Category: Learning

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)

Creating tangible value from MOOCs?

Since the pioneers of the MOOC movement have been the US universities, it is understandable for the World to expect some sort of leadership in this field from these pioneers. One thing that have been missing from most of these players is indeed a credible business model, without which MOOCs may not be sustainable.

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Since the pioneers of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) movement have been the US universities, it is understandable for the World to expect some sort of leadership in this field from these pioneers.

One thing that have been missing from most of these players is indeed a credible business model. Along the way, both Coursera and Udacity have introduced “premium” assessment model whereby the identity of the MOOC learner is verified (in Udacity’s case, it even have an online proctored examination system) and hence the academic credit earned will be acceptable to some institutions. My son took an introductory statistics course from Udacity and under “ProctorU”  (an online proctored examination service company) his credit, granted by St. Jose State University should be acceptable to his US university. The fees for this was US$150.  However all these add-on services are not paying the bills for these players. For the massiveness of its enrollment, MOOCs only have completion rates of about 7%, and even lower percentage of these learners would be “buying” the premium services.

I have mentioned in my previous article on MOOC that there are several ways that the MOOC players can generate income streams. In fact a recent report stated that one of the income streams (as I have mentioned) is indeed the recruitment of students to the universities associated with one of the MOOC players. 2 years ago I mooted the idea of MOOC to some for-profit higher education providers in Malaysia, but none managed to see beyond the trees to the positive branding effects of MOOC. Perhaps now with this article they should say, “We should have listened to that fellow”!!

I do not think that this revenue stream will be large, but I think the branding effect of successful MOOCs are great for the providing institutions. Whether this will end up in positive foreign student recruitment (which is a very complicated and complex affair) and how the MOOC players are paid for the recruitment is a different matter (will it be cost-per-click through or full fledged recruitment services?).

I think there is one element that none of the big MOOC player:s have explored: the corporate training domain. Although Udacity’s “nanodegree” is a good initiative that plots a MOOC course-learning path for learners. If they complete the suite of Udacity’s MOOCs successfully, this will put them in a position of advantage with skill-sets that employers (who have collaborated with Udacity)  want. This model is still sticking to mainly academic learning mixed with professional-skills courses. In fact many of the existing MOOCs have elements of learning that can be easily re-purposed for corporate learning and training usage. These learning courseware and delivery system are the key to creating a recurring revenue stream for the MOOC players. If the learning outcomes of these can be pegged with college credits or “star employers” acceptance as in the case of nanodegree of Udacity, I think the corporate learning providers out there will be able to sell these to their clients and learners easily.

With more and more smaller MOOC players with varying degree of quality coming on stream these days, I feel that some sort of consolidation will have to take place soon, especially with the current lack of any profitable business models.

(This article is contributed by Dr. YN Chow)

What’s going on in MOOC world?

This is the original article (unedited) on MOOC that was published in Focus Malaysia on June 08, 2013. It was written under the name of Plantcloner, the moniker used by Dr. YN Chow who had a column with Focus Malaysia for a stint. The published article’s title was, “What is going on in the revolutionary MOOC world”.

A new learning phenomenon was born in early 2012. It is called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). MOOC has revolutionized the learning world with class enrolments in the range of thousands with some going to over 160,000. The era of democratization of learning was created, so was the idea of separating learning from credentialization & certification.

Almost all the big names in Western academia have joined the MOOC movement. This has been followed by notable universities from Asia. In the USA alone, there are three prominent players in the MOOC world. The most popular in the number of learners signing up is Coursera which has over 3.7 million learners, 377 courses 80 partner universities. Udacity which provides a smaller number of courses, but with a much more “standard” format of quality learning content is perhaps best known as the pioneer of the MOOC world. The most elite club of all is perhaps EdX which was formed by MIT and Harvard but joined later by the likes of Stanford, UC Berkeley, & University of Texas System. EdX also has the elite members from Asia such as Peking University, Kyoto University, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and Seoul National University to name a few. However, Yale has decided to join Coursera in addition to National University of Singapore and a host of European and South American universities, making Coursera perhaps the most comprehensive in terms of member institutions, with the capability of 5 languages. Not to be outdone, 21 “redbrick” British universities, led by Open University (UK) formed Futurelearn in early 2013. However, to-date, there has been no offering from Futurelearn as yet.

