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San Jose State University suspends Udacity online course trials
San Jose State University's online education pilot held the promise of real course credit without the hassles of attending class in person. It hasn't worked that way in practice, however, and both SJSU as well as its partner Udacity have suspended their plans for fall courses. Quite simply, there have been too many flunkies so far -- while 83 percent of students completed their sessions this spring, no more than 44 percent of any given class earned a passing grade. SJSU and Udacity will use the break to learn what went wrong and retool the program, although it's not clear just when (or if) internet-based classes will resume. Online education is far from finished when similar for-credit trials have yet to begin; for now, though, SJSU students will have to drag themselves to the lecture hall.
Udacity to announce partnership with San Jose State University, will trial for-credit online classes
Working alongside college professors at San Jose State, online course start-up Udacity will launch a pilot program for remedial and college-level algebra. Importantly, these classes won't simply result in a nice certificate, but genuine college credit. Students will have to stump up $150 for each three-unit course, with the intake limited to 300; half will come from San Jose State, while the remaining places will be given to those attending nearby community colleges and high schools. The online course start-up, founded by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thurn, says that its own mentors will assist university staff in administering the course, which will include instructional video and web-based quizzes. MIT and Harvard's similar EdX course saw promising results during its own pilot tests at San Jose. While 40 percent in the traditional class arrangement got a C grade or lower, only 9 percent using the blended online course picked up the same grades. California Governor Jerry Brown hopes that the courses might help reduce barriers to college education entry -- more than 50 percent of entrants are unable to meet the college's basic requirements in math and English.
Teaching in WoW
Henry Lowood, a Library Science teacher at San Jose State University recently took his online "Games and Libraries" class on a virtual field trip: into World of Warcraft. As he explains it on the How They Got Game 2 site, the lesson he was teaching dealt with the usefulness of online games in the library, and his students for the most part had no exposure to online gaming, and so the class logged in for class credit.They started their own guild on the Windrunner realm so that they would have their own chat channel, and had to deal with the issue of mass death since most of the students were using 10-day trial accounts and thus were too low level to survive long. Despite the challenge, the online forum proved a successful environment in which to teach, and within WoW the students were able to encounter the community of online gamers, witness their teacher (a paladin) duel a priest to illustrate the PvP aspects of the game, and even received some resurrection from their instructor when they died along the way, "a first in terms of faculty-student relations." Now, those of us who have taught know the difficulties of keeping a classroom of students engaged, so I think this is a pretty novel way to do so. It helps that the lesson was specifically about online gaming honestly, but I wonder how well this would apply to a discussion on say virtual storytelling, or even a history lesson on warfare. I know that would be one class session my students would have never skipped out on.
