The Great Flipped Class Myth

Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury news has written "MOOCs: Could professors' resistance derail online-learning?"  referring to the on-line letter published by my department at San Jose State.  The question is over-generalized since we did not attack on-line learning in general, only MOOCs.  But isn't it exciting that we might even be considered some sort of force:  one that could derail MOOCs?  Well, let's be realistic.  Voices of criticism or even skepticism are quite small, and the momentum seems to be largely in the direction of MOOC expansion.  The best we can do is raise questions and perhaps influence the process to some small degree.  I am glad that Cassidy is least recognizes that the points we raised in the letter are "valid concerns."

What I want to talk about here is the myth of the flipped course. Here is why Cassidy thinks that MOOCs are in general a good thing.  He has talked to the people at Coursera: 

"When I talked to Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng earlier this year, what excited him most about this new way of teaching and learning was the potential it held for those who left college before finishing their degrees.

"Hopefully, it will bring a lot of working adults back into the education system," he said. "There are working adults who don't have a college degree." Massive online courses could ultimately let them pick up their remaining credits without having to regularly make it to a class at a specific place and time And he talked about knowledge-hungry students in developing countries who lack access -- financial and geographical -- to higher education."

O.K.  This could be a good thing.  But is this where the money is in MOOCs?   Cassidy wisely adds

 "None of which means Ng, an associate professor himself, isn't also excited about Coursera providing on-campus, online learning." 

So, lets get back to the point at issue.




"But rather than serve as a way to make professors less relevant, Ng described a system in which professors were more involved in teaching. Remember the flipped classroom idea? Daphne Koller, Ng's co-founder and a Stanford computer science professor, told me this week that that is exactly how she taught her most recent course.

"When they come into class, they have an open-ended discussion," she says. "Let's imagine you've got this problem. How do you go about solving it? It's much more interesting. Compare that to siting in an auditorium with 150 people listening to the same lecture."

Now we are getting down to the brass tacks, the real substance.  Koller thinks it is an amazingly new idea to have open-ended discussions in the classroom.  One wonders what Koller's classes were like before MOOCs came along....sounds like they were pretty deadly.  Moreover, her image of what is being replaced by MOOCs is the auditorium class with "150 people listening to the same lecture."  I have in fact taught classes with as many as 100 students, but I much prefer my regular classes of from 14-40 students.  I agree that the 150 student lecture class is not the best for pedagogy.  But lets talk about the 40 student class that I typically teach at the lower division level. Since these are General Education courses and since the president of my university wants to replace such courses ultimately with MOOCs, the real target of MOOCs, as I see it, is not replacement of 150 student classes but both 100 and 40 student classes.  And yet in the 40 student classes there already is a lot of open-ended discussion.  Coursera's idea is to expand class size way beyond 150 students!  It is amazing that Koller can speak with disgust of 150 student classes when the classes she now promotes have thousands or even hundreds of thousands!  This is beyond ironic.

Cassidy then continues: "The student/professor discussion is interactive and more personal. All of which makes the professor more important, not less. "The real value of attending a great university isn't just the content," Ng told me. It's the interaction with the person delivering that content."

This is exactly right, and this is why MOOCs are so bad!  MOOCs are massive.  Massive is not personal.  The flipped class is a red herring.  The real issue is that with MOOCs things are less personal.  Remember 1984 where things were promoted by giving them labels that were the opposite of what they really mean.  "Massive is intimate" sounds a lot like "War is peace."

Cassidy ends by saying:  "I understand that Ng is the founder of a for-profit business who has a self-interest in spreading the gospel of massive online learning. And I realize that it's too early in the online course revolution to know whether the shift will play out more the way people like Ng and Koller see it, or more the way the San Jose State philosophy professors see it."

Yes, time will tell whether people will buy into the smoke and mirrors of the "flipped class" myth.