Despite the revolutionary nature of MOOC, not everyone in the academic world supports it. Some academicians feel that MOOC does not provide sufficient learning experience such as student-to-student and faculty-to-students interactions. Others question the wisdom of spending scarce resources on a project that does not have a clear returns on investment. There are also questions raised on the lack of proctored examination for the various certification to safeguard academic standards and integrity. Some question the relatively low completion rate of learners of MOOC. Data from Coursera indicated that out of 100% of learners who sign up, about 70% will “turn up” for the start of the MOOC. Only about 30% would attempt the first assignment and 7 to 9% will stay and complete the course successfully. If we put this in the proper context, MOOC allows an institution to reach at least 1,000 times its classroom capacity in terms of learners. For a typical MOOC of 30,000 learners, 9% completion rate translates into a staggering 2,700 learners!

This author thinks that the detractors of MOOC have missed a very important point. That is, learning can now be easily segregated from certification & credentialization, an idea that was promoted by Salman Khan of Khan Academy (KA) fame (KA is one of the pioneered of MOOC but focus mainly on learning at primary & secondary levels). Thus democratization and massification of learning by MOOC has to be separated from credentialization and academic certification. Those who want to take up certification of their learning & knowledge attained via MOOC should have access to and be willing to pay for such certification. In fact this is precisely what both Coursera and Udacity have provided independently.

In Coursera’s case, it provides what it termed “Signature Track” where for a fees of US$49.00, a learner can have his/her identity digitally verified (using the latest webcam and other online imaging technology). Thus a “Signature Tracked” learner will have his/her identity authenticated thereby his/her certification by Coursera’s partner institution verified. How acceptable “Signature Track” is to the academic and industry worlds remains to be seen at this early days.

Udacity has gone perhaps in a more traditional direction. It has teamed up with San Jose State University (SJSU) to offer “College Credit” for US$150.00 per course. Thus anyone signing up for one of Udacity’s MOOC with “College Credit” will essentially, if he/she passes the online proctored examination, be given relevant college credit for that course. This opens up possibilities for any learners who may need the “College Credit” such as university students who may not have such a course offered at their college to take Udacity’s MOOC and earn the relevant credit. At US$150.00 for a course, it is a reasonably affordable fee. In fact the author’s son is taking Udacity’s “Elementary Statistics” to earn “College Credits” that he hopes to transfer to his degree program later. Of course, the key question is, how acceptable is SJSU’s credit by the university that finally award the author’s son a degree. As SJSU belongs to the California State University System and accredited by Western Association of Schools and Colleges this may not be a great issue. Initial feedback from this author’s 17-year-old son indicates that Udacity’s format of interesting and aesthetically pleasing video is gaining the confidence of this young learner.

Not every institution is geared to offer MOOC. If one has not planned the whole project well, the negative impact to the institution’s reputation is immense. This was  exactly what happened to Georgia Institute of Technology in February 2013. The course lecturer did not understand the scale of MOOC and used a free Google Spreadsheet to handle learners’ groupings. Google Spreadsheet has a capacity of 50 simultaneous “sign-ins”. With tens of thousands learners being told to confirm their grouping at the start of this MOOC the system just collapsed. The author was one of the learners and after struggling for 3 days to get on the course grouping, and before Coursera’s shutting the course down, he un-enrolled himself, fully disgusted with Geogia Tech for wasting his time and expectation on “Fundamentals of Online Learning: Planning and Application”. Needless to say, he will not touch any MOOCs from Georgia Tech with a barge pole.

Closer to home, Taylor’s University seems to be the first in Malaysia to jump on the MOOC bandwagon. The author has signed up and evaluated Taylor’s offering, “Entrepreneurship”. This maiden MOOC of Taylor’s attracted about 900 learners. However, the heavy reliance on recordings of “live” lectures has dampened the impact of this MOOC. It is very difficult to follow a lecture when you cannot see the slide presentation and having to follow the professor’s every movement in front of the cameras. Nevertheless it is a good start for Malaysia.