Category: Learning

Plagiarize and risk getting stigmatized

No body wants to be labelled as a cheat. That is something given for granted. In the academic world, the worst sin is none other than being caught as a plagiarist. Getting stigmatized by your peers and society at large is the consequences of being caught.

In the days before the internet era and before the rise of the mighty search engines like Yahoo and later Google, the risk of getting caught if you lift sections of work from others assignment or even published work was remote. This is especially so if you are just writing a term paper or an essay that get filed (and later thrashed). But today, with the rise of the internet and more and more literature, thesis, even essays are published or made available online by authors, the life of the plagiarist is getting riskier by the minute.

I have submitted an article for my column in The Heat which deals with a few examples from my own experience as a research scientist and a college lecturer which I hope the editor will accept for publication.

The availability of many plagiarism detection services with access to huge databases, fast and effective search engines means that to cheat on one’s academic work now is a very risky affairs. Even those who had plagiarized and it seems that their bad deeds were not detected when the work was submitted and accepted, the freedom of information principle and the eventual inclusion of the plagiarists’ work in one or more databases will lay bare the fraud committed sooner or later.

On August 7, 2014, it was reported that prominent US senator John Welsh was forced to quit his re-election campaign due to the exposure of his being a plagiarist. Welsh’s 2007 act of plagiarism for his master’s degree assignment was only exposed recently. The plagiarism committed and uncovered was clearly detected and published in fine details in which the detection software not only picked up “blow-by-blow”  the act of plagiarism committed by Welsh, it even pointed to which paragraphs, sections and entire page that were copied and from whom the relevant content was lifted. It was reported that Welsh’s alma mater may be rescinding his master’s degree. Hence being stigmatized by the academic community is just the beginning of Welsh’s woes, now losing his political career is far more damaging.

Once you are labelled as a cheat, in today’s digital world it means that you are forever digitally branded as a cheat. That is the peril of plagiarism. So those who have cheated in order to gain their academic degrees should rightly be worried sick now. This is because someone, somewhere and some time in the future will uncover your bad deeds. It is just a matter of time that you will be caught. There is no escape!

The M in MOOC stands for Massive!

Inside Higher Ed reported that the University of Wisconsin – Madison is revamping its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) offering. It will put emphasis on MOOCs that have local interests. This was done at the back of 3.2% average completion rate for Wisconsin – Madison’s MOOCs. Although this is low, it still falls within the 3 to 7 % range that is the average for MOOCs in terms of completion rate.

As a “veteran” MOOCer, I think Wisconsin-Madison has missed the whole point about MOOC by going local. MOOC is the means by which academic and other learning institutions can extend their reach to learners at all corners of the world whose only criteria of participation (aside from prior knowledge specific to some courses) is access to the Internet. Local learners can well afford the time (and resources?) to take up on-campus courses. By “going local” there may be many consequences such as:

  1. Lower sign up figures:

With an averagely popular MOOC, you can expect at least 30,000 enrollment. With local-focused MOOCs, you will bound to have a much lower enrollment figure as your subject will not have broad enough interest to the “Massive” part of MOOC. Hence a figure of 3,000 enrollment is already very generous, I think it will be more in the range of 800 – 1500. You will not have the kind of geographical reach that MOOC is designed to bring. Will you still be able to “qualify” your courses as MOOCs?

2. Lower total number of people completing the MOOCs: (Is completion rate more important than the number of learner benefiting from your MOOCs?)

The cost of putting up Wisconsin-Madison’s revamped MOOCs, IMHO will not be that much different from the previous version. With 4% completion rate of the “old” MOOCs and with say 30,000 enrollment, you would stand to educate and benefit 1,200 people. With an enrollment figure of 1,000 and a completion rate of say triple of the conventional 4%, you will only educate more or less 80 people. Hence your return on invested effort (the MOOC industry has still not figured out a business model, thus it is best to measure return on invested effort rather than investment at this point) will be very low.

