Just wrapped up my first MOOC experience. That’s Massive Open Online Course for those out of the loop. Which, of course, I was until I entered the fray. Now I’m an experienced MOOCer. Well, sort of.
I don’t recall how I learned about the phenomenon of massive online courses. It might have been a tech-savvy friend, of which I only have a handful. Maybe it was in the newspaper or on the news. Oh, I know, it was a story on public radio. It was an interesting story, engaging and compelling (note to self: donate more money to NPR next year).
The narrator of the story mentioned several online sites that offer college level courses. Coursera https://www.coursera.org/ was the one that stuck with me. I like the name. It’s smooth and carries a feeling of striving and achieving. So, I checked out their website. WOW! My mouth hung open as I scrolled through the class options: art, history, math, science, music, they have it all. And they’re not from schools run out of the second story of strip malls, either. The classes come from places like Stanford and Harvard and the Berklee College of Music (not that they necessarily have better instructors than other schools, but at least they are known quantities). And, here’s the icing on the cake: no cost! That’s right, not a penny to take one of this classes. Okay, some of the classes had book suggestions, but I felt no obligation. Heck, I only bought about half the books required during my undergraduate days!
Choosing a class was not easy when you have such varied interests as I have. After much mind-wrestling I decided to take Songwriting offered by the Berklee School of Music. It started out good, too, learning about basic song structure, prosody, stability, line lengths, and rhyming patterns. Each week you listen to video lectures, take quizzes, and complete an assignment that gets evaluated by several of your 65,000 classmates. There’s lots of support available through discussion forums, it’s easy to interact with other students, although not the instructor (which makes sense given the student/teacher ratio). You can easily find whining threads and complaints as well as assistance and motivation. You choose.
Okay, so we got to the midway point and things started breaking down for me. Part of it was the increasing detail and complexity of the topic, which included more musical elements, with which I had little background. I was a little concerned about the formulaic nature of the songwriting process being promoted, feeling it to be a bit stifling to creativity.
The biggest issue I had, however, had more to do with process than content. Each week’s assignments were distributed to classmates, who applied scores to various aspects of the assignments. Comments were an option, but not required. Mostly, the feedback was in the form of numbers. Bad. And double bad that those numbers would actually become a large portion of the
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against numbers per se. They’re quite important in life. Where would multiplication be without them? And our monetary system? How could you weight yourself, or communicate the temperature? Yes, numbers have their place, but NOT in meaningful feedback. That requires thoughtful consideration that is then communicated clearly with words. But that’s not what I got. What I got was numbers, some of which were gratifying (the high ones), some not so much (well, you know). And, I got those numbers from people like me, who were students because we didn’t have much songwriting knowledge or skills. How valid is that?
The trouble was, I wanted to improve my skills, not get a good grade. So, I continued with the class, with less interest and less motivated since I wasn’t getting the feedback I needed. Had I quit the class I would have succumbed to “great grade trap” that I believe is responsible for so many kids dropping out of school. When grades are used, students think less deeply, take fewer risks, and lose interest in learning (see Alfie Kohn’s work).
The class ended. I learned some, but could have learned a whole lot more if the class had been structured differently. Will I try another class? Yep. Would I recommend these types of classes to others? Absolutely, just focus on the learning and not the numbers.
