IN THIS ISSUE

Luminaria

Rise of the MOOC

LEARNING

ENHANCEMENT

CENTER

METROPOLITAN

COLLEGE OF

NEW YORK

Designed and Edited by Nathan Schiller

Welcome Letter from Dwight Hodgson

2

I Took A MOOC 3

Interview: MCNY President Vinton

Thompson 6

Learning To Learn 12

MOOCs At MCNY? 13

Low MOOC Completion Rates

14

A Brief Tour of MOOC Providers

16

MOOCs And Math 18

PLUS!

LEC students speak out

about the pros and cons

of MOOCs

Art from Taxgedo

V O L U M E 2 | I S S U E 1 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

2

A s the new Coordinator of the Learning

Enhancement Center (LEC) and Men-

tor & Leadership Development Pro-

gram (MLDP), I am excited to welcome you to

another edition of Luminaria. This edition

seeks to unfold the MOOC phenomenon. Re-

cently, I have found myself thinking about my

past professional experiences in non-

conventional environments, which have given

me an array of perspectives on education and

learning. As the Education Center Coordinator

for an adult basic education center, I analyzed

issues ranging from the residual effects of a

flawed K-12 system to the impositions of family

life on the adult learner. As the Coordinator of

a CUNY access program charged with getting

young minorities involved in biomedical re-

search and the world of STEM, I worked with

students at the top of their undergraduate clas-

ses—students who didn’t need remedial inter-

vention but who needed to be introduced to,

and guided through, research opportunities,

internships, and summer programs. And as

Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion at

a premier city high school, I promoted diversi-

ty within an intelligent and articulate but, from

the perch of interpersonal engagement, socially

and culturally uninformed student body.

In each of these situations—and in many more

like them—MOOCs have the potential to fill an

education gap by giving students the time and

space to step in and out of the classroom expe-

rience without interrupting their work flow.

Having seen

early college students selflessly offer up their

naivety in exchange for an introduction to dif-

ferent cultures, I imagine students will bring

that same innocence and yearning to the glob-

al, virtual MOOC classroom. I like to think

that, in the same ways my former students

strung their life experiences outside the class-

room into an applicable learning device when

they worked with their tutors, students en-

rolled in MOOCs will use their experience to

enhance the experience for all. And I also be-

lieve that the communal MOOC environment

will foster an opportunity for students to chime

in on topics they never imagined they could

have anything of substance to offer.

I am not concerned, and do not think, that

MOOCs will replace the traditional classroom.

More likely, they will supplement the brick-and

-mortar education system richly and robustly .

. . with many hiccups along the way. And that

brings me full circle, to my role with the LEC

and MLDP here at MCNY. As online classes

and MOOCs continue to expand throughout

higher education, support services—where con-

fused and introspective students converse with

real, live human tutors and mentors—will be-

come all the more vital. As you survey the per-

spectives of this issue, I hope you take a mo-

ment to consider how the digital MOOC model

might add to the analog nature of your educa-

tion and your life. Happy reading.

—Dwight Hodgson

Dwight Hodgson is the

Coordinator of the Learning

Enhancement Center (LEC)

and Mentor & Leadership

Development Program

(MLDP).

Welcome!

LEC Students on MOOCs

There are students who you don’t want

to be in classroom with—they steer the

professor away from the topics. This set-

up can be a waste of time. MOOCs can

change that.

—Ronald Knight

2

3

Why take a MOOC?

I have to admit, I love being in a classroom. I

enjoy trudging or skipping to class under an

umbrella or behind sunglasses. There’s nothing

quite like the tangy stench of white board

marker or the sharp smell of chalk and the

gleam of ideas filling a once-empty board—

learning takes hold of the space, and the world

outside the classroom melts away. I

had never taken an online course

before, and, though I feared I

would miss the inimitable experi-

ence of classroom learning, I was

excited to join the worldwide move-

ment of students enrolling in Mas-

sive Open Online Courses. I was

intrigued to try my hand at learning

in this new “classroom” in which

the student is simultaneously alone

and in the company of thousands.

Choosing The Course

Subject Matter

I c h o s e a c o ur s e c a l led

“Foundations of Teaching for

Learning” because I knew it would apply di-

rectly to my work at the LEC and other teach-

ing jobs. There were other interesting course

offerings (literature, philosophy), but I sus-

pected it would be difficult to stay motivated in

them, as I know I learn certain subjects best in

the company of others in discussion-based

seminars in “brick and mortar” classroom envi-

ronments. This course was described as an

overview of basic, student-centered teaching

practices, and I thought it would be a great op-

portunity to review what I already knew, en-

gage with teaching as I was practicing it day-to

-day, deepen my understanding of new re-

search in my field, and expand my set of skills

and resources.

Time Commitment

The course description predicted that this

course would require 4-6 hours

each of the four weeks. This

seemed manageable to me. (I end-

ed up spending a bit more time on

weeks that included an essay as-

signment.)

