LEGO and online courses: training as a constructor

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“Lego” in Latin means “I collect.” This world-famous designer loved the children for their accessibility, the possibility of unlimited creativity and the speed with which it was possible to collect something new from the cubes. The same can be said about the educational programs on the Internet and their most striking variety - MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses, mass open online courses). But can mass online education continue to evolve, taking advantage of the LEGO pattern?

We decided to deal with the phenomenon of online education: what is this “universal designer”, what hopes were placed on such projects and what was the reality, what “pitfalls” exist in the way of the educational business on the Web and how to overcome them. To the discussion of this topic, we also attracted educational projects that are undergoing acceleration of IIDF: their founders kindly agreed to answer our questions about the difficulties and possibilities of online learning.
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It is worth noting that in many Western materials, which will be discussed in the article, the term MOOC and online education turn out to be synonyms: foreign authors cite as examples of mass online courses both “classic MOOCs” and educational projects that do not have a mass character. . Therefore, below we will talk about online education in general and about MOOC as its particular example - the good that we decided to consider is equally relevant for MOOC and for online learning in general.

LEGO and online courses

Designer LEGO appeared in the 1930s in Denmark. A year after its introduction, the company became the second largest toy manufacturer in the world, and its multi-colored cubes are now sold in 130 countries. The features of LEGO, which distinguished this designer among other games, were the possibility of “rapid prototyping” and encouragement to conduct experiments - that is why a number of educational initiatives were subsequently created on the basis of LEGO (for example, LEGO ZOOM, an educational program that instills in children interest in learning and better understanding school subjects). These legendary plastic cubes are a good metaphor for modern online education: you can “play” with cubes (courses) and assemble your own designs (form an individual training program).

Today, online training is as affordable as the world-famous designer. Such courses are more interactive than regular activities, and also contain elements of gamification. Upon completion, such a course becomes a "brick" of knowledge: the study of one subject leads to the expansion of interests and the desire to gain more knowledge in related disciplines. Thus, students “assemble” their own “designer” with a unique content and structure.

Online education: perspectives, opinions and a bit of history

If you briefly ignore the metaphor of LEGO, you can, following numerous researchers, recognize the online disruptive innovative effect of the courses: according to Mike Lenox, professor of the Darden School of Business Administration of the Virginia University (and Forbes columnist), they will oust from the market a part of the universities in the same way as in the 1970s cheaper Japanese Honda and Toyota pushed General Motors into the American market.

“Just as KIA cannot be compared to Porsche, online learning and“ traditional ”learning are not things of the same order. Online learning is at a fundamentally different level of quality, rather than learning "traditional." But [in the near future] it most likely will not play any role. As long as there is a price difference, a number of students will choose cheaper options. By the way, KIA sells much better than Porsche ", - Mike Lenox

Some researchers go even further: not so long ago, Stanfond Professor Sebastian Thrun argued that, thanks to online education, after 50 years, only a dozen universities would remain on Earth. Lenox is more conservative in this regard: he believes that traditional education is by definition (or, at least, should be) at a level inaccessible to online courses. Therefore, adherents of classical education should not have “fear and hatred” in front of the acronym MOOC (and online courses in general): from the point of view of Lenox, this is a spectacular addition, but not a substitute for traditional education.

It should be noted that online courses are not the first attempt to create a mass educational system using the achievements of science and technology. When, at the end of the 19th century, the United States began to actively build railways (which accelerated the delivery of correspondence), a wave of "learning by correspondence" swept America. The proliferation of home radio outlets in the 1920s led to an attempt to create "radio colleges." Even the first attempts to form an e-learning system for more than a decade: in 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to store digital copies of lecture notes, homework assignments and entire video recordings of lectures from all university courses.


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"Pitfalls" of educational projects on the web

Unlike previous attempts, such as learning by mail or radio, online education seems to be quite a viable project. However, despite the acknowledged efficiency (which is confirmed, in particular, by the MIT study) and encouraging forecasts of scientists, the further development of online education presents a number of difficulties. They are connected, first of all, with the assumptions that as part of the formation of an “online education ecosystem”, it is necessary to organize the possibility of offsetting courses from different providers or create a system for selecting and navigating courses that would allow the user to more clearly formulate their requirements for “individual knowledge package ”for longer-term goals - for example, when acquiring certain professional competencies.

But these difficulties lie in the plane of the future of the entire ecosystem of online education, while today the creators of open online courses are forced to face a number of difficult issues and find effective solutions for them. The most important among them are, first of all, the issues related to the attitude of the user to the courses (three of the five difficulties associated with online education, noted in MoocGuide , relate to the user's capabilities).

The questions most frequently asked by journalists, researchers and course organizers themselves are as follows:

1. How to monetize such courses?
2. How can a student confirm passing the course and gaining knowledge?
3. How to treat such courses: is it fun or, after all, education?

