Are classes for online degrees similar to open courseware classes?

[Maus]

For those who might have done both, if DS18 (2E) and I want to see if he's got the executive skills to handle college classes (we are looking at an online degree), would working through an open courseware class or two give us a realistic feel?

[regentrude]

I am not sure. One of the biggest issues my students have is the juggling of assignments and deadlines. In many OCW courses, there is not the same amount of assignments and deadlines as there is in real college class. OCW courses differ vastly in the amount of work required and in the variety of resources available. It certainly does not hurt to try, but it may not replicate the real experience. 

[Lanny]

I believe the MOOC courses are extremely light compared to the regular college/university courses my DD is taking.  I base that on having completed a few MOOC courses which I audited.  Still. the education and the study skills necessary can be awesome in a MOOC course. One I especially recommend is a short course on Coursea.org called "Learning How to Learn".  If you search their site it is one of their most popular courses.  Awesome and a good place to begin.

To try to answer your question directly, my DD came home after Fall 2020 semester. She is taking courses that are all online and will save $ by living at home (we have 300 Mbps Fiber Optic service).  There is IMO a lot of work involved with her courses. Possibly for every hour there might be in a MOOC course, she has 10 or 20 or 30 hours of work or more.  

Bottom line is that's like comparing Apples and Oranges. There is a tremendous amount of information available free Auditing a MOOC course and it may help someone with self-discipline, etc.  Also, The MOOC courses are Asychronous (the ones I have taken) and the courses my DD is taking now in the Spring 2021 semester, all Onlne are Synchronous.  Another difference is that some of her courses have Recitation.  

Yes, I do suggest taking a few MOOC courses (Auditing for free, no certificate received) because they do require Self-Discipline and other skills.  I am going to begin a course from the Linux Foundation (I forget if it is from edx.org or coursera.org probably it is on coursera) and it is I think 14 weeks and at least one hour per day so that requires some self-discipline.

[elegantlion]

I don't know if MOOCs/Open Courseware have changed since 2013, but at that point, there are little feedback given if assignments were submitted at all. That feedback was mostly from peers who had varying levels of experience - in the few MOOC courses I took. So, while the input might be comparable for some courses, the output required certainly was not. 

What field are you looking at for courses, maybe we find some helpful resources for you? 

Edited January 27, 2021 by elegantlion

[Miguelsmom]

My son did 6 hrs a day on his open courseware classes and CC was less intense. University has a lot more scheduling different time lines for different classes.  One opens Sunday the other class Thursday. To get a feel for it maybe have him sign up for two classes and see how it works out. Or a summer class.

 

[Lanny]

The hours in the MOOC courses I have looked at have ranged from 7 to 15 hours typically required, to the one I hope to begin soon from the Linux Foundation (I think that is on the edx.org platform) which looks like about 100 hours estimated and a 14 week course.

I do believe the MOOC courses have some things that will help build skills regarding self-discipline and time management.

I remember when I took the first course (from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)  there was time pressure and I remember telling my DW and DD that I needed to complete that and get a good grade.  I think I got a 90 or so on that course. There were a lot of assignments and for someone with the time and interest to dive deeper, tons of reference material. It was my awesome introduction to what I high quality MOOC course can be like.

[Miguelsmom]

What major?

[Maus]

He's not sure what he wants to major in. He used to always say Mechanical Engineering, but he's not crazy about math. (He does okay with it, but doesn't like it.) We thought he might get started with General Studies and see what catches his interest most. 

[Lanny]

@Maus    This is probably a good time for him to discard the idea of Engineering.  Math is an integral part of Engineering. The idea of General Studies sounds like a good one for him.

[Corraleno]

I highly recommend Arizona State's online "Earned Admission" program. It used to be called Global Freshman Academy when they were partnered with Coursera, but now they run the program themselves and it's even cheaper.

The way it works is you register for a class and pay a $25 fee to validate your identity, so they can proctor exams remotely. Then you take the class as a regular college student, doing all the work, getting grades and feedback, and at the end if you are happy with your grade, you pay $400 to convert it to actual college credit. If you're not happy with your grade or you drop the class, there is no record of it on any transcript, so it's a no-risk way to test the waters for real college classes. Most classes are 8 weeks long and worth 3 credits.

