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As most people in ed-tech circles have heard by now, a much-touted MOOC experiment has ended in embarrassment.
In January, Udacity, a for-profit founded by Google and Stanford employee Sebastian Thrun to create customized online college-level video-based courses, announced that it would partner with San Jose State University to offer online versions of three SJSU courses. This was a small pilot: The three courses, in remedial and entry-level math and statistics, would be open to just 100 students each, half already enrolled at SJSU and half coming from other nearby community colleges and charter schools, for college credit at a cost of $150. Students would be able to seek extra help online from live tutors as well as from teachers or professors at their home institutions.
Udacity and San Jose State had reason to expect some good outcomes from this approach. In the fall of 2012, a San Jose State University lecturer supplemented his introductory course on circuits with online material from the edx MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) “Circuits and Electronics,” based on an MIT course. The pass rate rose from 59 percent for the San Jose State original version to 91 percent for the demonstrably more difficult MIT version of the course. In general, studies of online and blended learning have found completion and satisfaction rates similar to or slightly better than face-to-face courses alone.
However, that was not the case here. These were the pass rates for the three courses:
The final research report won’t be released until next month, and it’s too soon to know if this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the students recruited to take these courses were either high school students or had already failed the entrance exam for college math, or had even failed remedial math once already. The fact that the most basic course had the worst pass rate indicates preparation might have been an issue.
Nevertheless, in the face of these poor results, the SJSU/Udacity experiment has been put on “pause,” with plans to resume in the spring semester. “SJSU remains firmly committed to its partnership with Udacity,” the president and provost said in a statement.