First Impressions

The class “went live” on a specific

date, and I logged in as soon as I

had a free moment. I was “greeted”

by a welcome statement, and it was

initially a little uncomfortable to

realize that I was reading it, rather

than actually being welcomed by a

person/teacher. (There I found the

first of a surprising bounty of typos

in the regular written correspond-

ence from course administrators.) I felt excited

to start, and I took an optional “getting to

know you” survey. I imagine the survey is a

way to help the course designers understand

their audience/student population. My excite-

ment around this reminded me of how thrilling

it was to take those quizzes in Seventeen maga-

zine to find out what your “fashion personality”

was. Who doesn't love being asked about one-

self and filling in little bubbles to answer? My

first interactions with my MOOC were not so

I Took A MOOC

MOOC is an

acronym

for

Massive

Open

Online

Course

3

By Polly Bresnick

4

d i f f e r e nt

from early-internet quizzes

(“Take this quiz to find out your animal spirit

—CLICK HERE!”). Most of the questions on

the survey were straightforward (“What is your

level of education?”), and the final question

asked me to identify my gender! Interesting!

The welcome email also encouraged me to

poke around the course site. I am easily intimi-

dated by technology, but the course design

seemed sensitive to that, and I found the “base

site” quite user-friendly. It was like a web-

based syllabus/course schedule, with hyper-

links on a sidebar leading to the course materi-

als. The page for each week contained four vid-

eo lectures available to click on and view as

many times as you’d like, with the ability to

pause, rewind, and fast-forward. Each week’s

course material page also included suggested

activities to enhance learning, and some of the

practices were interspersed between the video

lectures—short videos of teachers in action or

speaking about their practice, worksheets to

use for evaluating oneself or one’s students,

and additional reading material. I would take a

multiple choice, electronic quiz, accessible at

the bottom of each week’s course materials

page. The quizzes “went live” at the end of each

week, and I would submit them electronically

by the middle of the following week. I would

complete two essay assignments, and submit

them electronically for peer-assessment, a pro-

cess I had not heard of. As part of the peer-

assessment system, I would evaluate the com-

pleted essays of two fellow students based on a

common assessment rubric.

Without an essay assignment, suggested activi-

ty, or a video lecture to watch, I was impatient

to start, so I went to the forum, hesitantly, to

check out what was going on there. The first

post I read started with: “Hello everyone, My

name is Y____ and I live in India. I have got a

degree in Electronics and Communication En-

gineering and an M.A. in English Literature.”

India! There was also a student in Guyana, and

one from Burma! The Philippines, Mexico . . .

There seemed to be a lot of ESL-focused teach-

ers in the group.

Finally, the first lecture was available to view.

It was a clear, thorough introduction to what

the course would cover and how to use the

technical aspects of the course. In order to en-

sure fairness, an introductory email stated, all

students participating must agree to abide by

an academic honesty code of conduct. I was

delighted to agree to this and eager get going

with the course!

What Made It Great

Format

The week-long modules were broken into 10-

to 15-minute video lectures, which I could easi-

ly make time for throughout the week. I wore

headphones and took notes while watching the

lecture videos, to help me focus and concen-

trate. If I missed any information, I appreciat-

ed having the option to “rewind” and listen

again. If I wanted to spend more time looking

at an image the professor showed on screen, I

could pause the video for as long as necessary.

And, of course, if I was interested in reviewing

any of the material covered in previous video

lectures, I could access them any time.

The quizzes at the end of each week were chal-

lenging! After struggling through the first one,

I made a point to review my notes and the

course material from each week before taking

the quiz.

LEC Students on MOOCs

I work, and I’m always rushing to school,

and the train is annoying. With MOOCs,

I could go home, take a shower, drink a

cup of tea, and then go online and learn.

—Tara Rowley

4

5 The two short essays offered another valuable

opportunity to review my notes, synthesize my

reactions to the information from the lectures,

and articulate how I planned to apply what I

was learning. Two other students taking the

course “peer-assessed” my essays and I “self-

assessed” my own essay! I thought this form of

assessment was a truly innovative way to offer

feedback to thousands of students. It was an

interesting challenge to evaluate myself hon-

estly—a valuable lesson in personal accounta-

bility and independent learning.

Content

Because the subject matter related to my work,

I could directly apply what I was learning as I

was learning it. This gave me the self-

motivation necessary for an online learning

situation in which there wasn’t a “live” teacher

taking attendance and holding me, the student,

accountable. I approached the course with the

goal of professional development. The infor-

mation I absorbed through taking this course

significantly added to my “bag of tools,” and it

deepened my intellectual engagement with my

work.

What Could Be Improved

Content

I know it was an introductory course, but some

of the information felt too basic and, at times,

gratuitous. The final week’s video lectures, “A

World of Change,” “Outside of School,”

“Professional Development,” and “Questions of

Professionalism,” for example, felt drawn-out

and were far less practically applicable than the

earlier lectures. The lectures in week two, for

example, “Thinking About Thinking” and

“Teaching for Learning,” were particularly in-

teresting and useful to me, as they deepened

my pedagogical approach to engaging students

with specific metacognition practices (a schol-

arly term for “thinking about thinking”). I had

difficulty self-motivating and engaging with the

course during this last week. I think the infor-

mation presented in the final week of the

course could have been condensed into one

lecture or left out.

Final Thoughts

The video lectures and announcement emails

often urged students to engage with the

“forums.” When I first started the course, I

peeked briefly at the forums. They were always

brimming with hundreds of entries posted by

enthusiastic students from all over the globe. I

was mentally overwhelmed and exhausted af-

ter spending about three minutes scrolling

through, and the experience discouraged me

from looking at the forums again. I suppose it

might have been interesting to discuss the

course material with my fellow students—to

have, for example, a “dialogue” of my experi-

ence incorporating the practices suggested in

the video lectures—but I didn’t feel like I had

time to engage in this way, and besides, I was

able to share and discuss what I was learning

with my friends and colleagues—far preferable

to “e-discussion,” even if it’s multi-perspective,

international, fellow student/fellow teacher “e-

discussion.” Nonetheless, I value the experi-

ence of taking this course. I certainly plan to

take more MOOCs in the future to continue

flexing my self-directed learning muscles and

adding to my professional skill-set. I do think

I’ll stick with professional development

MOOCs on subjects I can discuss and activate

with real people in the real world. In fact, I’ve

signed up for another MOOC on a specific ESL

teaching approach. It starts later this month.

