Think your class of 100 or 300 students is big? Imagine teaching more than 112,000 students from 200-plus countries. That's the situation Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, PhD, found himself in when he and colleague Emiliano Simon-Thomas, PhD, taught a massive open online course (MOOC) called "The Science of Happiness" last fall. Since then, another 64,000 people have enrolled in a self-paced version of the free class.
For Keltner, the MOOC is a way to promote what psychology has to offer to a much broader audience than an academic journal's readership or students in a traditional classroom. For students, the class offers a fun way to learn not just the science of happiness, but also practical tools for putting that research to use. Thanks to tracking throughout the course, Keltner knows that the class is having an impact: By the end of it, students are happier, more satisfied with their lives and less stressed out, and the more they engage in the class's exercises, the more they benefit.
"If you're in a profession with science and methods and discoveries that can be useful to people out there, it's a really uplifting experience to get those ideas out there," says Keltner. "It makes you feel like your work matters."
Keltner's class is one of hundreds of MOOCs now offered by a consortium of top-ranked universities called EdX, for-profit companies such as Coursera and other entities in the United States and beyond, including the Arabic-language MOOC portal Edraak, the Chinese-language XuetangX and the French-language France Université Numerique. What these courses typically have in common is no tuition, no credit, huge numbers of students and the belief that technology can bring high-quality education to just about anyone, anywhere.
And while MOOCs may not live up to the early hype about their potential to bring the equivalent of a traditional college education to anyone with an Internet connection (see "Will MOOCs be flukes?" in the "Additional resources" section), they do represent an excellent vehicle for spreading the word about psychology, say Keltner and other psychologists.
Now MOOCs are targeting new populations, such as employees seeking career advancement and high school students seeking an edge on Advanced Placement exams or college admissions, which may further broaden their audience. In addition, new business models are emerging that may allow instructors to be paid and so make teaching MOOCs more attractive. And there are new variations on the MOOC itself, including the "SMOC," or synchronized massive online course, pioneered by psychology professors at the University of Texas (see SMOCs).
Democratizing learning
The MOOC is the latest development in a history of distance learning that stretches back to the correspondence courses of the late 19th century. A more recent precursor is Britain's Open University, which began using mail and radio courses to broaden participation in education in 1969 and has since become the United Kingdom's largest academic institution. The university has now launched a MOOC company called FutureLearn to make high-quality education even more broadly available.
"I'm not a fan of the ivory tower view of academia, where all information is kept behind closed doors," says psychologist Graham Pike, PhD, a professor of forensic cognition at Open University who teaches a FutureLearn MOOC on witness investigation. "The idea is to bring psychology more into the public domain."
In the eight-week course, participants learn the dangers of relying on eyewitness testimony and how psychological science can prevent miscarriages of justice. Participants follow along with two police investigations, one conducted according to principles of psychological science and the other according to old-fashioned policing's reliance on what Pike describes as officers' "gut instinct."
The students are mostly members of the general public interested in psychology, including many intrigued by police shows on TV. But the course also attracts many law enforcement personnel, an important demographic since Pike's research has shown that a large percentage of police officers aren't familiar with the research on eyewitness identification.
Psychology may be especially amenable to the MOOC format, says Scott Plous, PhD, a psychology professor at Wesleyan University who has taught the largest real-time MOOC course ever given. "There's a general public appetite for psychology and psychological research findings," he says.
Plous's Coursera class "Social Psychology" attracted more than half a million students, with 260,000 students registered when he first offered it in 2013 and another 240,000 when he offered it again in 2014. The BBC even wrote an article about the course's final assignment, a "day of compassion" in which students spent 24 hours being as compassionate as possible and then analyzed the experience. Students "crowd-sourced" the best project, with the winner receiving $1,000 to donate to charity and a chance to meet the Dalai Lama.
Ten thousand students completed that "capstone" project the first year, meaning that 250,000 or so students didn't actually finish the class. That attrition rate isn't unusual for MOOCs, which can lose up to 95 percent of their students by the time they end. But that common criticism of MOOCs doesn't bother Plous, who adds that Coursera estimates 162,000 students actively participated in his course the first time it was offered.