To benefit 80 – 100 local learners, you might as well provide free on-campus delivery of the course rather than using the more expensive MOOC system.

I think what Wisconsin-Madison needs to do is to look into the delivery system of their “old” MOOCs and find out from learners or if possible engage a sample of learners (with incentives) to give them answers to what work for the learners and what elements are the “turnoffs”. By improving the completion rate by just 2 to 3 percent, a significant increase in the number of people benefiting from the institution’s MOOCs can be attained.

What elements of an MOOC that worked for me may not work for everyone. However in my case I think these are, for me at least the success factors in an MOOC:

(a) Clear and concise learning objectives and learning outcomes. The kind of pre-requisite knowledge and skills must be well specified as well. The syllabus must be well written and available BEFORE the course commences to allow learners to judge whether they want to or have the pre-requisites to benefit from enrolling and learning.

(b) Tie to (a) a series of short video lectures, “purpose-shot” (i.e. shot purely in MOOC fashion and not a class recording). Each video lecture should be around 8 to 10 minutes long, covering a learning point each. Long video covering many points will lose learners and it is not easy to resume learning if you have to take a break while watching a 1 hour lecture.

(c) Tie to (b) a good summary of the learning points to be achieved for the chapter, summarizing the key learning outcomes attained with glossary of new terms / concepts.

(d) A clear and easy to follow assessment regime. I for one is a kind “loner” when it comes to studying. I like discussion forum and will take part even if not required by the assessment regime if the conversation is interesting. I never like to work in a group in which the bulk of the assessment for knowledge attainment is based. In Stanford University’s pioneer “Technology Entrepreneurship” MOOC, I was let down by some of my fellow group members (we were from Malaysia, Singapore, and Pakistan) to the extent that we could not develop our project fully (luckily the assessment system made allowance for such scenario). I think group work should still be used but assessment of which should not occupy a significant chunk of the final grade. I also do not like peer-based-assessment for written work. This is because the system will not have the ability to distinguish the serious peer assessors from those who just want to complete the task and simply assign a grade. In fact, I have an idea: why not engage some of these serious peer reviewers as course monitors (a sort of class representatives) give them some Teaching Assistant’s privileges to “double mark” a group of learners’ work. In return these serious peer assessors can be given some incentives such as free enrollment into verified assessment (i.e Coursera’s Signature Track or edX’s Verified Certificate) which usually cost a fair bit of money especially if you are not earning US dollars like me.

In short, learners’ expectations and what an MOOC promised to deliver must tally. Some MOOCs look good on the introduction page but the content was either not suitable or too demanding of the learner. Some will have unrealistic assessment regime that drives away those who already enrolled.

The “we build it and they will come” expectation of some of the MOOC providers has to be erased from their vocabulary! What happens will likely be this, veteran MOOCers like me will come, even sign up and look around, feeling disappointed and dropout from the course!

Reading deeper into dates

Today is the “official” birth anniversary of my father who passed away on December 01, 2013. Officially, if he was alive today, the late Mr. Chow Kong Yong would have been 85 years old.

It was not until we were arranging for my father’s funeral in December 2013 that we discovered a new fact about my dad. One that we suspected even my dad, a retired school master did not know about.

My father’s birth certificate showed that he was born on the 5th of August, 1929 in the town of Pusing near Ipoh. All along we learned to remember his birthday on the Gregorian Calendar as such and that his birthday on the lunar calender was the 23rd Day of the Sixth month. You can imagine the shock we, the children and grandchildren of the late Mr. Chow showed when the administrator for the columbarium in Sam Poh Tong Cave Temple (a famous Chinese temple built into a series of caves in Ipoh) calmly informed us that the 23rd Day of the Sixth month in 1929 did not fall on 5th of August but 29th of July!