Even though online learning can’t quite repli-

cate classroom learning, it appears I’ve caught

the MOOC bug.

Polly Bresnick is a Writing

Specialist in the LEC.

5

6 Interview: MCNY President Vinton Thompson

6

M CNY President Vinton Thompson did not go to college to become a college

president. He studied biology at Harvard in the late ’60s, writing his senior

thesis under the late Stephen Jay Gould, the renown evolutionary biologist,

and then pursued a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, where he

carried out investigations in experimental fruit fly population genetics. In 1980, he was

hired as a full-time Assistant Professor of Biology at Roosevelt University, in Chicago,

an urban university serving a largely adult, commuter student body. At Roosevelt, he

took on administrative roles, eventually becoming Provost, and helped grow the univer-

sity’s downtown campus. In 2004, he was named Provost and Vice President for Aca-

demic Affairs at Kean University, in Union, New Jersey, where he oversaw the revitali-

zation of faculty scholarship and the development of many new programs, including the

university’s first doctoral programs. Four years later, in 2008, he became President of

MCNY. His work here has involved stabilizing enrollment, increasing the enrollment of

new students, leading the college through a successful regional reaccreditation visit,

and extending the campus to the Bronx. In this interview, he talks about the history of

distance learning, online classes, MOOCs, and the changing nature of higher education

in America.

Interview begins on the next page

7

7

C an you talk about the history of distance

learning?

Historically, distance education, particularly by

the federal government, has been viewed with

some suspicion. People have always treated

correspondence schools like they were voca-

tional things not of very high quality. I think

people tended to look at distance education

that way. And there’s still absolute schizophre-

nia of the federal government’s approach to

this. On the one hand, the federal government

would like people to do lots of online education

to reduce costs. On the other

hand, it’s extremely suspi-

cious about whether the qual-

ity of the program is good,

and whether we’re really veri-

fying that the person who says

they’re out there at the other

end of the connection is the

person they say they are.

These are not unreasonable concerns.

We’ve democratized, fantastically, higher edu-

cation: if you go back to the period before the

Second World War, fewer than ten percent of

people went to college, and barely ten percent

of people graduated from high school. We’re

now in the situation where something like 70

percent of people go on to higher education.

We’ve gotten high school graduation rates up,

and high school dropout rates aren’t nearly as

bad as they used to be, and this is true not only

for white students but for black and Latino stu-

dents. We said education is important, and

people have pretty much taken that to heart.

The issue is, now, that a lot of people aren’t

getting through college. That’s especially true

of people who come from relatively disadvan-

taged backgrounds. In a certain respect we’ve

solved the problem of access. Now there’s great

concern that we haven’t solved the problem of

success and completion. And there’s angst over

the question of whether through this process

we’ve diluted the nature of college degrees.

And so this whole issue of MOOCS and online

education plays out in that context.

What do you think colleges most fear about

online education?

There is a good bit of concern, on our own

board and nationally, that the net consequence

of moving toward a lot of online instruction, in

which more initiative is put in the hands of stu-

dents, may advantage the already-advantaged

and disadvantage the already-disadvantaged,

and lead to a brutally two-tier system of educa-

tion in which an elite handful

of students study in a more

traditional mode at residen-

tial colleges with live profes-

sors, and everybody else takes

online course with anony-

mous people somewhere who

may not be real professors in

the traditional sense. I think

there’s probably a danger of

things moving in that direction.

When was the first time you encountered

online distance learning?

In my last three years at Roosevelt University

in Chicago, 2000-2003, I was Provost and Aca-

demic Vice President and oversaw all the aca-

demics at the university. We had an early and

active online program in which we put a couple

of degrees at the master’s level entirely online.

It was through interacting with the dean of the

college of continuing education, who oversaw

this effort, and the person working immediate-

ly under her, that I first really got lessons in

understanding what online courses were, and

how they might function, and some of the ins

and outs of putting them together.

How did the students respond?

We marketed those programs essentially as

separate programs; they were not closely inte-

grated. So students came specifically because

There is concern that

online instruction may

lead to a brutally two-

tier system of

education.

8

they

wanted to take a fully online degree

program, and we enrolled people in places like

Poland. The people in the program were posi-

tive, because that’s what they were looking for.

There wasn’t this issue we face now of blended

classes, where you have a population that is, in

many cases, involuntarily exposed to distance

learning.

Do you have a similar vision for distance

learning at MCNY?

When I got here [five years ago], there had

been a lot of tentative efforts at instituting dis-

tance learning opportunities. At that point, we

had achieved some

fully online courses.

W e h a d n o t

achieved any en-

compassing strategy

for distance educa-

tion. I thought it

was important that

we do so, and when

we did our 2009-

2014 Strategic Plan, we incorporated a number

of goals related to distance education, which

probably the most encompassing was a goal of

achieving initially 20 percent—we’ve now mod-

ified that to 20-30 percent—of content in every

program through online delivery, either

through pure online courses or through blend-

ed courses, recognizing that the circumstances

in different programs might lead to different

approaches.

