WHAM! A new article published by the Chronicle of Higher Ed recounts some serious self-appraisal from the founder of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun. It seems that MOOCs work if you already have a degree or are among the demographic of highly self-motivated individuals that largely already have access to higher education. This flies in the face of the hopes and dreams of those that saw visions of effective education to the uneducated, underprivileged masses that would be on par with expensive, “elitist” traditional university-based education.
The motivation variable makes perfect sense to me. MOOCs are self-paced and self-policing, so a learner with low motivation is probably not going to complete the course. Motivation is also, not surprisingly, a key variable of success in traditional education, which begs the question. Are students successful in educational pursuits because they are highly motivated, or are they highly motivated because they are successful? If the latter, what if success is only possible for those with means and access to traditional education? Educational inequity is a condition that the MOOC was supposed to remedy. MOOCs were supposed to be the answer to the “oppressive” higher education system. MOOCs were an egalitarian society of learning where everyone, regardless of means, would have an equal opportunity. And so they have. And yet, those that would be (or are) successful in traditional higher education have better outcomes in MOOCs.
I, for one, believe that highly motivated people have good outcomes because they are highly motivated. That is, high motivation is causal for success (but not completely). If this is true, MOOCs have potential to supplement the instructional methods we use to educate our students, but they will not be able to motivate the unmotivated. In this regard, we should view MOOCs for what they are, not what we wish them to be.