It seemed that for 84 years my dad (and the rest of us) did not know his actual date of birth! I then recalled one of the stories that my late grandfather used to tell me when I was a kid. During the good old days (in the 1930s – 40s), many babies were born in the home. The “standard operating procedure”  (SOP) back then was to report the birth at the nearest police station to get a birth certificate for the child. With high infant mortality, especially during the Great Depression years, the SOP was to wait till the baby survived for 7 days before the father would register the birth. It is my educated guess that my grandfather followed this SOP as far as the birth of my dad was concern!

Of course during those early years it was very difficult to convert the date from Lunar Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar system, so the “mistake” in my dad’s birth date would go on undiscovered. But today, we have plenty of apps on our smartphones that have lunar calendars which can do a conversion of dates in 2 to 3 swipes. If one wants to get the conversion from an authoritative source, the Hong Kong Observatory provides great conversion tables.

So if you are given a date, especially a distant date in the lunar calendar by anyone, do not take their word for the conversion of this date to Gregorian Calendar. Always double check with your lunar calendar apps or to be on the safe side, consult the Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion tables! For conversion of Muslim Calendar to Gregorian Calendar (and vice versa),  this site provides a good conversion apps on their website.

I guess the wrong conversion of my late father’s birth date shall remain a Chow family joke for generations to come!

The late Mr. Chow Kong Yong, taken on Feb 11, 2011 in his house in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia.

Can you learn to be innovative & creative?

The management guru, Peter Druker (1909 -2005) said, “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth”.

I wonder how many entrepreneurs practice what Drucker’s had preached. Many think that innovation and creativity are confined to the “creative people”, like those who design your logo. Wrong! You can actually learn to be innovative and creative. I am in fact learning from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the Pennsylvania State University entitled, “Creativity, Innovation and Change” (CIC) at present*. There are a great deal that even an “old dog” and trained scientist like me can pick up. This 8-weeks course is near its completion for this session, but do check it out on Coursera (www.coursera.org) to put this course on your watch-list for the next session**.

I particularly like the idea of the “idea journal”, a physical notebook, or the electronic version from your smartphone or tablet that you use to jot down any idea that come to mind. Doing this regularly will help you to build up a good collection. Review and act on some of these ideas periodically and you are on the first step of being innovative and creative.

But having ideas, recording them and executing your ideas are not the surefire way to be successful in your innovative quest. You need to have two further actions: being observant and having the habit of collecting and analysing data from your innovative and creative projects.

My PhD work over two decades ago was on how to multiply narcissus using a non-conventional method (narcissus are bulbs that produce trumpet-like yellow flowers that signify the imminent arrival of Spring). In the era of 1980s plant tissue culture or commonly know as cloning of plants was beginning to be used extensively to clone high potential and high value plants.  After working on the problem for over a year, I was not getting my plants that I cloned  to multiply fast enough. I was stuck.

On one cold Friday night in late 1988, I was working for over 12 hours in the laboratory, doing more work to fine tune my technique to multiply my plants. Fatigue and frustration overcame my mind (later I attributed this to my having inhaled too much 99% alcohol used as antiseptic spray over the long working day). I was very brutal in the way I used the scalpel to cut my plants. I was even more brutal in the way I stuffed the cut plant materials in my test tube with growth medium. Despite feeling tired, my training dictated that I would need to label and keep record of my experiment with full eagerness, even though I had done about 500 test-tubes of plants by then, at about 10 pm.

10 weeks later, while doing my daily routine of inspecting and recording data on my hundreds of test-tubes, something odd caught my eyes. 12 test-tubes were showing 12 to 15 shoots each while the rest were “normal”, pathetically with 2 or 3 shoots. Checking back my records, I found out that the plants in these particular batch of test-tubes were in fact those that received the severe cutting and brutal stuffing in that fateful night. This was in fact the turning point of my research.  I had cracked the the tough nut of low multiplication rate of my plants in tissue culture.  Without the keen and trained eyes, I would not have figured out what caused the substantially higher rate of multiplication of my plants inside these 12 test-tubes. Without a habit of recording data and events, I would not have traced the unexpected results back to my brutal treatment of the plants, which in fact removed the effect of what plant scientists called apical dominance that allowed the severely cut plants to multiply in much larger number. I had a system then to produce massive number of narcissus shoots in test-tubes. However, the end product that was required of my PhD work was a system to produce a massive number of narcisus bulbs which will in turn produce flowers. I was not out of the woods yet.