What are the reasons for doing that?

There are a variety of reasons. One—and I

think this is the single most important one in

this circumstance—is to give flexibility in the

schedules of individual students. We serve

adult students as our primary market. One of

the major characteristics of adult students is

that they’re balancing a number of things in

their lives, and typically school is their third

priority, after their family and their job. The

nature of our education, where we encourage

people to study full-time while they often work

full-time and have significant family responsi-

bilities, leads to extremely full schedules. We

had talked loosely in the past about offering

flexibility to our students, and what we’ve real-

ly offered is convenience in the scheduling, in

the sense that we offer classes in the evenings

and on the weekends. But actual school sched-

ules are inflexible—you come when we sched-

ule classes, and there’s not much choice in

those schedules, because people go through a

fixed program. One way we could introduce

flexibility in that structure is to give students a

choice about when they study, through dis-

tance learning, so that they can take the 20 to

30 percent of their

c o u r s e w o r k

through distance

learning at times

that suit their com-

plicated schedules.

And that should

both make life easi-

er for our students

individually and

make our programs more attractive for stu-

dents. The option of working full-time while

going to school full-time is a very attractive

thing; it’s one of the main reasons students

come here. But we have to find realistic ways

for people to actually do that.

Another major reason for introducing distance

learning is that you can do things in a distance

learning mode that you can’t do in traditional,

conventional classes pedagogically. At this

point in history, it would be utterly uncon-

scionable to graduate students who have no

LEC Students on MOOCs

The right professor needs to manage

the course, someone who motivates

the discussions and is not a “Ghost.”

—Clarita Liepolt

8

Working full-time while going to

school full-time is one of the main

reasons students come here. But

we have to find realistic ways for

people to actually do that.

9 experience working in an online environment.

Almost anyone, right now, who does any job

that’s not manual labor—and most of our stu-

dent graduates are not going to be doing man-

ual labor—does a lot

of work, if not all, in

an online environ-

ment. There’s a ma-

jor practical learning

experience involved

in working in depth

in an online environ-

ment. You learn that by doing it, and you do it

in part by working in these courses.

And the third consideration—and this is also

important institutionally—is that if we admin-

ister online learning well, it should reduce the

pressure on our classroom space. For instance,

right now we tend to be chockfull of students

Monday through Thursday evenings. Our

classrooms are relatively unoccupied during

the day. They’re fairly well occupied on Satur-

day, but not as well as they could be. It’s very

expensive, particularly in New York City, to

rent space to accommodate peak demand. To

the degree that we can reduce pressure on

classroom space by administratively well-

chosen schedules for distance learning oppor-

tunities, we can serve more students for less

facilities costs. In the long run, that puts less

pressure on tuition, which should enable us to

lower costs for students.

Another consideration—and it’s a significant

one, though it wasn’t the driving force—is that

this will enable us this coming January to move

to a 14-week academic schedule. We presently

run three full 15-week semesters a year. I’m not

sure I know any non-profit four-year school

that does that; typically, what happens is that

summer sessions don’t offer either a full sched-

ule or don’t last 15 weeks. A 15-week schedule

poses difficulties for students and staff, be-

cause there’s not a lot of down time. With a 14-

week schedule we will be able to start a week

later in January, which will give a longer holi-

day break. It will give more time for people to

get grades in and processed; from the point of

view of recruiting, it will give more time to en-

roll new students without a rush in the begin-

ning of January.

We’ll also be able

to increase sub-

stantially the sum-

mer break, which

our faculty are re-

ally looking for-

ward to. And,

there’ll be longer breaks in the summer and

winter for students. It would not be possible to

run a 14-week schedule without the incorpora-

tion of distance learning.

Do you ever see MCNY offering a MOOC as an

elective or transfer credit?

I anticipate that, going forward, we will see one

of two things happen. First, we will see people

bringing, for credit, on transcripts, as transfer

students, courses that they’ve taken in MOOC

form. My guess is that we will accept those

courses, like we accept other transfer courses,

once they’re on the transcript. There’s already

a New York non-profit institution that does a

lot of distance education itself and is making a

specialty validating MOOC courses—Excelsior

College, in Albany.

Second, people will come to us with MOOCs

that have not been transcripted somewhere

else. We will eventually have to have some poli-

cy on that. My guess is that our policy will be to

follow the guidelines of recognized national

organizations. We already give credit for cer-

tain types of military experience, and there are

guidelines for doing that, published by the

American Council for Education. We adhere to

those guidelines; it’s one of the ways we’re a

veteran-friendly school. The American Council

for Education is also working on mechanisms

to give credits for MOOCs, and should they do

so, I think it would be very likely that we will

accept those courses in one form or another. In

9

At this point in history, it would be

utterly unconscionable to graduate

students who have no experience

working in an online environment.

10 that sense, MOOCs pose a challenge that isn’t

all that fundamentally different from students

bringing all external credit. You often have sit-

uations where the transfer credits don’t direct-

ly correspond to any particular course that you

give in your institution, so you give credit and

make informed decision about what substitutes

for what in your own curriculum.

Do you think there is chance that the MOOC

will be remembered as a “fad”?

I think that it’s not just a passing fad. But I

think the nature of MOOCs is going to trans-

form. There are hopes that people can find the

mechanisms to take online courses and perfect

the pedagogy in such a way that they’re not on-

ly inexpensive or free but very effective and,

particularly in situations where students need

remediation. Gates Foundation and Lumina

Foundation, which are the big private funders

of higher education initiatives and innovations

in the United States, are both putting money

into this. Whether it’ll be successful or not, I

don’t know. My own intuition tells me that in

situations where students need a helping hand,

human interaction is an important component.

