The Disadvantages of MOOC and Some Feasible Suggestions

 

As a modern product of internet education, MOOC has received worldwide attention because of its large scale,open curriculum, online learning, and convenient methods. The European and American countries have developed three major platforms, Coursera, edX and Udacity. Comparing with the traditional education model, the new open education model represented by MOOC has time and space’s benefits  for most educates. The convenience has brought people closer to life-long education. Therefore, some people have put forward the idea of ​​letting MOOC replace traditional education. However, compared with traditional education,MOOC still has some shortcomings. This article analyzes the future defects of MOOC from the perspective of education and puts forward feasible suggestions.

 

First of all, MOOC’s large-scale class will have an impact on multiculturalism. Because of the characteristics of its networked teaching, the class will form an industrial mass production knowledge output. However, most of the current knowledge exporting initiatives of the global MOOCs are in the hands of European and American countries with relatively developed politics, economy, culture, technology and education. Therefore, in contrast, for underdeveloped countries, the large-scale knowledge output formed through the MOOC will inevitably lead to the culture in a weak position, and even form cultural invasion, cultural hunting, and thus affect the global culture diversity. “The rise of MOOC in the United States is, on the face of it,the advocacy and practice of individual Elite Teachers. In essence, it is jointly promoted by University, government and enterprises. It can be said that the key role is Precise the government, which has a deep purpose behind the spread of American culture”(Liu, 2017). Basically, this means government is one of the most important supporter for the Mooc and some other online education system. The reason for government to support this project, definitely the MOOC has common benefits that everyone admitted that, another reason is to export domestic culture value, to attractive other country’s citizens are interested in America’s culture and tend to pursue America’s culture value, and weaker other culture value, eventually, lead to a culture invasion.

 

Secondly, the teaching mode of MOOC is insufficient in cultivating students’ learning passion. According to the survey, the dropout rate of global MOOCs in 2016 is over 95%. “Although the number of enrolled learners is enormous, only a small partial of them completed the whole course from the beginning to the end and took the final exam. As reported, the average complete rate is less than 10% [17]. The number of learners who took final exams and obtained certification is even lower”(Xu, 2016). The most important reason for the high dropout rate is that the MOOC does not have certain constraints for the educated people. The current MOOC class does not have to be like traditional teaching, to go to class at the prescribed time, and some other constraints. This phenomenon create a conflict. The online class is welcomed by people because of its randomness of time, which means lack of restraint. And lack of constraints will cause lower learning passions and lower self-discipline. If this situation last for a long time, this will cause a vicious cycle for both of the MOOC and students. “due to their open nature, enrollment is open to the general public and consequences for failure in a course are minimal to none. This openness results in a large portion of students registering for the course without ever actually participating in it and students At virtually every point during the course”(Xing, 2016). So, due to there are even no consequences for failure the course, students may do not want to pay much attention for the MOOC, because they may have no punishment for failing the MOOC course. This is also one reason that the teaching methods for MOOC is insufficient. “We show that students whose behavior suggests that they are not organized are significant less likely to succeed in a MOOC.” (Banerjee, 2014). This also suggest if people really want to learn something from MOOC, they need higher self-discipline and organized behaviors. Therefore, the online class is developing student’s self-discipline and struggle spirit.  In comparison, traditional teaching has a unique advantage in this aspect, and can make timely teaching adjustments according to different situations of student’s psychology and emotions.

