed to submitting a plagiarized essay, but the student said he had not realized that copying and pasting from other sources was wrong. The student asked that his essay be withdrawn and that he be disqualified from receiving a certificate, but Mr. Rabkin said he wrote to Coursera officials saying the student should be given a second chance.

Although there are cases of deliberate plagiarism I think most cases are due to a lack of awareness of what constitutes plagiarism and many cases could be avoided with some hands-on training. An excellent example of how to increase awareness of plagiarism is described in an article in Faculty Focus: An Assignment that Prevents Plagiarism. Here students were given a sample essay written by the teacher and fully referenced but which contained 10 examples of different types of plagiarism. The students' task was to spot the plagiarism and rewrite the essay correctly and finally adding their own referenced conclusion. By doing this excercise the students became more aware of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. According to the study this type of work reduces plagiarism radically.

There are of course stern warnings against plagiarism in every syllabus and college regulations but the whole concept is still abstract and poorly defined in the minds of the students. Only by raising the issues in a practical manner as described above can students grasp what is allowed and develop a sensitivity for what is not acceptable. The fact that plagiarism has been discovered in a MOOC says nothing really about the nature of the course itself, simply that this is an issue that few students today have a clear grasp of.

The soft side of learning

  by  y-a-n

One of the common misconceptions about using technology in schools and universities is that it will motivate students more than using the traditional textbooks, whiteboards, papers and pencils. Giving everyone access to laptops, tablets, mobiles and a host of creative tools will lead to more highly motivated students and better test results. These factors can help to increase motivation and may lead to better results but only if other, more important factors are present. It's all about the hardware and the software of education.

I have just read a fine blog post by Bill Ferriter, Are kids really motivated by technology? despite many attempts to get students to use blogs, wikis and interactive video forums like VoiceThread they have never really caught the students' imaginations in the way he expected. They were simply not particularly impressed by the tools on offer. There's nothing wrong with the tools per se, but Bill realised that the actual choice of tool or technology was subordinate to other more abstract motivators.

"What students are really motivated by are opportunities to be social — to interact around challenging concepts in powerful conversations with their peers. They are motivated by issues connected to fairness and justice. They are motivated by the important people in their lives, by the opportunity to wrestle with the big ideas rolling around in their minds, and by the often-troubling changes they see happening in the world around them. 
Technology’s role in today’s classroom, then, isn’t to motivate. It’s to give students opportunities to efficiently and effectively participate in motivating activities built around the individuals and ideas that matter to them."

Students aren't really interested in the hardware of education. It really doesn't matter how much fantastic content you offer or how many cool tools you use. Content and technology are not motivators. The real motivators are the software of education: energy, enthusiasm, engaging discussion, commitment, feedback, support, group dynamics and clear objectives. If these soft factors are present then learning takes place whether it is online, in a classroom or a mixture. Software trumps hardware every time and that is the key point to understand before making more pointless comparisons between classroom and online learning. The arena and the content (classroom, LMS, social media, books etc) are of course important but not as much as we think. Great learning can occur in poor environments if the softer elements are in focus.

Shades of MOOC

  by  Alfredo Louro

There are many types of open online courses for large groups of participants that are labelled MOOCs. Most of them are indeed open, online and aimed at a mass following but their pedagogies differ. There's a big difference between the pioneer MOOCs of Downes, Siemens, Cormier, Couros etc, built around connections, dialogue, flexibility and collaboration, and the streamlined instructional MOOCs of Coursera, EdX and Udacity.

So I was glad to see Lisa Lane's blog post Three kinds of MOOCs which gives a good definition of three shades of MOOC: network-based, task-based and content-based. It's not a case of one being better than the other but a case of horses for courses. Different formats suit different learners with different objectives and motivations.

The network-based MOOCs of Downes and co are excellent for digitally highly literate and self-sufficient learners who know how to collaborate online and are at ease in different digital environments. These courses are complex and lack clear bullet-point objectives and guided study. Those who prefer clarity, structure and guidance will feel more at home in the more traditional and familiar format of the content-based MOOCs of Coursera and co. The task-based MOOCs will appeal to more practical learners.

There's no right answer here as Lisa sums up:

"So I’m rejecting both the Good vs Bad MOOC model, and the million-points-of-MOOC approach, and going for a triad."

Or maybe time to find new labels. Will 2013 see the MOOC morphing into other new concepts?

From creation to curation

Now that there is a wealth of open content available the focus has turned from content creation to curation, packaging and advanced search. A recognized weakness with OER is finding the right resources with some degree of quality assurance. So now there is a growing list of new tools that find the right resources and package them in convenient forms.