And I am skeptical that we’re going to solve

this whole issue of cost, in conjunction with

access, through online education.

However, it also seems to me intuitively that

online opportunities, particularly in things like

mathematics, combined with the support of

live, empathetic instructors, may be, in the

long run, more effective than what we do now,

particularly for students who are struggling.

And there, I suspect—because I think a lot of

money is going to be thrown at this sec-

tor—within a

few years we’re going to end up with some real-

ly good online tools. I also see a world in which

people are conducting more and more of their

lives through the Internet. People will come to

expect to be able to do a lot of their school

work and interactions through the Internet,

and this will inevitably have to translate in one

way or another to pedagogical forms that re-

spect that. Distance education as it exists now

is the harbinger of that. What this is going to

mean overall for colleges, I don’t know.

It seems like, at their core, online classes and

MOOCs are attempts to address growing

needs/issues in higher education.

Society, on a per-capita basis, isn’t willing to

put the investment into individual college stu-

dents that we did in the 1930s, 1940s, and

1950s, when a much smaller portion of the

population went to college. So now, what do

you do? One of the answers for the last ten,

twenty years in particular is, “Well, we’re going

to solve that problem by making loans easily

available, and that’s okay because all you folks

who run colleges have convinced us that a col-

lege education has such wonderful effects on

peoples’ earning potential, and therefore col-

lege is primarily a private good, and for people

who are getting this private advantage, it’s rea-

sonable that they pay for the good, and we’ll

front the money, and then they can pay it off

later.” But people are now very concerned

about whether the ratio of debt to return, eco-

nomic and otherwise, is sustainable. And,

again, one answer to that is to say, “Okay, we’ll

just find cheaper ways to do higher education,

and then people won’t have to go into so much

debt to achieve it.” MOOCs, I think, are so at-

tractive in many corridors because they seem

to offer a glimmer of possibility for doing that,

in, what ostensibly, on the face of it, is a highly

democratized environment. What could be

more democratized than [anyone] being able to

take a course at Stanford?

Interview by Nathan Schiller,

LEC Writing Specialist

LEC Students on MOOCs

They seem like a great option for people

who want to learn from home and feel

comfortable with computers.

—Huarquidia Dominguez

10

11

LEC Students on MOOCs As much as I try to run away from it, eventually everything is going to be online. I wouldn’t want to take an entire Master’s degree online. I need to be in a class setting. MOOCs take discipline. You have so much freedom—you don’t have to go to class, no one takes attendance. But it brings spice to your learning to see teachers from Australia and England. The next generation, that’s what they’ll be do-ing in schools. It’s good and bad.

—Yenie Perez

11

Polly Bresnick and Anthony Harrison (MBA, 2014) review the structure of his case study.

Scenes from the LEC

12

12

Learning To Learn By Parker Pracjek

S keptics and proponents alike typically

love to predict the fate of emerging inno-

vations. For those meant to succeed and

become integrated into the fabric of a market or

culture, there are often a host of lessons learned

and interesting standards that take shape. And

so it has been with the MOOC.

Though only a few years into the MOOC experi-

ment, nationally, it seems, we are moving be-

yond a honeymoon stage and into a serious

reckoning of what this phenomenon means for

higher ed, for MCNY, and for individual learn-

ers. Already the radical MOOC has entered ado-

lescence, growing pains and all, and its adult

features are starting to take form. Some of these

features include 1) democratization of access to

learning from field experts, 2) technology and

instructional design as co-facilitators of learn-

ing, and 3) a shift from instructor/institution-

directed instruction to student-directed. The

emergence of these features is good news for

many, but particularly for adult learners.

In looking to answer my curiosities about the

relevance of MOOCs for the MCNY community,

I returned to readings about adult learners and

andragogy. Andragogy, a system of ideas, con-

cepts and approaches to adult learning, was first

popularized by educator Malcolm Knowles in

1968. This model sees instructors more as facili-

tators helping learners maximize their learning

abilities. This approach is in sharp contrast to

teacher-directed instruction, which can be

said

to promote dependence and obedience

(Knowles, 1984). What Knowles and others ob-

served, and what many MCNY students would

consider self-evident, is that “people who take

initiative in educational activities seem to learn

more and learn things better than [. . .] more

passive individuals (Hiemstra & Sisco, 1990).

Indeed, MCNY’s Purpose-Centered Education

asks that the learner be a student of their own

learning through regular, intensive shaping and

application of knowledge in the field. So at its

core, MCNY seems to capture the importance of

individual learning continuing long after the

formal learning activity is completed in class.

But is this enough to satisfy the needs of today’s

adult learner?

Enter MOOC stage left. Suddenly, much of what

we know and revere about the traditional class-

room is called into question. With the appear-

ance of this MOOC on our stage, certain things

many of us have long taken for granted can be

seen in high relief: the traditional instructor/

institution has full responsibility for making

decisions not only about what will be learned,

but how and when it will be learned and if it has

been learned.

In many ways, the traditional classroom struc-

ture is alienated from the way we gather and

process information in our extracurricular lives.

As we navigate a city like NYC, a multitude of

adult demands and curiosities sparked by ac-

cess to new troves of information and media, we

are naturally engaging in the very activities re-

quired of learners in any MOOC scenario: we

are making connections with “various ‘nodes’ of

content [. . .] on the Web, aggregating content

and creating knowledge” (Morrison, 2013).

