There is an article in today’s NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?ref=opinion#comments
that discusses online courses. This gave me an opportunity to comment on my experiences with both an MIT online course and what it demonstrated about how this particular material had not been taught well (in my opinion) in the past. Here is the comment I posted.
“It is important to compare MOOC’s with what else is avaliable, even at prestigious universities. I have experience using the MIT OpenCourseWare (Similar to Edx and MITx) at one of USNews’ top 15 schools. I taught an important course, especially for engineers and scientists. It was Differential Equations. I used the MIT online material for my class (giving my own lectures, tests, etc…) and, compared to the normal course here, the students learned much more and much better. For example, a student who had taken the course the way it is normally taught here, wrote of the homework in this course,
.“…I cannot do many of the [MIT homework] problems…on almost every problem set. …and I made an A in Differential Equations and I made an A in the next course…” From a student tutor, who made it clear that he/she felt they had learned Differential Equations quite well.
(When I read his statement to my class, they laughed heartily since they could do the MIT problems. )
Here is the bottom line. First, good online courses can be used to great effect in teaching. Even more importantly, students and their parents should check these online courses to make sure that they are getting a competitive education. Where I taught, the Chair told me that he wanted a “cookbook” course, the one where students with an average 740 Math SAT get an A without learning enough to even do many MIT type problems.”
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