To MOOC or Not To MOOC

Webinar with John Covach (May 1, 2014)[1] At colleges and universities across North America, online education is a topic that has generated a significant amount of discussion in the past year or so. In many ways, the idea of online education is only the most recent version of something that got its start in the nineteenth century: the correspondence course.(1) The development of radio and television in the twentieth century, and then the rise of the internet over the last twenty years, has made it possible to conduct courses with far less time lag than was present in the early days of distance learning, when lessons and assignments were carried by surface mail. Each issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education seems to bring word of some new development or wrinkle in the rapid development of online courses, and perhaps no topic is more controversial than MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).(2) While many embrace the idea that MOOCs make college-level learning available to thousands who would otherwise not have pragmatic access to it, others worry that MOOCs threaten to put traditional college courses out of business.(3)[2] In February 2013, the University of Rochester officially joined Coursera, one of the largest providers of MOOCs in the world.(4) The university had considered several options regarding online education, some of these claiming to offer the prospect of revenue generation and increased ease and flexibility for students, as well as the possibility of functioning as an alternative to conventional classes and counting for credit. In choosing to partner with Coursera, the university chose to place availability of knowledge above the concern for revenue: Rochester MOOCs are free, open to anyone who wants to enroll, and do not count for college credit.(5)[3] I was chosen to teach one of our first MOOCs and based my Coursera courses on the History of Rock class I currently teach at the University of Rochester. Coursera recommends that regular semester courses of twelve or more weeks be broken up into six- to eight-week courses. Accordingly, History of Rock Part 1 runs seven weeks, while History of Rock Part 2 is six weeks in length. The courses are offered consecutively, with Part 2 immediately following Part 1; students electing the sequence thus have a similar experience to those taking the regular semester-length course at Rochester. Coursera has found that students tend not to stick with lectures that extend longer than about fifteen minutes; they strongly recommend breaking up the week's lectures into a series of shorter videos. Correspondingly, within each week of my courses there are several lectures, each ranging from about five minutes up to fifteen minutes in length, making a total of about ninety minutes of lecture each week. Students can either stream the videos from the Coursera site or download the videos for later viewing offline. Coursera also suggests putting a quick quiz at the end of each of these videos, and perhaps one in the middle as well. I decided to use these quizzes as an opportunity to review the main points of each video rather than test details from the lecture.[4] Consider the following video, which is drawn from Week Four of Part 1, "The Beatles and The British Invasion (1964-66)." This video discusses the development of Beatles music from what I call a "craftsman" approach to an "artist" approach. It is the fifth of ten videos from that week of the course.Video. "The Beatles from Craftsmen to Artists"The following quiz appears at the very end of the video, after the lecture has concluded but just before the copyright notices.(6) The correct answers are shown with asterisks.Which of the following statements describe the career of the Beatles and rock authenticity as discussed in the video (mark all that apply)?*The idea of authenticity in rock music means that artists write their own songs and play their own instruments on recordings. …