By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor
At Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, three courses will be blended with MOOCs,1 adding yet another variation to the alphabet MOOCs — bMOOC.2 The MOOCs are required, and MOOC performance affects course grades. They’re adding flip into the mix by devoting interactive F2F class time to topics covered online. This innovation is in response to the shortage of qualified faculty in higher ed.
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Community colleges devote huge chunks of their budget to remedial learning, and a sizable amount of the cost is in constructing and maintaining onground facilities such as learning centers, labs, classrooms, and staff offices. An alternative that may be long overdue is to shift remedial learning online via online courses and MOOCs. In a study last month, Furqan Nazeeri, Jared Moore, and Nathan Benjamin3 suggest that “Offering remedial courses online rather than on campus has the potential to provide time and cost savings” (p. 6).
This is just one of the implications they discuss. Their approach is interesting. They lump MOOCs into the larger category of online courses. This is both accurate and insightful. However, it’s a source of confusion throughout the report when it’s not clear whether the reference is to MOOCs or for-credit online courses or both.
Their division of online courses into four models — For-Credit, Research, Pre-Matriculation and Post-Graduation — is typical of the confusion. This scheme seems appropriate for MOOCs but not for online versions of traditional courses. Even for MOOCs, the categories are more inclusive than exclusive, blurring the distinctions. For this study, perhaps MOOCs and online courses based on traditional course parameters should have been treated as separate models.
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4 advocates “Nevada’s recently enacted nearly universal education savings account (ESA) program.” This is how it works: “For parents earning above the low-income level, the state will deposit funds totaling 90 percent of the average statewide support per pupil, or roughly $5,100, into an individual education savings account for each child.” The amount rises to 100 percent and $5,700 for low-income parents. “Parents can withdraw funds from their ESAs to pay for a variety of educational services, such as private school tuition, distance-learning online programs, and tutoring.”
Sounds like a good idea, until it smacks into the brick wall of reality, in this case, the high cost of private schools.5 Still, with wise management, diligence, and luck, parents could find affordable alternative schools or even home-school their children with the money.
Considering the rest of the nation, Nevada’s $5,700 cost per pupil figure seems low. According to Allie Bidwell, “Nationwide, states spent an average of $10,667 per student in the 2011-12 school year – a 2.8 percent drop from the $10,975 they spent in 2010-11, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics.”6
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1Rozelle Laha, “IITs, IIMs use technology to fight faculty crisis,” Hindustan Times, 15 July 2015.
2Not to be confused with the Barcelona School Bmooc, a business training platform.
3A Framework for Online Learning Revenue Models at Universities: Research and Opportunities, ExtensionEngine, June 2015.
4“Why Your State Should Copy Nevada’s School Choice Plan,” Heartland, 7 July 2015.
5Geoff Williams, “Can I Afford to Send My Child to Private School?” U.S. News, 3 Feb. 2015.
6“How States Are Spending Money in Education,” U.S. News, 29 Jan. 2015.
Filed under: Blended Learning, Community College, Education Savings Account, Higher Education, K-12 Schools, Learning Center, MOOC, Online Course, Remedial Learning |
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
The amount spent on educating children should be shameful in many states. While we expect some variation due to cost of living, the numbers belie that adjustment.
This Nevada experiment is directly aimed at taking down the public education establishment, IMO. I am assuming that those ESA funds are withdrawn from the local public school district when a parent taps into them.
This is a stick and not a carrot approach to fixing things. Some may see this as the only resort, but Nevada is beating a dead horse with that stick, a horse that has been starved to death by serial budget cuts for education.
Public education is a complex issue and involves lots of politics these days. Few parents truly have the knowledge to choose education options well. I went through this experience myself beginning around 35 years ago and continuing through the college choices of my children. It was really tough.
After problems with a very highly rated private school, we switched to a more ordinary one that cost considerably less. New problems arose. Finally for my son’s 8th grade and my dauighter’s 9th grade, we switched to being tuition students at one of the top-rated public schools in the country that was some 35 miles distant. Our children rode the train to school each day. Then, we moved to a rental in that town.
The opportunities to learn, to make good friends, and to enjoy school were so much better at the public school that there was just no comparing it with private schools. The highest rated private schools are the most expensive and most exclusive. Their primary purpose seems to be creating children who conform to certain ideals and having 100% college admissions for high school graduates. That push for conformity creates an atmosphere in which hazing is common, and the schools turn a blind eye. We hear much about entitlement programs for the poor these days but rarely hear anything about the entitled rich brats attending those top-tier private schools.
Despite all of the problems with teacher’s unions, cantankerous school boards, and the occasional sub-par teacher, the public school produced results for my children. One graduated from MIT, the other from Brown. I won’t go into details of all of the benefits my kids had because they attended that school. Suffice it to say that the friends they made there are still their friends, more so than in college. Some are even my friends.
Give our public schools a chance, and choose them as carefully as you would choose a private school. Meanwhile, let’s do something meaningful about those inner-city and poor rural schools.