From Financial Times, Nov. 26, 9:02 pm we have a letter from Sebastian Thrun of Udacity It can be found at
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/36d6eee8-5388-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html
The letter is titled "With mentoring, we can do 20 times better than ‘Mooc
1.0’"
Thrun there claims that Udacity is not dropping out of MOOCs but instead is evolving the concept. The Spring pilot at SJSU failed, but he refers to a second pilot in the summer in which the average pass rate was 71 per cent, which is the same as face-to-face courses at SJSU. He stresses that the cost was %10 of the normal cost, although how he comes up with this number is not clear. He then says "If these results were to hold for all college classes, we could soon say goodbye to student debt" implying that one of the main reasons to go with Moocs is that student cost will go down dramatically. Did students in fact pay less for these classes in the summer than they do for normal classes? I have seen no evidence of a student discount or any reason to believe that students will be paying less for Udacity courses than for regular courses. Thrun also mentions that "We achieved our results by teaming up students with personalised mentors who provide feedback and help when needed" and suggests that these mentors are what make Mooc 2.0 so much better than Mooc 1.0. Usually at SJSU we call such mentors "teachers" and "professors." Who are these personalized mentors? What status do they have in the profession? Who pays them? How much are they paid? If classes are going to be cheaper and yet each student will have a personalized mentor does this mean that the mentors will be paid very little per student? How many students did each mentor mentor? If the answer is 1000 then this could hardly be an example of personalized mentoring. Remember that a Mooc is "massive." This means thousands of students. How many mentors were hired? How good are these mentors? How are they tested? credentialed? Perhaps the answer can be found at Georgia Tech. Thrun writes "Udacity’s new model is the foundation for our work with Georgia Tech, where we are offering an entire master’s degree at 15 per cent of the tuition cost of on-campus education." My understanding is that the class that went well in the summer consisted mainly of students who already had BAs. Moocs do seem to work well with highly motivated students who already have a college education. But Thrun still sees Moocs as a model for bringing down tuition costs of students without BAs. It looks to me that this is a scheme to replace faculty with undereducated and underpaid part time workers. What kind of an education is this? Would you want your own children taking these classes, for example getting his or her papers graded by an underpaid person without any credentials?
