Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If you are a successful college professor, and someone asks you to turn your course into a MOOC, proceed with great care. These things are not the same.

I am currently taking a series of online courses or MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course or is it Massive Online Open Course or is it Massive Opportunity to make Outrageous amounts of Cash?). I am not having a good experience. There are opportunities to learn, and I am learning. There is also, however, great disappointment.

The lectures are sloppy. Some lectures are difficult to understand as the speakers are not native English speakers. Many visuals shown are fuzzy and illegible. The lecturers don’t answer questions.

I caution successful college professors from doing a MOOC. I feel that these persons who come across poorly in the MOOCs are excellent professors and succeed at both research and teaching—in a campus environment.

Specific cautions:

You can’t show slides and just talk as if you were in a classroom. That comes across as sloppy, and the grammar, once transcribed and shown on the screen next to the video, is embarrassing.

Don’t let the production company show your presentation without your final, absolute approval. They will put up any out-of-focus  junk to save time and money.

Have a firm agreement on who will answer questions from paying customers. You may need to spend 28 hours a day answering questions. You can’t do that. Hence, you ignore most questions and give poor answers to the rest. You come across as (hmmm, how to say this?) a jerk.

MOOC is not college. MOOC deals with professionals in the workforce. They invest time and money and expect excellence. They are not 18-year-old freshmen who need to be “weeded out” with quips and suggestions to ask another student. And you don’t have a staff of grad students to take care of these things.

Excellent material can be presented in an excellent manner in a MOOC. The MOOC can also present an excellent professor as a bungling, heartless hack. Proceed with caution and feel no fear in marking up the contract.