Certainly adult learners—to varying degrees and

LEC Students on MOOCs

I’d rather sit face to face with the profes-

sor. If I need a question answered, I need

it answered right away.

—Venita Rice

13 depending on the course content—have the

ability, need and desire to take responsibility

for their learning (Knowles, 1980). Theories of

adult cognitive development tend to agree that

adults are motivated to learn by a sincere de-

sire to solve immediate problems in their lives

and that mature adults cherish independence

and are responsible for their own actions

(Hiemstra & Sisco, 1990). In the MOOC model,

and more than in classic distance learning, the

learner is necessarily an empowered driver of

his or her learning and an active participant in

the assessment of knowledge.

At every turn, the LEC and the Office of Aca-

demic Support promote independent, lifelong

learning. Self-directed learning skills set all of

us up to be adaptive, inquisitive and connected

in a world in which rapid change seems to be

the only stable characteristic (Knowles, 1975).

Thankfully, the MOOC has lasted long enough

to impact how we think about our learning

and, quite possibly, how we can learn without

being taught.

Parker Pracjek is the

Director of Academic

Support.

References

Hiemstra, Roger. (n.d.). “Moving from pedagogy to

andragogy,” Adapted and Updated from Hiemstra,

R., & Sisco, B. (1990). Individualizing instruction. San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from

http://www-distance.syr.edu/andraggy.html

Knowles, M. (1980). Modern practice of adult education:

from pedagogy to andragogy. Revised and updated.

New York: Cambridge.

Morrison, D. (2013, February 5). The MOOC

honeymoon is over: three takeaways from the

Coursera calamity [Blog]. Retrieved from: http://

onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/the

-mooc-honeymoon-is-over-three-takeaways-from-

the-coursera-calamity/

13

MOOCS At MCNY?

As MCNY continues to expand the number of

courses offered as either hybrid or fully-online,

we cannot ignore the MOOC craze that has

shaken up higher education over the past year.

Therefore, the Office of E-Learning continues to

monitor the trend toward MOOCs offered

through providers such as Coursera, edX, Udaci-

ty, Udemy, and others. In coordination with the

faculty and academic administration, we also hope

to develop a procedure for offering credit for

MOOCs delivered by another provider or institu-

tion that fit the necessary criteria for our differ-

ent programs.

New MOOCs in varying content areas are being

rolled out all the time as this method of course

delivery continues to develop and become more

popular. I believe that eventually there will be

MOOCs offered that can apply to all of the pro-

grams here at MCNY. Some day in the future, we

would love for MCNY to offer its own MOOC

through one of these providers. The Emergency

and Disaster Management MPA program has con-

sidered the development of a MOOC in an effort

to build on the momentum and global networks

made during the SMARMIE Conference held at

MCNY in March.

MOOCs are definitely here to stay, and the Of-

fice of E-Learning hopes to incorporate this type

of learning environment for students here at the

college in the near future. If you have taken a

MOOC on your own, we would LOVE to hear

your feedback on the experience. You can email

elearning@mcny.edu to share.

—Claire Machia

Claire Machia is the

E-Learning Coordinator.

14

14

Low MOOC Completion Rates By Aleksandr Rusinov

N owadays, MOOCs are getting a lot of

positive attention in the mainstream

media. One year ago, the New York

Times published an article titled “The Year of

the MOOC.” Clearly, MOOCs are part of the fu-

ture of education. But before we praise them as

the future, we should examine their alarmingly

low completion rates in more depth.

MOOCs attract many participants for two main

reasons: they are inherently “massive,” and tra-

ditionally they have not charged tuition fees.

This has led to completion rates—typically de-

fined as earning a certificate—hovering around

10 percent. In many cases, the statistics are

worse. Last fall, for instance, of the 12,725 stu-

dents enrolled in a MOOC called Bioelectricity,

at Duke University, only 345 of them (2.7%) at-

tempted the final exam.

To contextualize the low rates, let’s look at a

doctoral study titled “Deconstructing Disen-

gagements: Analyzing Learner Subpopulations

in Massive Open Online Courses.” By surveying

three Stanford MOOCs—Computer Science 101

(high school), Algorithms: Design and Analysis

(undergrad), Probabilistic Graphical Models

(grad)—the study identified four types of partic-

ipants: auditing learners, who watch video but

take few quizzes or exams; completing learners,

who view most lectures and take part in most

assessments; disengaging learners, who take

part only at the start; and sampling learners,

who watch the lectures at various times. For

each course, the study tracked the percentage of

participants according to these populations. In

all three classes, the highest percentages of par-

ticipants were sampling learners, while only the

high school class had greater than 8% of partici-

pants completing learners.

One reason for low completion rates may be

that MOOC participants are often professionals

with a college degree. MOOCs give these partici-

pants control over where, how, and with whom

they learn, but the participants do not seem to

take advantage. Another reason could involve

the fact that about 3 in 4 MOOCs students are

from outside the U.S. It may be difficult for

MOOC participants who do not speak English

as their first language to stay with a course. A

leading challenge for MOOC participants lies in

overcoming the lack of social presence and the

high level of autonomy. Without the ability to

work alongside a teacher and fellow participants

on problems and projects that involve collabo-

rative explanations, MOOC participants may

have less incentive to bother with courses.

