What's a credit worth?

This week I am starting my 4th coursera course, offered by Duke University called Think Again: How to Reason and Argue. I signed up mostly because I was intersted in the topic, but as a nice side-effect it allows me to continue to be exposed to a variety of MOOC "accreditation" schemes.  This particular MOOC offers statements of accomplishment on two tiers:

  • Statement of Accomplishment
  • Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction.
To get the "with distinction mark" you need to score 85% or better in the course. It seems like the only gradeable items in this course are the quizzes, which I assume at this point are multiple choice.  The caveat here is that you can only take a quiz twice (and not the same quiz) to have it count for credit.

There are exercises in the course, but they are ungraded, so I am wondering how that works for non-self-motivated autodidacts.   While pondering this, I also came across and readthis article on the Chronicle on the Uneven Value of Academic Credit. What happens when Duke students take Duke MOOCs from Duke Professors and ask for those credits to count toward their degree?

This is not a hypothetical at this point, it is something that will happen sooner or later. And as our own universities start offering massive online courses,either as xMOOCs through edX or Coursera, or as cMOOCs through free online tools, the question will invariably come up.

Even if you take the MOOC out of the equation, it's still an interesting question to ask! For instance, prior to arriving to my current role, the department offered an online, 3 week, graduate course in January (in-between semesters). Our normal course offerings are 13 week courses in Fall, Spring and Summer.  On rare occasions we also had 6 week summer courses online.  If a student has the opportunity to knock out 3 graduate credits in 3 weeks, why belabor the whole affair and take that course in spring or fall when it's 13 weeks? I know that students have told me that they love those courses, but are those courses right for students? Are we doing them a disservice for offering those courses†? And, at the end of the day, are the 3 credits I earn in 3 weeks the same as the 3 credits that I busted my behind to earn in that super-hard-course that was 13 weeks, but really should have been 15?

Along with defining "academic rigor" we need to do a better job of what is deserving of 1 credit, 2 credits, or 3 credits. Butts-in-seats is not the underlying measure (or at least it shouldn't be), but I do believe that time spent in a class does have a connection to how well rounded a course is, and how much practice students can get our of a specific topic.  Your thoughts?


† for what it's worth, I have discontinued this course that ran for 3 weeks, and I am lobbying hard to get rid the odd 6 week courses as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more