Being innovative also means that one should look at other people’s idea and see if you can borrow any concept or ideas from them. That is why academics always tell their research students to read around the subject and think out of the box.  In 1989, my supervisors, the late Dr. Barbara M. Harvey, Dr. Christopher Selby and I were having a casual discussion with another scientist who was studying the physiology of potato. We learned that in potato, if you provide high concentration of sugar in your growth medium, you could trick the plants to form potato tubers. By adapting and innovating on this technique, I reached another turning point of my PhD work. I could make my narcissus shoots form bulbs in test-tubes. In fact I had created the protocol not only to produce bulbs from shoots but these bulbs were physiologically matured by my system. I had sliced two to three years off the time of 5 years that normally took young bulbs to flower.

By early 1990, I had enough data to commence write up for my PhD thesis. To ensure that I used my creative and innovative flair only on my thesis, my supervisors “banished” me from my lab. Six months later, I completed my writing.  Subsequently three papers were produced from my thesis and accepted for publication in international journals, two of these are still being cited by other researchers working on bulbs today, 20 years after publication.

Innovation is not magic, it will not bring you success in a puff of smoke. You need to work on it, and there is no short cut. It requires what I learned from CIC, “intelligent fast failure”: getting to experiment with your idea fast, doing the work intelligently and learn from the failure so that you can rework at the problem with a refined execution plan. I had about 15 months of constantly having failures in my PhD studies, killing lots of narcissus plants in the process, but each time, I learned new facts and gathered  new observations. As well opined by Professor Darrell Velegol one of the brilliant professors of CIC, “You want to make failures that are early-small-fast-cheap, as opposed to late-large-slow-expensive”. I built on this knowledge and with a trained but keen sense of observation, recording my data judiciously, I had my “Eureka” moment  twice. Unlike the legend of Archimedes, I was wrapped up in my labcoat each time!

Plantcloner was trained at Queen’s University of Belfast.  He  believes that innovative and creative skills can be learned and there is creative and innovative flair in everyone of us waiting to be unleashed.

Footnote:

This article was initially published in October 26, 2013 edition of Focus Malaysia by Dr. Chow YN under the moniker of “Plantcloner”.

*The author took and completed this course successfully in September 2013.

**CIC has just started again on July 14, 2014. Interested learners may still have time to join in the fun.

Discrimination against the small guy on the Internet?

The first time I heard of the term, “Internet Neutrality” I did not understand its  true meaning. After all the Internet is supposed to be the disruptive technology that have brought equality to users. Anyone now can publish without the need of being tied to a newspaper, magazine or a publisher. Freedom of expression is still very much in place (well, most of the places in the world anyway). Is this not an Utopian realm that we are in?

However Professor Stephen Wicker’s Massive Open Online Course, “Wiretaps to Bigdata” which I successfully completed in May 2014 had opened my eyes to the issue of “Internet Neutrality” (IN) . Why the tech savvy internet users, especially those of Professor Wicker’s intellect are up in arms against what is happening to IN? What does IN entail? Why having IN is essential to all Internet users, rich or poor, power or just men-on-the-street? An article in the UK’s The Observer (July 26, 2014) attempted to answer some of these questions. It mentioned the report on Youtube (HBO) about Internet Neutrality by John Oliver. Watch this hilarious video (warning: adult language is used but censored!) to find out more about the issue of IN.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU]

IN means that the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is expected to treat all its subscribers as equals. Any packets of data sent and received by any subscriber will be done on an orderly queue or in practice many, many such order queues. No one is to be treated preferentially and the speed of data transmission is a factor of just how big is the “pipe” (capacity) divided by how many users are concurrently sending and receiving data. You can subscribe for a bigger “pipe” to have more data traffic to/from your site but each bit of the data that you send and receive are treated on the same way as the others. It is like travelling on a tolled highway, every car pays the same toll rate and travel at the maximum prevailing speed of the traffic at the particular stretch of the road.

