To time or not to time

Expected duration. Time on task. Lock stepped vs open. Start and end dates. Peer pressure motivation. Collaborative vs independent.

All of the above are all too well known for online learning developers. Does your design measure progress? Is it via time on task, do you lock access based on progress, do you enforce weekly or other spacing, use pre and post testing to adapt the experience or some other method? These issues are often tied to if you are allowing people to access content versus undertaking more collaborative activities.

This week I have had chance to pick up a few “courses” (well resources really in some cases) and this has got me thinking again about the temporal aspect of online learning. For example, is there value in Coursera basically unenrolling you from their courses to fit in their schedule, with the option to reenrol on the next session. This is partly as there are discussion activities but, in reality, the timing adds nothing to the learning experience for those wanting to pass through the course at their own pace.

Google, for example, advertise that they have opportunities via Coursera yet the company known for “organiz[ing] the world’s information and mak[ing] it universally accessible and useful” lock these “job-training solutions” to their/Coursera’s timelines rather than those of the interested party.

This expectation of working through at someone else’s pace is poor instructional practice when, in reality, many such courses are combinations of async activities such as videos, reflections, quizzes, etc. The defence for the model is probably facilitator support (i.e. being able to have someone online to help with questions). However, this seems contradictory to the idea of flat rate charging ($39 a month* as in the below image) without the traditional Coursera “audit” (i.e. FREE) access option. If the intention is to increase completion rates through forcing a time-based fear/scarcity mode of motivation this similarly is poor given there is not the personal support you would have in, say, a traditional university course to give you a hand and nudge you along to the final deadline.

Ultimately it feels that if this is the model then these courses need to be designed to allow any time joining with, say, monthly cohorts for discussion boards. Indeed we were designing similarly to this for rolling start degrees back in c.2010.

Ultimately it feels like MOOCs continue to fail at their stated objectives time and time again.