One example of this is Boundless. This compiles free e-textbooks from open educational resources. Boundless helps you replace your standard course textbook with an e-book of open content including texts, images, film, sound and animation. The resulting e-book can be accessed by laptop, tablet or mobile and is instantly available to all students. It can be used as a supplement to a printed course book or can simply replace the printed version. It's all free, at least in its present beta version but there are of course premium services such as SmartNotes.

As more and more solutions like this emerge the role of the textbook publishers becomes very insecure. The arguments for free online e-books are irresistible for students and highly attractive for cash-strapped educational authorities, many of whom are looking at the open textbook sector already. The key factor in this competition is quality assurance. How trustworthy is the material retrieved by services like Boundless? Is it equally well selected as the equivalent material in the printed textbook? The printed textbook has been written as a logical progression with clear developed themes whereas the digital version is a mix of completely independent modules. Quality in open e-books depends on effective tagging including parameters for subject matter, objectives, learning outcomes, age group, level and so on. As the meta data improves and resources are produced with more thought for reuse then solutions such as Boundless will become increasingly attractive.

Definitely worth investigating further.

Read a short review of Boundless on Edudemic: The Future Of Textbooks Is Free … And It’s Now Available.

Educational entrepreneurship

  by  brotherM

Higher education is becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, though not always in traditional terms of starting profitable companies. Many faculty members are trying out new methods, new pedagogies and rethinking their whole approach to education. Ideas must be developed, backers must be won over, arguments sharpened and the whole concept needs testing and quality assurance. Many great ideas never get developed because the people involved don't know how to get started. Universities need to be better at getting new ideas off the ground whether in the form of internal projects, collaboration with other institutions or real start-ups.

Now there's a course that looks at exactly these issues and it's an interesting addition to the wide range of free, open online courses available today - Ed Startup 101. The course will run from 24 August to 7 December and will be lead by David Wiley, Richard Culatta and Todd Manwarin. It will be open and free for all online but will also be offered for credits to students at Brigham Young University. Those not eligible for credits will be able to earn certification within the Open Badges infrastructure.

In response to the present wave of MOOCs offered by the major universities this one claims to be an "old style" MOOC, that is to say:

"... one that focuses more on building community and learning together socially than on watching video clips and answering multiple choice questions. Ed Startup is designed to acquaint educators, educational researchers, and others to the world of entrepreneurship and intrapeneurship, help you decide which one is right for you, and support you in the first steps of your journey. During the course you’ll learn directly with an incredible group of experts (people who have done it before and succeeded) as well as with peers (people who are passionate about making a change for the first time), and work toward transforming your own innovative idea – or another innovative idea established in the research – into a well-designed product or service that can improve the lives of teachers and learners."

Future vision

Here's a film showing what the world may look like when mobile technology is baked into glasses and you no longer need a mobile device to interact with the net. I suspect that this is already perfectly possible, the question is whether we want to buy the concept. One problem that may result is that you will no longer be sure if the person you're talking to is even looking at you at all. They might be reading web pages or checking their Facebook in their lenses. Your class can all be looking at you and appear to be listening but are all in fact somewhere else. Just beware when all your friends suddenly start wearing trendy glasses.


Project Glass One day by Spi0n

Digital scholarship

 Some rights reserved by btobetun

One of the barriers to the adoption of open educational resources in mainstream higher education has been the question of quality assurance. Academics are often wary of any material not published by established reputable academic publishers and so OER get dismissed or overlooked. However there are now many important initiatives that are providing access to quality OER with reliable search facilities.

One of the most promising I've seen is the result of a major project by Open University along with the universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Manchester. They have launched two sites offering a vast amount of information, guides and access to assessed OER: Digital scholarship and Ready to research. The OER that are linked to from these sites have all been approved by the developers and users are encouraged also to rate each resource and add comments, thus adding a crowd-sourcing element to quality assurance. In many ways this is similar to the OpenScout initiative I wrote about a few weeks ago. The key element is that all the resources are genuinely open.

"The site is a portal to a collection of Open Educational Resources (OERs) accessed from repositories and institutions around the world. All these resources have been provided free by their authors under Creative Commons or other licence for anyone who wishes to use them for educational purposes. 
The OU Digital Scholarship team, and our partners in Nottingham, Leicester, and Manchester, have reviewed and selected every resource listed on this site in order to ensure that it is a genuinely open access and high quality item of self-study material appropriate for students in the UK and elsewhere who wish to prepare themselves to study on research degrees in UK universities."

The Digital Scholarship site focuses on using digital resources in university studies in general, with self-learning material on issues such as digital literacies, using multimedia material, collaborative learning, plagiarism, information retrieval, social media and ethics, rights and intellectual property issues. Ready to research focuses on academic writing, research methods, online academic identity and  the use of technology for dissemination and publication.