How it Works: https://ea.asu.edu/how-it-works

DS (who is also 2E) took HIST 102 (Ancient & Medieval Europe) and ASM 246 (Human Origins) and transferred the credits to his university. He said there was a lot of reading, but he found the courses to be pretty easy. He also started the astronomy course (AST 111), but dropped it because he said the assignments and quizzes were 99% math and he thought the class was really boring. There are some tech-oriented classes, like introductory programming, as well as gen ed courses like Intro Sociology, Human Communication, Micro & Macro Econ, etc. The English Comp classes are a bit weird, though — IIRC, the 1st one is very touchy-feely, writing about yourself and creating some sort of personal website, and the 2nd is about designing and carrying out some kind of research project in your neighborhood. The math courses are all self-paced and use software: College Algebra and Precalc use ALEKS and the two calc classes use Gradarius.

Course list: https://ea.asu.edu/courses

If your son is interested in an online degree, all of ASU's Earned Admission courses apply directly towards a degree there, or you can transfer them to most other colleges and universities (although they may just transfer as general credit, that really varies from college to college). ASU also accepts most CLEPs, so between the EA courses and CLEPs, the equivalent of two years of college could be knocked out pretty cheaply. Also, Starbucks has a partnership with ASU where employees who work at least 20 hrs/wk get a significant tuition discount upfront and then they can get their tuition and fees reimbursed at the end of the semester as long as they pass the classes. There are also inexpensive options for online degrees based mostly on CLEP and DSST exams through schools like Thomas Edison State in NJ, although majors tend to be limited compared to a program like ASU.

 

 

Edited January 28, 2021 by Corraleno

[SeaConquest]

39 minutes ago, Corraleno said:

I highly recommend Arizona State's online "Earned Admission" program. It used to be called Global Freshman Academy when they were partnered with Coursera, but now they run the program themselves and it's even cheaper.

The way it works is you register for a class and pay a $25 fee to validate your identity, so they can proctor exams remotely. Then you take the class as a regular college student, doing all the work, getting grades and feedback, and at the end if you are happy with your grade, you pay $400 to convert it to actual college credit. If you're not happy with your grade or you drop the class, there is no record of it on any transcript, so it's a no-risk way to test the waters for real college classes. Most classes are 8 weeks long and worth 3 credits.

How it Works: https://ea.asu.edu/how-it-works

DS (who is also 2E) took HIST 102 (Ancient & Medieval Europe) and ASM 246 (Human Origins) and transferred the credits to his university. He said there was a lot of reading, but he found the courses to be pretty easy. He also started the astronomy course (AST 111), but dropped it because he said the assignments and quizzes were 99% math and he thought the class was really boring. There are some tech-oriented classes, like introductory programming, as well as gen ed courses like Intro Sociology, Human Communication, Micro & Macro Econ, etc. The English Comp classes are a bit weird, though — IIRC, the 1st one is very touchy-feely, writing about yourself and creating some sort of personal website, and the 2nd is about designing and carrying out some kind of research project in your neighborhood. The math courses are all self-paced and use software: College Algebra and Precalc use ALEKS and the two calc classes use Gradarius.

Course list: https://ea.asu.edu/courses

If your son is interested in an online degree, all of ASU's Earned Admission courses apply directly towards a degree there, or you can transfer them to most other colleges and universities (although they may just transfer as general credit, that really varies from college to college). ASU also accepts most CLEPs, so between the EA courses and CLEPs, the equivalent of two years of college could be knocked out pretty cheaply. Also, Starbucks has a partnership with ASU where employees who work at least 20 hrs/wk get a significant tuition discount upfront and then they can get their tuition and fees reimbursed at the end of the semester as long as they pass the classes. There are also inexpensive options for online degrees based mostly on CLEP and DSST exams through schools like Thomas Edison State in NJ, although majors tend to be limited compared to a program like ASU.

 

 

I hope they run another $99 special! I really wonder if any of the UCs will take these credits. To which university were you able to transfer the credits? We are thinking about doing their chem course vs a CC intro chem course that is a pre-req for gen chem. We keep going back and forth about it. I am told that the writing courses that are self-paced are also self-graded, which I think is weird for a writing class, but the instructor-led comp courses have actual instructors that grade.  

[regentrude]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

The way it works is you register for a class and pay a $25 fee to validate your identity, so they can proctor exams remotely. Then you take the class as a regular college student, doing all the work, getting grades and feedback, and at the end if you are happy with your grade, you pay $400 to convert it to actual college credit. If you're not happy with your grade or you drop the class, there is no record of it on any transcript, so it's a no-risk way to test the waters for real college classes. Most classes are 8 weeks long and worth 3 credits.