Online courses: education or entertainment?

The first of the above questions, at first glance, lies entirely in the field of philosophy, but in fact, understanding how users perceive online courses themselves can suggest effective options for positioning and monetizing such a business. A few years ago, MOOC was considered a phenomenon that traditional universities could absorb (the Times called 2012 the Year of MOOC, and the star columnist of this newspaper, Thomas Friedman, predicted the onset of a global revolution in higher education), but now the attitude to online courses has changed from enthusiastic on skeptic.

Jonathan Rees, a professor of history at the University of Colorado, generally believes that through online courses no one and no one can be taught - this is nothing more than entertainment (edu-tainment), and the teachers who participate in the creation of these courses are simply “chopped bitches on which they sit ”and go not only against the interests of the profession, but also against all principles of training.

“The most common way to learn in most of the largest online courses is to provide a single multiple-choice question after each five-minute block of lecture video. Yes, if I told my academic council that I taught history in a similar way, then at the same time I would go to look for another job, ”- Jonathan Reese

Despite the fact that Reese’s attacks against online learning are quite emotional, they have to be reckoned with one way or another: it is possible that he’s overly exaggerated when he accuses “superprofessors” of online courses in pursuit of cheap popularity, but contradict him difficult - online courses really move from education to entertainment. The main argument in favor of this opinion is the extremely low level of passing online courses (the ratio of the number of enrolled and the number completed the course).

William Spaniel from the University of Rochester, writes that the average level of online courses usually does not exceed 10% - and not because the course is bad or uninteresting, just for users, it is not a form of education, but leisure activities (or “educational entertainment”). If at some point the course becomes uninteresting to you, or there appear blocks that you have already studied and you do not want to spend your time on them - you stop studying, and despite the knowledge that you have acquired (maybe even in full volume, which can provide the course), it will still remain unfinished.

“The problem is that by enrolling in a course, you are just“ recording ”- nothing more. If we take Netflix as an analogy, it turns out that enrolling in a course is the same as choosing a movie that you put on the “recommended for viewing” list (and maybe someday you’ll actually watch), ” William Spaniel

Even Professor Trun, who told several years ago that online courses will absorb traditional education, is not so sure about it now - and the reason for this is the very low level of courses (Trun is co-founder of Udacity and knows firsthand how many users of his project subscribe to courses, and how many - ultimately passes them - in his case, as FastCompany writes , no more than 7%).

In addition, if Trun initially hoped to bring to education users from developing countries (primarily the African and Asian regions), then in reality he had to admit that mainly Americans are signing up for courses in Udacity, a good part of which already has at least a bachelor's degree Sciences - to compete with higher education project Udacity could not (which, again confirms the thesis about the significant entertainment component of learning on the web). This problem is typical not only for mass courses (MOOC), but also for online education in general - for example, many projects in the field of online education undergoing IIDF acceleration also noted that a low completion rate is an important issue the decision of which they continue to work.

Who are the courses really competing with?

So, if online education cannot compete with the traditional one and is rather a supplement (moreover, often an entertainment supplement) to the classical training system, how can the creators of online courses monetize this business? Indeed, in this case, as Reese and Lenox rightly point out, the alternative to online courses is not an expensive university education (which is especially characteristic of the USA - students spend $ 400 billion annually on university studies - more than the annual revenue of Amazon, Apple, Google , Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook combined), and books, libraries or entertainment.

And this is despite the fact that the costs of preparing courses are often comparable to the costs of a university — for example, for a course on bioelectricity alone, Coursera was needed (not counting the teacher himself):

• a consultant in the field of academic education and pedagogy, who gave advice on the development of a course plan,
• an employee who helped create and publish materials on the site,
• operator and video editor,
• Copyright Assistant,
• a librarian who assisted in the search for additional materials on the course, in the public domain,
• and student assessment consultants.

To be fair, it is worth noting that this course was created on Coursera by Duke University - hence this meticulous approach to its development - but the meaning remains the same: regardless of the type of course and its subject, creating high-quality content remains a difficult and costly task.

Theory vs practice: how do business models of online education change?

Naturally, in conditions where the user does not take online education seriously enough and is also surrounded by a mass of alternatives, MOOC providers and online learning platforms are forced to create alternative business models. One of them was the conscious separation of courses into “general education” (academic) and “applied”.

According to the study , which was conducted by the same Duke University, students were interested in choosing courses that could have a qualitative impact on their lives in general (and which can be studied for a long time in the mode of “elective”) - such as, for example, the history of ancient Greece , and topics that are related to applied skills that are useful in their work (often referred to as the so-called “business courses”).

And if users, as a rule, are not ready to pay, nor to study academic specialties for a long time, then business courses have gained a certain popularity among the audience of online courses (William Spaniel generally calls academic courses the main weak link of online education). In particular, only 1,000 people agreed to study the history of Greece at Udemy (and pay $ 10 for it), while 35,000 paid $ 99 for Excel courses.