Now IN is under threat! The court in the USA has just allowed a media company to be given a special treatment by its ISP so that data flow to and from this company’s websites are preferentially treated and given “queue jumping” right. Of course the ISP justifies this special treatment and negating the principle of IN by showing that this media company is paying extra for the service. At first, it seems there is nothing wrong. A passenger who is able to pay for a first class seat on an airplane is entitled to better service, flat-bed seat, caviar,  champagne and the works compare to fellow passengers travelling on economic class seats. But internet traffic is not like travelling on an airplane where all the passengers, regardless of the class of seats that they have traveled will depart and arrive together. First class passengers on the same flight do not get to fly faster and arrive earlier. However in the IN’s case, now those companies who pay extra to the ISP are in fact given a different plane so that they could fly faster than the rest of the crowd. Thus discrimination of the type of users of the Internet has been created and allowed by the USA legal system with the Federal Communications Commission very likely to side with the ISPs.

Now it seems that if you have more traffic and willing to pay more, you can have a “special lane” on the information highway that the others are not allowed to enter. This discrimination against the common internet users is a bad precedent. It allows another form of censorship of the Internet at the hands of the ISPs. If people accessing your portal is experiencing congestion all the time, they will move on. Big businesses can virtually smother out the small guys by buying up the data flow available.  That is the danger that the tech savvy people have identified.

If you have more vehicles and bigger vehicles on the highway, does that give you the right to take up all the space on the fast lane and forbid the other users from enjoying the high speed travel?

The way things are going in the US, it seems size is might and might is right and the ISPs and Big Businesses can have their cake and eat it.

Footnote: This article is contributed by Dr. YN Chow who thinks that the rights of internet users all over the world is in danger of being stepped on if Internet Neutrality is being dismantled.

Scholarships to study in US ivy league for China’s poor: why this is great?

US $100 million education fund to send China’s poor high achievers to Ivy League schools in the USA.

A recent Wall Street Journal’s report about the US$100 million education fund set up by one of China’s growing band of billionaires to send China higher achievers from poor families to US ivy league universities generated a lot of unexpected reactions.

Billionaires Zhang Xin and her husband, Pan Shiyi of SOHO China who made their fortune in properties in China had donated US$100 million to set up this education fund. The fund’s main aim is to finance high achieving students from poor families in China to elite schools in the USA for their undergraduate education.

One would have expected positive reactions from across the country to this philanthropic deed. However a look at the comments left by readers of this article would indicate the responses were diverse. Though most commentaries stated that the philanthropic act of Zhang and Pan was good, many differed in their opinion on why the money has to be spent on institutions in the USA. The argument most cited was that China has world-class universities, why not spread the fund more widely by financing poor students to study in China? Similar sort of arguments have been given by Malaysians as to the value of the Malaysian Government spending millions of ringgit sending students to study overseas.

In fact the cost of higher education in China is relatively low compared to the USA and even Malaysia. Thus many from poor families in China, if they have good Gaokao (university entrance examination) scores it would not be difficult for them to get into high ranking Chinese universities and by the same account some sort of funding. But if one select from among this group of high achievers and fund their studies overseas, there are many benefits that the country will gain.