Do they have actual humans giving feedback? Or is it all computer graded multiple choice stuff?
I cannot see how this model can work, if whether there is income to pay human instructors depends on how satisfied students are with their grades. Grading and giving meaningful feedback, especially for writing courses, is insanely time consuming for professors.

Edited January 28, 2021 by regentrude

[Corraleno]

1 minute ago, regentrude said:

Do they have actual humans giving feedback? Or is it all computer graded multiple choice stuff?
I cannot see how this model can work, if whether there is income to pay human instructors depends on how satisfied students are with their grades.

I can only answer for the courses that DS took, but I believe that in those classes all the quizzes and exams were m/c and were auto-graded. Given the huge numbers of students in some of those classes, I don't think hand-grading quizzes and exams would be possible. He thought the lectures were really good though (the human evolution class was taught by Donald Johansen), and the instructors and multiple TAs were heavily involved in the discussion forums, so students could ask questions and go deeper on the topics if they wanted. The instructors are all regular ASU staff, their employment isn't really dependent on whether enough students end up paying for the credit. Many of these classes were originally offered for free through Coursera, basically as a community service (and you can still take them for free if you don't want the credit).

Also, to be fair, some of the really large gen ed classes that DS chose to take online at his university were also mostly auto-graded. I think each required at least one research paper or project at the end that was hand graded — but the quality of the TAs, and the value of their feedback, varied considerably. For example. he took a Physical Anthro class online and said the TA was a totally disorganized flake and he felt the ASU class was actually much better, both in terms of how it was run and how much he learned.

That said, I would not recommend taking English Comp through ASU if a student actually wants to learn something, because the grading seems to be largely based on self-evaluation and peer review — and a very large percentage of students in that class are not native speakers, so the peer review is basically useless. OTOH, DD took an online English Comp class through the local CC last semester and it was even more useless than the ASU class, despite the fact that the feedback was coming from an actual instructor (when he could be bothered to respond). DS's freshman comp class was pretty bad, too, but not as bad as ASU or the local CC — it was just a ton of pointless busywork for someone who was already an excellent writer, while not providing remotely enough help for the kids who really needed it (at least half of DS's class were international students in STEM majors whose English writing skills were very poor).

As someone who chose to attend a tiny LAC for undergrad, I definitely agree that there is no comparison between an in-person class taught by an enthusiastic and engaged instructor, and a huge online class that uses autograded m/c quizzes, but I think most college classes these days fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and unfortunately the trend seems to be moving towards the lower end as college becomes more and more expensive and budgets and staff are cut. 

[Corraleno]

1 hour ago, SeaConquest said:

I hope they run another $99 special! I really wonder if any of the UCs will take these credits. To which university were you able to transfer the credits? We are thinking about doing their chem course vs a CC intro chem course that is a pre-req for gen chem. We keep going back and forth about it. I am told that the writing courses that are self-paced are also self-graded, which I think is weird for a writing class, but the instructor-led comp courses have actual instructors that grade.  

Do the UC's use Transferology? If so, you should be able to see which classes they accept and what they count for. Ohio State accepted both ASU courses as "general electives," but not as history or anthropology. I believe DS could have petitioned to have them accepted as subject credit, but he didn't bother. Ironically, they do accept both of the English Comp courses as fulfilling the English requirements, even though (IMO) they are not nearly as good as the classes DS took. I think ENG 101 is the one that is "graded" mostly by self-evaluation and peer review, while 102, which requires a research project, may have more instructor feedback. TBH I didn't look too deeply into 102 after I saw the kind of research project that was required and knew DS would not want to do that.

[SeaConquest]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

Do the UC's use Transferology? If so, you should be able to see which classes they accept and what they count for. Ohio State accepted both ASU courses as "general electives," but not as history or anthropology. I believe DS could have petitioned to have them accepted as subject credit, but he didn't bother. Ironically, they do accept both of the English Comp courses as fulfilling the English requirements, even though (IMO) they are not nearly as good as the classes DS took. I think ENG 101 is the one that is "graded" mostly by self-evaluation and peer review, while 102, which requires a research project, may have more instructor feedback. TBH I didn't look too deeply into 102 after I saw the kind of research project that was required and knew DS would not want to do that.

The UCs use something called Assist, but it is really just to determine if courses will transfer between the CA CCs and UCs/CSUs. It doesn't help for other schools ---> UC/CSU transfers. I never knew about Transferology, so thanks for that. It looks like UCLA has taken the course before for actual chem credit, so that bodes well for UCSD and Cal too.