If you’ve ever enrolled in or taught a large lecture, you’ll know that these courses have many problems. While one lonely professor paces up and down at the front a large lecture hall (likely armed with a mic and remote clicker to help call up stimulating images and video clips to keep everyone engaged), anywhere from 100 to over 1000 students slump back in the audience armed with their own digital devices (even if they have been banned by the professor) playing games, watching reruns of their favorite television shows, and texting nasty comments to each other about the class and professor. Until recently, despite this familiar scenario, in the “online courses versus large lectures” debate, face-to-face lectures continued to win. There are now signs that\u00a0the pendulum may finally be shifting in favor of online courses.<\/p>\n
In January,\u00a0Beth McMurtrie from the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>\u00a0visited Michigan State University to report on the universities academic innovation centers. As she would later report, however, it was not the university’s technological innovations that left a lasting impression.\u00a0 “What stayed with me,” writes McMrutrie, “Were not the whiteboards, sticky notes, and optimistic talk of design thinking, but the students in the back of a psychology class. Inside this vast lecture hall, one professor had the thankless job of trying to manage a class of more than 600 students. He tried to make the course engaging with short, relatable descriptions of the material and pop-up quizzes to keep students involved. But a bunch of them were checked out. They were scrolling through Twitter, scanning the course catalogue, and listening to music. One enterprising student had\u00a0Grey\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>\u00a0playing on her phone.”<\/p>\n In the past, the defence of large lectures over online courses has rested on a single factor: Students ultimately learn more in synchronous rather than asynchronous learning environments. Human contact, any human contact, even contact that involves a professor running around a stage with a roaming microphone, is simply more engaging than an online course, but is this really the case?<\/p>\n Over the past decade, the rise of MOOCs has offered an unprecedented opportunity to study the impacts of online learning. While there are certainly consistent findings that MOOCs yield lower completion rates, this is primarily due to the fact that these courses are often non-credit and free. Simply put, the incentive to complete the course is lower than it is in a traditional credit course on campus. When asked about engagement, however, there is growing evidence that students in fact often feel just as or more engaged and learn just as much or more when enrolled in an online course.<\/p>\n A 2014 study was carried out by\u00a0David Pritchard, MIT\u2019s Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, with three other researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Tsinghua University found that in MOOCs, “the amount learned is somewhat greater than in the traditional lecture-based course.” Especially encouraging was the fact that the study revealed that students level of knowledge coming into the course appeared to play a less significant role in their achievement levels. Indeed, those who came in least prepared tended to do as well as anyone else, suggesting that online courses may also be ideal to overcome\u00a0 certain gaps in testing.<\/p>\n