 

Finally, most online teaching can’t make students establish a systematic knowledge system. Most of the teaching content of the MOOC is fragmented knowledge. Most of the students learn in the fragmented time, although it saves a lot of time, but because of the differences of audience. The student’s knowledge level and life background are different, and the understanding of the classroom content is naturally different. Secondly, in the establishment of the knowledge system, the characteristics of fragmentation are the advantages, which are in line with the requirements of a large number of people who have already worked, but the characteristics of fragmentation also make MOOC inferior and cannot be like the traditional teaching mode. The traditional teaching model can help students build a systematic and coherent knowledge system according to different academic situations. MOOC 

 

Suggestions:

 

In response to the above problems,several suggestions are proposed in conjunction with the reality:

The first one is to help the weaker culture to establish the contents of the MOOC, to form a diversified online education, and to break the monopoly of the educational content of the more developed countries. In particular, it is necessary to help developing countries to establish content that has national characteristics and is in line with their national conditions to meet the needs of more people. At the same time, it is also suggested that some developed countries, including UNESCO, can organize special personal to export some MOOC content with local regional characteristics and cultural characteristics to developing countries according to the actual situation, and guide global cultural diversity to form a healthy development.

 

The second one is to strengthen the combination of traditional education and MOOC teaching. Although there are many advantages in the teaching of MOOC, the high dropout rate caused by the limited binding force of “peer learning”, and the lack of certain constraints on the educated, the self-discipline of the educated, is the problem that the MOOC cannot avoid. As far as teaching efficiency is concerned, MOOC is not only a substitute for traditional teaching, but also a mainstream model for education and teaching. Therefore, it is suggested that while teaching in the MOOC, it is necessary to strengthen traditional teaching and form an educational model based on traditional teaching and supplemented by MOOC teaching.

 

The last point is to adhere to the “student-centered, teacher-leader”and strengthen teaching interaction. Because MOOC teaching cannot achieve face-to-face communication, in terms of interaction, it will inevitably lead to insufficient communication, the delay answers, etc.and even the desire of teachers and students to lose interaction due to certain strangeness. Therefore, it is suggested that in the teaching of MOOC, it is necessary to improve the standards for teachers. Under the mode of thinking that “content is the king”, we must pay more attention in the methods. Introducing a group of people must have solid knowledge, more love, patience, etc. Teachers of professional literacy teach the classes, guide teachers to carry out layered teaching according to the student’s situation; strengthen the interaction efficiency according to the student’s classroom performance, so that the motto “subversive education technology” “reduce the education cost”, “education fairness”, etc will come true.

 

To sum up:   The MOOC has an impact on multiculturalism, it will allow the more developed countries to transfer their culture to a relatively underdeveloped country and lead to cultural invasion. Some students   lack of curiosity, lack of passion and self-discipline for the MOOC courses.Because of the lack of constraints on the educated in MOOC, this will cause a vicious circle for both MOOC and the students. Finally, because the MOOC network is mostly the transmission of fragmented knowledge, even if it is convenient, compared with traditional education, it will not be targeted because of different individual learning conditions. And I also talk about some suggestions due to these particular questions, thru establish the MOOC contents for the weaker culture especially in some developing countries. To increase student’s self-discipline and the combination between traditional education system and MOOC. And increase the employment standards for the MOOC’s instructor are all the feasible methods to increase MOOC’s development.

 

Learning partners:

We have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of MOOC, and usually we compared with the traditional education system. My learning pods has asked in post-4 whether online teaching will replace the traditional teaching mode. Through the drawbacks of MOOC (a kind of online teaching)that I explained in this article, it can be seen that traditional teaching will not be networked replaced by teaching. I do believe MOOC and other online learning systems are the good assistant methods for the traditional education system.

 

References:

Banerjee,A.,& Duflo,E. (2014). (Dis)Organization and Success in an Economics MOOC. The American Economic Review,104(5),514-518. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/42920989

Liu,Y. (2017). An exploration of constructive approach to the higher institutions’MOOC with chinese local characteristics.IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 242,12114. doi:10.1088/1757-899X/242/1/012114

Xing,W.,Chen,X.,Stein,J.,& Marcinkowski,M. (2016). Temporal predication of dropouts in MOOCs: Reaching the low hanging fruit through stacking generalization.Computers in Human Behavior, 58,119-129. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.12.007

Xu,B.,& Yang,D. (2016). Motivation classification and grade prediction for MOOCs learners.Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2016,2174613-7. doi:10.1155/2016/2174613