We must also consider, though, that perhaps

completion rates are not the most useful tool

with which to measure MOOCs. While the tradi-

tional educational structure of the brick-and-

mortar classroom renders completing a course

and earning a degree vital for employment, the

ultimate purpose of MOOCs may prove to be

imparting information to as many participants

as possible. But, at the same time, in January,

Georgia Tech will offer its highly-ranked Mas-

ter’s Degree in Computer Science entirely

through MOOCs (and at a discount of $34,800).

This ground-breaking move could be the first

sign that education administrators view MOOCs

on the same level as traditional classroom

courses. We should pay attention to how many

students enroll in the program—but we should

be far more interested in how many complete it.

Aleksandr Rusinov is a Math

Specialist in the LEC.

15

15

Percentage of Participants by Type of

Learner in 3 Stanford MOOCs

Auditing Completing Disengaging Sampling

High school 6% 27% 28% 39%

Undergraduate 6% 8% 12% 74%

Graduate 9% 5% 6% 80%

Total number of participants: 2.9 million

Total number of countries: < 220

16

F or curious individuals interested in tak-

ing a live dive into a MOOC course, this

article aims to offer a thumbnail view of

four major MOOC providers: Coursera, edEx,

MIT Open Courseware and Udacity. I had not

heard of MOOCs before our Luminaria issue,

and I hope my first impressions will offer a

starting place for your explorations of this new

learning format. If you head out into MOOC

territory, I’d like to know what you find.

Udacity

Udacity has blossomed in the last two years,

and its partnership to San Jose University

shows its Silicon Valley affinities, that is, a di-

verse engagement with all things Internet. In

terms of breadth of subject, Udacity courses

focus on five areas, all somewhat technology-

oriented: business, computer science, mathe-

matics, design and science. Courses such “How

to Build a Startup” or “Web Development—

How to Build a Blog” could spark an MCNY

student’s interest.

Like most MOOC providers, courses are free. If

one wants to get credit or certification for job

purposes, “modest fees” apply. All courses have

open enrollment, and often have quizzes along

what seems to be an adjustable timeline. Look-

ing over the list of available courses, there ap-

pear to be 28 classes at the time of this writing.

Courses are helpfully divided into beginning,

intermediate and advanced levels. Courses are

close-captioned in English, and can have subti-

tles in Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese,

and even Latin! To help students transition

into a new learning format, they often offer

videos and self-assessments.

Coursera

Among its 82 “starting soon” courses at the

time of this writing, Coursera offers classes

across a wider spectrum of subjects than Udac-

ity. Coursera has a greater offering in the hu-

manities, with classes such as “Modern and

Contemporary Poetry” or “9/11 and Its After-

math.” Stand out social services courses in-

clude “Saving Lives Millions at a Time: Global

Disease Control Policies and Programs,” “Care

of Elders with Alzheimer’s Disease” from The

John Hopkins University, “Introduction to

Sustainability,” “Disaster Preparedness,” or

even “The History of Rock.”

Coursera currently has 433 courses listed, alt-

hough it is unclear how many are currently

available. Coursera attempts to stand apart

from the herd pedagogically through interac-

tive exercises and use of peer review for stu-

dent work which could be useful particularly

for humanities courses. In fact, it could be said

that peer-to-peer feedback is one of the most

beautiful possibilities in MOOCland; unlike

classes bound by time and space, you have the

chance to bounce ideas against others—

literally—around the globe. Coursera boasts

courses from universities such as Columbia,

Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Museum of Modern

Art, Caltech, and the University of Pennsylva-

nia. Having established relationships with

First Walk on the MOOC: A Brief Tour of MOOC Providers

16

By Yasmine Alwan

17 global universities, Coursera also offers classes

in Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Italian

and German.

The descriptions of courses are smoothly-

packaged and more consumer accessible to this

potential customer. Is sum, my visit to

Coursera stood out among providers. See Polly

Bresnick’s article (Page 3) for an account of her

experience taking a MOOC through Coursera.

MIT Open Courseware

In 2002, MIT Open Courseware began as an

impressive not-for-profit initiative by Massa-

chusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to place

all undergraduate and graduate course materi-

al online for global accessibility across time

and space. Currently, more than two thousand

courses offer a range of materials, reading lists,

lecture notes, and, in some cases, complete

textbooks by MIT professors, a lure for this

writer! Fewer courses are provided in a more

structured format, with video lectures.

Courses are given in English, Chinese, Dutch,

French, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese, Span-

ish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Courses

tend to be science-oriented, such as

“Innovation and Commercialization,” “A Glob-

al History of Architecture: Part 1,” “Classical

Mechanics, Introduction to Aerodynamics,” or

“Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics,” “Introduction

to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Conscious-

ness.”

There is a different feel moving through the

Open Courseware’s site, in part due to MI-

TOC’s different purpose and history. Rather

than a start-up channeling an innovative edu-

cational product, MITOC unfolded specifically

as a university’s attempt to turn itself inside

out as a public resource. I am struck by the

generosity and boldness of this first move by a

university so nationally and globally esteemed.

edEX

An offshoot of MIT Open Courseware, edEx is

a joint effort of MIT and Harvard. Course sub-

jects spanned the humanities, medicine, law,

nutrition to name a few. My walk-through of

the site yielded 51 new and current courses and

17 past courses. Courses that dovetail with LEC

student interests include “Statistics,”

“Descriptive Statistics,” “Introduction to Bio-

ethics,” “Ideas of the Twentieth Century” or

“Introduction to Global Sociology.”