There are 3 most obvious reasons why the education fund from Zhang and Pan is aiming to send high achievers from poor families to ivy league schools in the USA:

1. Great exposure to Western ideas, innovation and approaches to solve problems:
Zhang Xin herself is a recipient of a scholarship that enable her to gain a Western education. But she had to work in a sweatshop in Hong Kong for five years before saving enough to go to London to enroll in a language school, working to pay her way before securing a scholarship for her undergraduate studies. Zhang must have appreciated the differences in approach to tackle problems in the West compared to what is practiced in China. I think without integrating and “cross fertilizing” of Western innovative approaches with the pragmatism of the Chinese “way”, Zhang might not have made it to the major league. Thinking out of the box is not something in the culture and traditions of the Chinese. By sending high achievers from China to top universities in the USA, Zhang and Pan will help to create an elite group of highly intelligent young people who will have the benefit of this “blended” approach to help solve many problems that China will face.

2. Great networking potential:
Only by learning and working with elite scholars from all over the world will a high achievers from China be able to learn to be expand his/her horizon. This sort of networking and friendships forged with fellow elite high achievers from all over the world can only be found at elite universities and US ivy league schools perhaps have the best mix of high achievers from all over the world. Although China’s elite universities have been admitting increasing number of foreign students, the number and “mix” of nationalities is still minute compared to their peers in the West, especially USA ivy league. This sort of network that is built when one is at undergraduate levels will bring tremendous payouts when these high achieving China students complete their studies and move on to industry or academia. This sort of networking will not only do the scholarship holders a great deal of good but will benefit  China immensely in many different dimensions in the long run.

3.  Character building:
The most crucial lesson that every student who is fortunate enough (including this author) to receive an opportunity to study in a Western country is indeed the need to “grow up” fast, to be independent and to be accountable for one’s own actions, i.e. character building. This sort of character building is most pronounced if one is living and learning in an environment and culture that are totally alien to what one is accustomed to. To survive, study and thrive in elite ivy league schools in the USA, Chinese students will have to be able to communicate well and be independent in their thinking, both may not be easily attainable if they were to study in their home country.

The same three reasons above are what drive many parents in Asia to send their children to study in the West even when faced with escalating cost every year.

Now, I only hope that we have our own version of Zhang Zin and Pan Shiyi in Malaysia!

Footnote: This article is contributed by Dr. YN Chow who spent about 12 years studying in the UK.

Contagion effects of for-profit colleges woes?

On the day that Americans celebrated the country’s independence day, The Huffington Post reported that one of the largest for-profit college groups in the USA, Corinthian Colleges was heading for disaster. The crux of the matter was due to Corinthian’s over reliant on federal government-backed study loans to the bulk of its 72,000 student loan which was effectively pulled back by the authority. For 2013 Corinthian had a revenue of US$1.6 billion, US$1.4 billion of which was attributed to federal government-backed study loans. 85 out of over 100 of Corinthian’s campuses over 25 states are now up for sale with another 12 slated for full closure.

Although Corinthian gave reassurance to affected students that their studies would not be disrupted, the damage to the confidence of the market is irreparably done.  Corinthian’s case has not been helped by a judge ruling that it does not need to disclose its financial woes in any of its advertising materials. This fuels speculations that there must be more that meet the eyes as far as Corinthian’s predicament is concerned.  It was disclosed that Corinthian’s case may just be the tip of the iceberg, another for-profit group, ITT Education Services Inc. is set to lose some of its federal government funding.

Just 10 days later, a routine audit and review by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) on the largest for-profit education group, Apollo Education Group which, according to Apollo was a routine procedural matters was read by the market, in light of the Corinthian case with “controlled alarm“.

Are we seeing a contagion effect on the for-profit higher education sector in the USA? Will this contagion effect due to the pulling back and tightening scrutiny of for-profit players in the USA have a “mirror” image if PTPTN (Malaysia’s National Higher Education Funding Corporation) copies some of the measures taken by the USA’s DOE?

So far PTPTN has been concentrating on its efforts in the recovery of study loans and it has not been paying too much attention on the education providers. It is surely highly beneficial if PTPTN performs periodic auditing and review of all the education providers, both public and private to ensure that the study loans provided are spent prudently and achieving their intended purposes.