You can access material by choosing topics or by using the tag cloud. Each resource has information about how much time is required to work through the material, what kind of media are used, who has produced it and what you are allowed to do with it. This can then of course be complemented by users own comments and recommendations.

It will be interesting to see how these sites are used by other universities and whether OER can finally become an accepted part of academic study. The skeptics had valid arguments against OER but they are now being dealt with. It's time to stop the arguing and work together to build sound digital scholarship.

The magic formula

  by  mararie

I've just read yet another report that shows no difference in learning outcomes between online courses and traditional classroom courses (see Campus Technology, Interactive Online Learning Produces Learning Outcomes on Par with Traditional Teaching Methods). Nothing wrong with the study of course and I've read many similar ones, mostly with a similar conclusion. Traditionalists like to point to such studies as justification for continuing to ignore technology but these studies are missing the main issue I feel.

It's not a matter of one form of teaching being somehow "better" than another, we should be investigating how learning can be fostered using a good mix of the various tools and learning situations available today. It's a bit like investigating whether students learn more in a modern well-equipped classroom compared to a more traditional classroom. It all depends on what goes on in there, who teaches, what methods are used, students' attitudes to the course being taught, exam contraints, class dynamics and so on. The room in itself does not magically lead to better learning just as the mere use of computers or mobiles or whatever will not magically lead to better learning.

Computers are no magic ingredient; it depends on what the teacher and the students do with them. That's what we need to be examining in research. Simply face-offs between online and classroom prove very little and simplify the issues.

Your attention please

  by  opacity

I've just read an interesting post by Stephanie Chasteen, Digital distraction in the classroom. When we discuss students being distracted by social media in class we generally attribute such behaviour to the teacher not engaging them and simply lecturing. However this seems to be a simplification of the problem. Despite all efforts to involve students in her lessons and avoiding the pitfalls of traditional lecturing Stephanie observed that a number of students were off task anyway and wonders why.

"Even in this ideal environment, the temptation of digital distraction was too high. I might view this akin to addictive behavior now, and realize that students need more explicit support in order to do the right thing for their learning. I think that the biggest mistake that I made was to fail to have explicit guidelines for use of technology (laptops, cell phones) in class."

The fact that you can access social media in class proves to be too tempting for some students despite the interactive nature of the session. The solution offered is to involve students from the start in drawing up guidelines for classroom involvement and make the issue of attention and respect a clear issue from the very start.

As I have no doubt mentioned several times before here, this is not a problem that can be simply attributed to any stereotype generation X/Y/Z, homo zapiens or digital native. I see the same behaviour in conferences and meetings and am myself also guilty of being easily distracted. Just as students like to keep up to date with their social networks, their teachers and professors enjoy being efficient multi-taskers by simultaneously attending a conference whilst attending to e-mails and other communication channels. A major reason behind this is the fear of drowning in the flood of e-mails if you dare to switch off for too long. As a result you tend to check the in-box the moment a conference speaker wanders away from your immediate area of interest.

I will try to resist the temptation to go off task but at the same time there are pressures on both sides of this problem. On the one hand we all admire today's ideal of the multi-tasking, mobile worker always available and always productive but also critical of people's inability to pay attention for more than a few minutes. Switching off all channels for a two day conference can be very positive for your competence development but the price to pay is when you get back to your office and discover a backlog of e-mails and several irritated calls in your voice mail wondering why you haven't responded.

Maybe it's time to have a discussion about common guidelines in every workplace. It's not just a student problem.

How open is open?

  by  cheesy42

I wrote a post at the start of the year called 2012 - the year of the MOOC? and it has certainly proved to be just that. A number of high profile initiatives such as Coursera and EdX have been launched offering free online higher education to a great deal of mainstream media buzz. The acronym MOOC is frequently used but has grown to include models that differ significantly from the original versions launched by people like George Siemens and Stephen Downes several years ago. The original model is highly collaborative with students aggregating and creating content, discussing and sharing new ideas in a dynamic but sometimes chaotic environment. The notion of the traditional linear course with predefined objectives becomes more fluid with each student participating on their own terms and with individual objectives.

Most of the headline-making MOOCs like EdX are highly traditional in format; online lectures, lesson plans, tests and reading with some kind of certificate of completion at the end (though never "real" university credits). The gap between these two models is so large that we may need to redefine the MOOC or bring in some new acronyms.

David Wiley questions the use of the term Massive Open Online Course on the grounds that most MOOCs fail to comply with at least one of the words in the acronym (The MOOC misnomer). Indeed there are many that are not as open as we might imagine, many are not so massive and some are not really courses in the traditional sense of the word. Wiley is worried that free might become more important than open:

The MOOCs which are “massive but not open” pose a special threat to the future of OER, but no one seems to be paying attention… Before long the general public will feel that “free” is good / innovative enough, and no one will care about “open,” permissions, or licensing. The good has once again become the enemy of the best. And how to you wage a PR war against “the good?”