The edEx user experience appears very

smooth; they include a demo MOOC course,

and a fairly similar set of supports that other

sites offer; their meet-ups around the world

seemed a stand-out feature.

I wish you a dynamic expedition into the thick-

ets and wilds of a new learning form that is

likely to innovate and proliferate even more

than we can yet imagine.

17

7 intriguing MOOCs from all over the world!

1. Begin Programming: Build Your First Mobile Game, University of

Reading (United Kingdom), Future Learn

2. The Future Of Storytelling, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

(Germany), iversity

3. Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works, California

Institute of the Arts, Cousera

4. Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction, Uni-

versity of Virginia, Coursera

5. Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead,

University of California, Irvine, Canvas

6. Dark Matter in Galaxies: The Last Mystery, International School for

Advanced Studies (Italy), iversity

7. Canine Theriogenology for Dog Enthusiasts, University of Minneso-

ta, Coursera

Yasmine Alwan is a

Writing Specialist in the

LEC.

18

M any of my favorite math courses—

calculus, differential equations, line-

ar algebra—are offered online, for

free, for anyone in the world, and are taught by

distinguished professors from elite universities

like MIT and Harvard. I believe MOOC math

courses are appropriate for enhancing learning

across all levels, from basic skills to advanced

disciplines. But many advanced math courses

assume that a student has taken prerequisites,

which many colleges, including MCNY, do not

offer. MOOCs could efficiently tackle the pre-

requisite problem, though how well they will

prove as a math teaching tool is unknown.

I find that students fear math in a way they do

not fear writing. Writing is similar to speaking,

something we do all the time. Math, however,

is similar to little we do in our everyday lives,

and it involves formulas and calculations many

students find scary and confusing. To succeed

in math, one must become fluent in a discipline

before moving to a more complex one. Finance

classes ask students to calculate the risk of an

investment. But to do that, students need to

know how to apply standard deviation, which

means they have to take statistics—otherwise

they must play catch-up. I see a lot of this at

MCNY.

A classroom is an ideal place for math teach-

ing. In math, students do best in participative

learning environments, where they can speak

out and share information. But instructors

have a lot of information to get across in a class

session, and this doesn’t always leave time for

questions. Many math students need tutoring

so that they can ask how to get from Point A to

Point B at the moment an equation is being

presented.

Many MCNY students, who balance school

with jobs and families, don’t have the time for

independent tutoring. Eventually, students

most pressed for time will need to learn math

online. MOOCs could prove a viable alternative

to in-class instruction. Until the advent of the

MOOC, many math professors taught online

classes by Xeroxing textbook chapters and

posting them online. This was not necessarily

the instructors’ fault, as there had not been

great formats to post lecture videos, but it

made online math learning difficult. MOOCs

are changing these online platforms by allow-

ing professors to post videos of their lectures,

where they patiently explain topics using

whiteboards and additional graphics.

I am considering taking a Stanford MOOC

called “Statistics in Medicine.” I’m excited to

see how the instructors will use standard devi-

ation, test hypotheses, and correlate variables.

Without a doubt, I will rely on my statistics

background for support.

Barrington Scott is a Math

Specialist in the LEC.

LEC Students on MOOCs

I travel home to Turkey. With MOOCs, if

I still want to attend my classes, I can. If

my visa expires, I can take my classes. If I

could meet with my professor over

Skype, that would be great.

—Seving Senol

MOOCs And Math 18

By Barrington Scott

19

LEC Students on MOOCs They make you more accountable. I like that. I don’t

like to be micromanaged: assignments or expectations can get miscommunicated, though webinars or voice chats diminish those instances.

—Dawn Mulcahy

19

Barrington Scott shows Maka Nadarovna Makharashvili (AS Business, 2014) how to calculate manufacturing costs.

Scenes from the LEC

20

Coordinator

Dwight Hodgson ext. 2437 dhodgson@mcny.edu

Office Manager

Sandra Ariza ext. 2438 sariza@mcny.edu

Writing Specialists

Nathan Schiller* ext. 2418 nschiller@mcny.edu

Yasmine Alwan ext. 2416 yalwan@mcny.edu

Polly Bresnick ext. 2429 pbresnick@mcny.edu

Math Specialists

Barrington Scott ext. 2449 bscott@mcny.edu

Aleksandr Rusinov* ext. 2446 arusinov@mcny.edu

*Available in the Bronx

About the Learning

Enhancement

Center (LEC)

The LEC, which publishes this news-

letter annually, offers a wide range

of services, at our Manhattan and

Bronx centers and online, to help

students develop their writing, math

and other skills necessary for aca-

demic success at MCNY. All MCNY

students can receive FREE one-on-

one tutoring in math and writing.

To schedule a session,

call, email, or visit us in person.

Website and Blog: www.mcny.edu/academic_support/lec.php

www.mcny.edu/student_serv/lecblog/

Hours Locations Phone Email

Manhattan Campus: Manhattan Campus: Manhattan Campus: lec@mcny.edu

Monday-Friday: 9-7 Room 1293 (212) 343-1234 ext. 2438

Saturday: 10-4

Bronx Extension Center: Bronx Extension Center: Bronx Extension Center:

Hours vary by semester Room 508 (212) 343-1234 ext. 4011

LEC Staff

Editor’s Note

Our previous two

issues were published

on our blog, The Spe-

cialist. Although this

issue will be published

there as well, it marks

Luminaria’s return to

print—hence the be-

ginning of Volume 2.