“People interested in studying for the sake of study are not willing to pay for it”, - Jonathan Heyber (Degree Of Freedom )

Realizing this, Udemy, for example, has formed a whole platform of "premium business courses." The company Udacity under the authority of Truon went even further: they created not only application courses, but also provided third-party companies with a kind of B2B platform for learning their technologies, recruiting and attracting users. So, Google paid Udacity for the possibility of publishing its own course on the portal to attract developers to work with Google platforms.

Attempts by educational projects to offer options for B2B cooperation are not limited to the possibility of using the site as a tool to attract users for a partner company. For example, the Wikium project, which is undergoing acceleration of the IIDF, plans to start working with other organizations, providing access to its platform for employees of the client company with the possibility of further evaluating employees on the results of the course (the project is already running the Institute for Athletes Skill Improvement - the system is actively tested by ).


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Certificates: protection against cheating and source of income free courses

And what about companies that provide online education for free? In this case, the example of Cousera and their Signature Track project (signature tracking) is indicative. After enrolling in a course within three weeks, you can decide whether you want to receive a certificate of completion of the course (the certificate confirms the fact of training, contains the user's assessment and a comment about its preparation). Such a certificate will cost you between $ 30 and $ 100 and will contain your photo and ID (for example, your driver’s license number), confirming that you are you.

In the process of tracking the user's signature is identified using a webcam or a unique keystroke. However, it’s only your conscience and motivation that can keep you from cheating or “helping a friend” outside the signature tracking mode — all that Coursera can do is force you to sign an agreement confirming that all your homework and answers to questions are done by you. , and you do not share them with other users.

The benefits of an online certificate: Universities and employers

“Many universities do not adequately relate to online courses and to private education in general. They believe that state accreditation is above real knowledge, ”Sergey Kondrashov, founder of the educational project for learning Chinese, Laoshi

If for an educational platform a certificate is one of the options for monetization, then the benefits of a procedure similar to tracing signatures on Cousera remain dim for the student. Theoretically, in the US, points (or, according to the credit rating system, credits) earned during the course can be added to the amount of credits already earned at an institution of higher education (thus, in theory, after passing an online course, you can do online learning or increase the total number of points). In reality , virtually no top US higher education institution supports such a system of exchange and credit transfer - even Duke University is not ready to transfer credits to its own courses on Coursera.

"Despite the fact that the courses are taught by professors of the University, they (the courses) are not taught in the same way as we study at the university, and do not include personal interaction with students," - rector of Duke University Peter Lenge (Peter Lange)

Nevertheless, attempts to combine online education and universities continue - Udacity and the Georgia Tech Institute (Georgia Tech) have created a joint online program to obtain a master's degree in computer science. True, its price is $ 6,600 - a little less than a third of the cost of training at the Institute itself.

“If we talk in general about online courses and universities, cooperation is quite possible. After all, there is a lot of high-quality and interesting content that can form the basis of the course as part of a program of a specialty approved by the Ministry of Education. And if the course reflects the structure of the program and at the same time it is more interesting, contains a detailed practical part, why not set off the fact of passing the course at the level of certification of the university discipline ", - Nika Bazilevskaya, co-founder of the project Growth Systems

As for the benefits of online certificates when applying for a job, it also remains vague - in those industries and companies where certificates and diplomas are really appreciated, online education has a relatively small weight (if it has at all - especially compared to a university diploma) On the other hand, if the acquired professional skill relates to the field of purely applied, its actual presence will be evaluated much higher than the supporting document.

“Fortunately, more and more people - both workers, students, and employers - understand that a diploma is not all. Personal development must occur constantly, throughout life. For employers, it is important to see that the employee is set to work on himself, knows his weak points and is ready to correct them, and also is serious enough and far-sighted to invest (mainly time) in his intellectual abilities. This is a great recommendation. ”- Sergey Belan, co-founder of the Wikium project

In my opinion, the confirming certificate does not affect the opinion of the employer. Most of them look at what they know during the interview. The maximum that can be made a mark about the presence of a certificate - will help pass the screening (primary selection of resumes) - Ilya Parshin, co-founder of the Datamonkey project

And yet, despite the difficulties and unfulfilled expectations, online education seems to have found its niche. Projects such as Udacity receive support and advancement from foundations like Andreessen Horowitz. And Sebastian Trun himself literally says the following in an interview: “We will not offer you something as serious and powerful as traditional academic studies. But the education system must evolve and develop in the direction of the emergence of short-term courses aimed at the formation of professional skills. And the method of obtaining the latter will change. "

Like the Lego designer, online courses seem, on the one hand, frivolous entertainment, and on the other, they can, if used properly, become an effective complement to traditional education and make an excellent specialist or erudite student with their own, unique set of “knowledge- cubes.