Debbie Morrison writes a good summary of some of these issues in a post called MOOC Mythbuster – What MOOCs are and what they aren’t that includes an overview chart comparing and contrasting different forms of course delivery.

Are all MOOCs really MOOCs? It's certainly a term that just now accommodates a wide range of models and maybe by the end of this year the MOOC as a concept will have morphed into new terminology. This is hardly surprising since it is all about experimentation and development of new educational models. Defining a moving target is never easy.

Telephones and e-mail - is the end at hand?

 Some rights reserved by kristiewells

The two most important means of communication for those of us over 30 are showing signs of serious fatigue. Most of us still rely on phone calls and e-mail for the vast majority of our business and personal communication but two new articles in the New York Times indicate that this domination is under threat.

Let's take e-mail first. According to an article by Nick Bilton called Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail, 107 trillion e-mails were sent last year from 3.1 billion active accounts. This boils down to the average business user getting an average of 105 e-mails every day. Most of this deluge is unnecessary and could be avoided if people learned a few simple rules like thinking several times before hitting the "reply all" button and not sending so many copies to people who probably don't need to know at all. However the constant flow is hard to regulate since even if you diligently reply quickly to every mail that action simply prompts just as many answers.

"Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke."

The fact that the vast majority of e-mail in the world is spam does not make the situation easier. Maybe e-mail is simply nearing the end of the line and is suffocating under its own weight. Many under the age of 25 use e-mail very sparingly, preferring to communicate by social media where you have greater control over who can reach you and where communication is usually short and to the point. Most over 25 belong to the e-mail generation and are trapped in it for the time being but we can see new communication models forming.

Good old telephony does seems to be on the retreat already. Again the younger generation clearly prefer texting to phoning and now companies are increasingly abandoning the phone for online communication with customers. Amy O'Leary writes in another NYT article, Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind, about how many net-based companies are simply not on the phone at all.

"Voice calls have been falling out of fashion with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text only, please). But what is a matter of preference for the young is becoming a matter of policy for technology companies; phones cost money, phones do not scale."

Global companies like Google or Facebook would need large armies of call-center operators to even try to answer customer questions by telephone and it's easy to understand why they simply don't even try. It simply takes too long to talk to customers and costs too much. Many companies don't even advertise a single phone number and often make their e-mail address very difficult to find. In a global market there simply is no time to deal with the millions of phone enquiries that would stream in. Instead of trying to keep up with the deluge the big companies are switching off and referring customers to self-help sites and forums.

However as the giants become harder to talk to maybe smaller companies can use the old technology to their advantage by providing the exclusive service of voice communication. 

Can you cheat in a MOOC?

 Some rights reserved by cogdogblog

The explosion of net-based learning and in particular so-called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with thousands of students participating online for free has of course inspired many writers to warn against the dangers of cheating and plagiarism. Of course there are few control mechanisms in massive online courses and the whole concept is based very much on trust and mutual respect. However since MOOCs are voluntary, informal and do not lead to regular university credits the issue of cheating on such a course would seem rather irrelevant. Who are you cheating on such a course? What is the point of cheating?

This is the topic of a good blog post by Debbie Morrison, Cheating in a MOOC - an oxymoron. The point is that since MOOCs are all about informal learning and not about the pursuit of grades there is no hard currency worth cheating for.

"You can’t cheat in a MOOC. Well let me clarify, you can cheat while completing an auto-scored quiz or exam, or on an essay that might be peer reviewed, but it’s pointless. In this instance cheating does not serve any purpose. The courses are free, you can’t earn college credit, and are not part of a credential [at this point]. Furthermore MOOCs depend upon the learner being self-motivated, to learn for the sake of learning."

Cheating in such an environment is a bit like cheating in a hobby like bird watching. You can claim to have seen all sorts of rare species but the only way to gain real credibility is to be able to prove it, by showing photos or being able to describe in detail the distinguishing features of the bird you have seen. In bird watching it is essential that other people in the same geographical area also see the bird. You need evidence and witnesses.

In the most collaborative MOOCs (ie those run by Siemens, Downes, Cormier and co) there is constant interaction and whatever you post will be read and reviewed by other participants. If you cheat you will probably be revealed sooner or later. It may well be harder to cheat in this type of learning arena since it builds on reflection and debate rather than on clear-cut answers.

However, as soon as hard currency credentials are at stake some people will always be tempted to take short cuts. MOOCs are popular because participation is driven by internal motivation. Do we automatically pollute them if we introduce external motivators into the mix?