Is online education good or bad for equality?

It seems like it would obviously be good — now kids who don’t have money and don’t live near universities have, in principle, access to much of the world’s knowledge as long as they have a cheap computer and an internet connection.

But in math, I’ve heard anecdotally that this isn’t really happening.  I thought we were going to see an influx of mathematical talent, smart kids from Mississippi who couldn’t get any math past calculus from their peers, their local high school, or the public library, but who trained themselves hardcore on Art of Problem Solving or Mathematics Stack Exchange.  But I don’t think this is happening so much.  (Correct me if I’m wrong about this!)

I thought about this when I read this article about MOOCs, which says that they’re primarily used by wealthy people who already have college degrees.  What a depressing outcome that would be, if a platform meant to make elite education available free to everybody and help undo the student-loan disaster instead mostly made life easier for people whose lives are already easy, and saved money for people who already have money.

 

 

Sebastian Thrun, MOOC skeptic

The founder of Udacity no longer thinks MOOCs are the answer, says this Fast Company article.  As for me, I’ve become more optimistic about MOOCs as I’ve talked to the people at Wisconsin who are doing them, and seen what they’ve put together.

Although Thrun initially positioned his company as “free to the world and accessible everywhere,” and aimed at “people in Africa, India, and China,” the reality is that the vast majority of people who sign up for this type of class already have bachelor’s degrees, according to Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute. “The sort of simplistic suggestion that MOOCs are going to disrupt the entire education system is very premature,” he says.

I too was surprised to learn that most people who take Wisconsin’s MOOCs are 30 and up.  But that made me really happy! Right now we put a massive amount of effort into teaching things to people who are between 18 and 21, and after they leave the building, we’re done with them (except when we mail them a brochure asking for money.)  30-year-olds know a lot more about what they want to do and what they need to know than 18-year-olds do.  55-year-olds even more so, I’ll bet.  I hope we can make higher education a life-long deal.

Oh, also:

When Thrun says this, I nearly fall out of my chair. He is arguably the most famous scientist in the world

I feel like you have to be very deeply embedded in Silicon Valley culture to type this sentence.

 

Wisconsin puts the MOO in MOOC

UW-LaCrosse started it, launching an online math course, “College Readiness.” with the help of a grant from the Gates Foundation.  A lot of the energy around MOOCs has centered on advanced courses:  machine learning, business analytics, and so on.  The kind of thing that gets funders and nerds excited.  But funders and nerds are already educated!  If MOOCs are to provide the educational equity they promise, they’ve got to do it at the low end — giving kids access to a better math course than their understaffed, underresourced high school can provide.  Is there a demand for basic, unflashy math instruction online?  Seems like it:  a thousand people have signed up, twice as many as UWLC expected, including an 83-year-old and an 11-year-old.  Those are much smaller numbers than Coursera gets for its sexy machine learning course, but I’ll bet the gap in number of finishers will be much narrower; this course is an “I need to,” not an “It would be cool to.”

And now UW-Madison has gotten into the act, announcing yesterday that UW would be offering four courses with Coursera, two to start this fall.

Readers:  would it be a good idea, a bad idea, or some combination of both, for me to propose to teach a number theory MOOC?