I disagree. If you’re doing dishes you are not taking a college level course. One of the best things about digital courses is that you don’t have to spend an hour zoning out to a professor talking and then spend a day doing exercises, but the two can be intertwined and knowledge can be cemented.
Of course it can be done terribly. But the best online courses I’ve taken have split things up into small chunks with relevant exercises.
That's something we have in common :). My disagreement spans a few dimensions:
* I've already been through school. An undergraduate and graduate degree already taught me how to learn. I have good habits, and I know how to buckle down and study when needed. For me, I find that having something to do with my hands while listening to a lecture actually helps me stay more focused on the topic. Before and after watching, I like to review the slides, do some reading, and take notes.
* I already have degrees. I'm not looking for extra credential. I'm just looking to learn something new from someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not. It would be nice to have the opportunity to listen without necessarily jumping through all the hoops of a normal college class.
* Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content. In these cases, it's really frustrating when a course won't let me skip around and focus on the topics that I want to learn. The quickest way to get me to drop an online course is to make me sit through lecture content that I've already learned before somewhere else.
* Different students learn in different ways. You might like that the frequent quiz interruptions hold you accountable. That's great! For me, I don't find it too helpful. Usually the mid-lecture quizzes are simple "are you listening?" questions that don't really test your deep understanding. I'd rather go through a set of exercises all at once after listening to the lecture.
Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
The one-size-fits-most nature of online education goes against the "customize your education at scale to learn" which was an earlier anticipated advantage about MOOCs. Specifically, adaptive learning and being able to accommodate a variety of learning behaviors and styles. "Learn at your own pace, in your own way, on your own time but still within bounds to the rest of the class" kind of thing.
I remember when Stanford launched online CS courses in the mid 2010s, that it was thought they'd have the best of both worlds and their in-person, offline course offerings wouldn't be affected. (Diluted down to the lowest common denominator of student, which now included online learners who weren't Stanford students per se.) Well, over time, turns out double duty-ing course material for online and the "regular" classes crept into all education for instructors. Which meant the courses with online equivalents became easier across the board. Thus, the target audience for everything shifted.
Again, with acknowledged intentionality, I don't really have an issue with this (which you could crassly summarize as "dumbing down" the course offerings for convenience's sake) -- except that from my vantage point it was an unforeseen consequence of part of the online and MOOC push.
Obviously, I benefited from online courses in my mid 20s and so I look at their rise with nostalgia and through a rosier lens than many. However, I also can't help but think that they ended up being not quite what was promised at the outset, which was better targeting in addition to expanded educational access around the world. Especially for students who thought they'd signed up for the more challenging materials and didn't want to be part of a grand new experiment.
Interesting that MIT OpenCourseWare will outlast edX, which for a few years truly did look like it was the future of university level education and beyond.
And for new content, I never watch lectures with other things. I never did. And I still find 2-4 minutes videos annoying as hell.
> Sometimes I already have background knowledge that overlaps with the course content.
I used to think like you, all the time. "Oh, I already know this." and while I'm sitting there being all smug and self-satisfied that I'm the smartest person in the room I realized:
* The content is good for a refresher. "Background" knowledge is just that, you're admitting you want to hear an expert speak on a subject yet want to throw out what they have to say because you "already know it from before this class".
* The content often provides context. Just like the "Previously on..." segment of TV shows that will recap specific plot points so the viewer understands the events of the new episode they're about to watch, discussing what you term "prior knowledge" will help contextualize the new content that you don't understand properly.
> Basically, I see no reason online courses can't be structured to give us more choices about how we want to consume the content!
OK, but that's not edX/Corsera's job lol
They don't have to cater to every single whim of every type of education personality. It's all well and fine that you, a multiple degree holder, would love to skip around content that you find boring/tedious/whatever while saying you want "someone qualified to teach me who can filter out what's important and what's not".
Like it or not, these websites are just simply not aimed at you, a large-brained Multiple Degree Holder. They're aimed at people who are behind you in education.
Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture 2 or 3 or even more times. Sometimes I like to listen to a lecture when I'm going for a run. Sometimes I like to listen while I'm doing chores. Seems presumptuous to say I'm "not taking the course" when we know that learning styles vary so much between individuals.
YouTube has a ton of lectures, for free, that you can view and/or listen to in this manner.
But doing dishes during a lecture seems antithetical to what they are trying to achieve with remote learning, and isn't the use case they should be catering to.
It baffles me that people expect to take a process optimized for a neurotypical 20-year-old subsidized enough to devote 100% time to study and apply it to everybody else on the planet. I get how physical universities ended up the way they did. But software is infinitely soft and the internet is basically everywhere. Insisting that everybody must learn the same way a bunch of well-off youth did in 1950 is grossly exclusionary and wasteful.
In short, I don't care what the universities are trying to achieve with remote learning. I care what the students succeed in achieving. Let's focus on that.
They are trying to exclude large swathes of the population?
It is extremely common for people with ADD to focus better when they keep the part of their brain that distracts them busy. In college I folded origami in lectures so that my brain wouldn't go off on tangents that would lead to me tuning out significant sections of the lecture.
Some people combat the tangents by being busy, and some people embrace the tangents (which can be valuable for understanding) by listening to lectures multiple times.
It won't work for a calculus lecture, but for a lot of topics it works just fine.
It seems, but it isn't. The inflexible way they structure their courses is just a failure to accommodate to different learning styles. And it's okay - they don't need to be everything for everyone - but it's disappointing.
I picked this up from Mortimer J. Adler's "How to Read a Book". There's lots of other techniques discussed in it, but the idea of "skim the content first to know what's coming up, so you have an idea of what each chapter (or lecture) is building towards" improved my retention massively and works well for things that aren't just books.
Relatively mindless tasks to occupy my hands frees up my brain to focus. If I'm not doing dishes, I'm doodling or playing with a coin or, or...
Now this comment by OP (benrbray) and you (wodenokoto) gives me an idea that courses can be designed in a way that the learner can mention how much hands-free time they have to spare now, depending on which the platform can hold off any interactivities / quizzes until then (or something like that), to make the learning process more personalized.
It sounds like you assume everyone suffers ADHD and that's no the cause, not everybody learns the same way and the dish washing strategy always worked for me in college.
Strong disagree - as you point out in the next sentence, slightly distracted is the standard model of consumption for in person.
