Why Every College Teacher Should Take a MOOC This Fall

It’s move-in week this week at the state university campus across the street from where I live and where I taught for several years. This occasion always reminds of the ominous first paragraph of Don DeLillo’s 1984 academic satire White Noise, which begins, “The station wagons arrived at noon.”

The station wagons and the provisions they carry have changed in 30 years, but the dislocation recorded by the narrator hasn’t. The students still “get younger every year,” as my colleagues like to joke. This fall faculty will marvel that their students were born in the year Bill Clinton ran for a second term, Madeleine Albright was appointed the first female secretary of state, the Unabomber was arrested and Dolly the sheep was born.

It’s a form of gallows humor, of course, poking gently at the uncertainty about whether the kids are getting more dissimilar from us or vice versa. We like to think our experience, not to mention our liberal arts foundation, makes us empathetic. We look across the seminar table and see their boredom, annoyance, confusion or enthusiasm and figure we have a better than average chance of understanding what they are going through.

It’s difficult, though, to really test the presumption that we know what being a college student is like. With rare exceptions, the experience we treasure so much is confined to one short period of our lives, and we never again sit facing the blackboard after we earn our degrees.

MOOCs, though, offer an eye-opening opportunity to simulate the experience. That’s what happened to me last semester when I chose a class that uncannily put me on an intellectual and emotional path very similar to that of students in my first-year composition courses.

I chose Introduction to Mathematical Thinking by Professor Keith Devlin at Stanford University mostly because I’ve been on a jag recently to fill in the woeful gaps left by my B.A. program 25 years ago when I spent too much time with DeLillo and not enough on my math and science requirements.

Like many of my students, In choosing this MOOC, I bypassed more appropriate developmental classes with wishful thinking, but confidence and enthusiasm carried me through the first couple of weeks. Then a funny thing happened. I started having emotional responses, of all things. In the evenings while I worked on the MOOC, I was at various times intrigued by the challenge, suspicious of the structure of the course, bemused with the brown nosers in the forums, annoyed that my teacher wouldn’t just tell me what to do, hungry to focus on the work and thinking of quitting.

I was also making dumb mistakes paralleling almost exactly what I scold my students for. I’m often amazed that students who invest so heavily in their education will show up to my writing class without pen and paper. But I was struggling with the third week’s homework before it dawned on me that sitting and watching Devlin’s videos wasn’t going to be sufficient and that taking notes might be a good idea.

The class also offered a vivid experience of the kind of intellectual development I encourage in my students. In first-year composition, we emphasize asking good questions and the importance of process over getting the right answers. I refuse to tell students how many sources they should have or which paragraph the thesis statement should go in. Instead I try to sell them on the value of not knowing, of exploring and of sometimes failing.

“Yeah, yeah,” I imagine them thinking as they suffer through these lectures. “Just tell me what the homework is for Wednesday.” I want to create the messy conditions for learning, but they usually just want the formula for success.

A similar thing happened in Devlin’s math MOOC. Along with many other students in the discussion forums, I was sometimes frantic for step-by-step instructions on how to approach a math problem. But Devlin steadfastly refused to provide any, because that would defeat the purpose of the assignment and of the class. And, even though he was using almost the same rationales I give when I stand at the head of the class, in the position of a student I was remarkably deaf to this message.

About midterm, however, I started to see my limitations as a student more clearly, and the parallels with my class became clearer. In the hallway after class it seemed to me the tone of vulnerability, insecurity and confusion in my students’ voices had increased a decibel or two, while the wheedling and reluctance had decreased. The change was on my part, of course. I was hearing them differently.

Which is probably a good thing in my case. My own style has always been what I like to think of as “tough but fair” but I may also have become a wee bit impatient with them over the years and numbed myself to their genuine confusion and bewilderment about the work. They were sometimes trying to tell me much the same thing I found myself grumbling through the computer monitor at Devlin -- that they weren’t sure what to do and were getting discouraged.

Being in their position, however imperfect a simulation a MOOC may be, reset the levels for me a little bit. At the end of the spring semester, my last as it turned out, I finished the home stretch with a boost of patience that made me I think, more effective. (I also finished Devlin’s course with low but passing marks, having learned a lot in the early going before getting in over my head and going into survival mode for the remainder.)

I won’t have an opportunity to test the theory that taking a MOOC makes me a better teacher, but I know when I observed move-in day this year, it was with more empathy than last year. I’m tuned less to their lack of preparation for college and more tuned to the opposite. The ominous feeling I have now is for how unprepared college is for their needs.

Robert is the owner of McGuire Editorial, an end-to-end content marketing services firm, and works with many edtech startups. You can follow him on Google Plus and Twitter.