PTPTN can also collaborate with other agencies such as the Malaysian Qualifications Agency which oversees the quality of teaching and learning of higher education providers to ensure that their respective databases can be cross-referenced.

The yearly amount of RM5.0 billion injected to the entire Malaysian higher education industry as student loans. This is the fuel that sustains the bulk of the for-profit institutions of higher learning in Malaysia. More stringent reporting and auditing procedures should be levied on all institutions of higher learning whose students are receiving PTPTN loans. Institutions, whether public or private with high percentage of PTPTN loan defaulters should be made accountable and if needed, PTPTN should do like the DOE of USA, pull funding from these institutions accordingly.

If we let the status quo persists, the student loan contagion effect of the USA will reach our shores sooner than you expect!

Footnote: Dr. Chow has an opinion piece on his column in the weekly, The Heat dealing with his experience in repayment of study loan and why he sleeps soundly each night as his conscience is clear, he paid back all he had owed! 

 

Updates:

July 20, 2014: It seems that the contagion effect has started in the USA. Another for-profit education group is under the spotlight. This time, DeVry University is being investigated by New York Attorney General.

Article: Germany’s Beautifully Communal World Cup Win Over Argentina

I always thought that football/soccer is a team game. Germany’s win shows that only those who played as a team would win. Individualism gets you nowhere!

This article depicts this elegantly.

Germany’s Beautifully Communal World Cup Win Over Argentina

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/germanys-victory-was-an-argument-against-the-uss-me-first-sports-culture/374353/

What are on-demand MOOCs?

I think Coursera has been listening to its 8.44 million MOOCians (learners) lately. It has joined Udacity in offering On-Demand MOOCs. So far only 3 MOOcs are available in on-demand mode from Coursera, I think there will be more to come.

What are on-demand MOOCs? You may want to ask.

Well there is one aspect of Massive Open Online Courses that has been limiting its acceptance. Due to the familiarity of content / course providers who are almost entirely from academia (with notable exceptions being many course lecturers of Udacity who hails from industry). This means that the MOOCs from the main players like Coursera and edX work on the college-semester system and design the delivery of their MOOCs along fixed time frame, deadlines for assignments/ exams etc. Learners need to follow the schedule and the particular MOOC is only available at fixed time of the year (usually not more than once per year).

To an adult learner, which the bulk of MOOCians belong, the lack of flexibility in most of the MOOCs in terms of the need to enroll and take classes in accordance to a schedule dent lots of the enthusiasm, especially your work life is hectic and you may need to travel frequently.

Someone, especially Udacity came out with a brilliant solution early on. Why don’t we follow the Video-on-demand mode of the movie industry to let users decide when and how they would like to take a MOOC? For the learner, on-demand MOOCs means that they can pick and choose to take which of these MOOCs as their needs arises and decide how long they want to devote to the course each week and the time line for them to complete the course.

However there is one disadvantage to learning in on-demand mode that I can see. Without the tight deadlines and the urging from the professors (albeit via the video lecture) and teaching assistants/ coursemates encouragements and engagements in the asynchronous course discussion forum there is just no pressure for one to progress. The dropout rate for on-demand MOOCs may be far higher than the “conventional” fixed schedule mode. This may be partially mitigated by the MOOC players and content providers if they create (and have teaching assistants in place) to service the learning discussion forum. But I can tell from experience that the feeling of loneliness in learning is the most difficult hurdle for a MOOCian to overcome.

For the MOOC players and content partners, there will have to be many re-defining of the way a MOOC is designed and delivered. Hence re-designing of existing MOOCs may be needed if these are to be “converted” to on-demand mode.  Even in on-demand mode, both the MOOC players and content partners will not be able to let these courses be delivered on “auto-pilot” without inputs. The level of engagement between a course provider (aka a learning institution) and the MOOCians can be very much reduced (thus reducing the cost of delivery). However, someone (a skeleton crew of teaching assistants / technical staff) will need to be monitoring and responding to queries from MOOCians, especially dealing with technical problems. As mentioned above, there is still a need of a course discussion forum for MOOCians to learn from each other and for teaching assistants to help out occasionally.