Unlike a college class that students can fail, says Plous, a MOOC allows students to learn a bit about a particular topic and take what they need from the experience. A person working in sales or marketing might be keen to learn more about the psychology of persuasion and social influence and simply not need the rest of the class, for example.
"This is a six-week course of mini-lectures on topics that might be particularly interesting, entertaining or useful for people who want to enrich their lives, relationships and work," says Plous. "If it does that, I consider it a success."
New directions
Many MOOC students are looking for more than just informal education, however.
In a 2013 study of students taking University of Pennsylvania-produced MOOCs on Coursera, researchers from the university found that most are already well-educated and cite a desire to advance in their jobs and to satisfy their curiosity as their main motivations for enrolling.
In sync with those findings, Udacity — the MOOC platform founded by MOOC originator Sebastian Thrun — no longer seeks to provide access to higher education to all. Instead, its goal is to offer training that can help people advance in the tech industry.
Most MOOC platforms allow students who pass their courses to purchase certificates that they can use when applying for academic programs, jobs or promotions. Keltner's class also offers continuing education credit to psychologists and other health professionals.
"MOOCs are an important opportunity for influence, because lawyers, physicians, nurses, speech therapists, clinical therapists, even schoolteachers need continuing education and professional development," says Keltner. "They're going to want it on an online platform, and this is a way to do that." The self-paced version of the class is designed for professionals with many demands on their time, he adds.
At the other end of the spectrum are high school students, a new target audience for MOOCs. Earlier this year, EdX launched two dozen free high school classes. EdX's chief executive officer predicts that middle and high schoolers could eventually account for a third of EdX users.
Jeneen Graham, EdD, academic dean at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California, is teaching the introduction to psychology class. In contrast to the 18 students she usually teaches face-to-face in her Advanced Placement psychology class at St. Margaret's, she is now teaching more than 27,000 students from 185 countries.
Many are from rural areas that lack access to Advanced Placement-style courses. Others are home-schooled. Still others are international students who want to prepare for college in the United States. Graham has encouraged her St. Margaret's students to enroll, too, as a way to review for the upcoming Advanced Placement exam.
But fewer than half of the enrollees are actually high school students, says Graham, explaining that she has "a couple of 85-year-olds" as well as students with doctorates.
"Many are in technical or scientific fields where they have a lot of scientific knowledge but may not have the human understanding," she says. "Others are thinking about changing careers." Others simply want to explore psychology in what Graham calls the more "approachable" venue of a high school class.
Financial considerations
In addition to new audiences, MOOC producers are also exploring new business models. Currently, most instructors aren't compensated, either by the MOOC platform or their own universities. And putting together a MOOC can be a great deal of work, says Anderson D. Smith, PhD, a psychology professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has twice taught an "Introduction to Psychology as a Science" MOOC for Coursera.
You can't just film your lectures and slap them up online, says Smith. "It was very time-consuming — like my first year as a college professor," he says.
Fortunately, Georgia Tech received funding to develop Smith's and two other MOOCs from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which hopes to save college students money by replacing basic courses with MOOCs. The $50,000 grant covered the cost of producing the models, a computer specialist to handle the technical aspects and a teaching assistant whose full-time job was to monitor the class discussion forums.
With a seal of approval from Quality Matters, which offers quality assurance for online education, the course offered its 41,000 students the option of undergoing identity verification and paying a fee to get certificates they could use to persuade their home institutions to give them college credit. So many students took that route that Smith received a $2,000 check from Coursera — the first payment he has received for developing the MOOC and teaching it twice.
"They're beginning to figure out ways to have a business model that actually pays instructors," says Smith. Georgia Tech, he points out, now offers a MOOC-only master's degree in computer science that costs just $6,000, with instructors paid as if they were teaching continuing-education courses.
For Smith, teaching the MOOC wasn't about the money. It was about spreading the message that understanding human behavior requires scientific validation rather than intuition or common sense. Plus, he says, it was professionally satisfying.
"I was looking for a new adventure," says Smith. "It was fun for me."