The design of the assessment for on-demand MOOCs will need to be adjusted. There may not be possible to include “group discussion and peer assessments” in on-demand MOOCs as someone needs to organize the MOOCians and the level of engagement and monitoring is  far too demanding if the on-demand MOOC is available all the time. Thus the kind of assessment that can be used in on-demand MOOCs may be limited to the multiple choice questions only. Thus the likes of Stanford University’s Technology Entrepreneurship MOOCs which requires learners to form their own project groups with high reliant on peer assessment review and scoring will not fit well into the on-demand mode per se.

I think if the MOOC players and content partners can find a way to decouple some of the crucial assessment and engagement elements from on-demand MOOCs and some how offer these as an extra which may require greater inputs from the content providers and hence the market may be opened to the charging of a fee for the added service, this “hybrid” of on-demand delivery with scheduled / supervised assessment may be a possible solution.

I have taken Professor Tobias Kretschmer’s “Competitive Strategy” before and I think Coursera has pick the right MOOC to roll out the on-demand mode. “Competitve Strategy” has all the features that makes it very easily adapted to the on-demand mode.

The on-demand feature will be the first step towards MOOC players and their content/course providers in homing in on the corporate learning market. The next step may is to reduce each course into manageable chunks of modules that a corporate learning provider can mix and match (like Lego bricks) to create a customized learning solution for its clients. I have mentioned before, this may be the pot of gold for the MOOC players (and content partners). Instead of offering an MOOC that cost a lot of resources to create once a year, with on-demand mode, these courses can be rolled out (and thus pick up revenue) as and when there are learners, whether these are MOOCians or from the corporate learning circle, it does not matter!

The MOOC realm is getting more interesting!

Footnote:  Dr. YN Chow is a keen MOOC learner and has taken over 20 MOOCs since the start of the MOOC phenomenon.

A great way to learn about genetics & how it affects you

I was one of the “guinea pigs” of Queen’s University of Belfast in 1985 when along with 5 others from the Class of 1985, I was awarded a scholarship to be the pioneer batch of Master of Science students in the newly minted Biotechnology programme.

A lot the then state-of-the-art knowledge that I was imparted with have indeed been superseded over the last 20 odd years of intense research in this domain. However, the basics in genetics, I hope do not change much.

When I first review this course, Genes and the Human Condition from The University of Maryland under Coursera, I thought to myself, since this course does not have any requirements in advanced biology, it may be too easy for me. I guess I did not know how much I have forgotten about genetics that I picked up about 30 years ago. After taking Week 1 classes, I have decided to stick to this course till its completion. I guess I have a lot of unlearning and re-learning to do. 

Although the course information states that there is no requirement for advanced biology. I think one will have to have at least some knowledge of high school level biology to appreciate the course fully. Professor Tammantha O’Brien (who gives Week 1 classes) is very animated in the way she teaches and the lectures can be a bit too fast at times, her enthusiasm to teach is infectious on the learners’ mood to learn. In short, you will learn a lot if you make the effort to keep up with her. Professor. O’Brien’s co-instructor, Professor Raymond J. St. Legar’s classes has yet to start.

There is still a couple of days to the end of Week 1 and I urge those who want to know about how genes work and how genetics affects you should give this MOOC a go.

Already this “revision” course for me has kept me updated on the subject of genetics. I will be a better teacher if I get to teach my plant tissue culture class again! It took me less than 3 hours to complete Week 1, but I expect that I will need to put in more in later weeks because Week 1 is a sort of revision for me!

(This article is contributed by Dr. Chow Yong Neng)