To MOOC or not to MOOC: A student's take on the growing trend

Following is a blog post by Jordan Mills, UB’s editorial intern and a student at Central Connecticut State University. After reading an article in the Winston-Salem Journal regarding Wake Forest University (N.C.) not being ready to enter the world of free online courses, it got me wondering, is it worth the while for a college student to be enroll in this type of course?
In case you aren’t already familiar, massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are online courses that schools are now offering through a service called Coursera, a partnership with different universities to offer free courses to the public. Coursera started with started out with just Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania. Now, other schools involved include California Institute of Technology; Duke; Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University (Md.); Rice University (Texas); the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia. Also involved are international institutions like the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto, and EPF Lausanne in Switzerland.
I think this is a great way for older, retired people to have the chance to further their education during their spare time or even as a hobby. It also allows many international students to further their education. According to the New York Times, 160,000 students from 190 countries enrolled after Stanford University offered a free online course on artificial intelligence a year ago. Since then, the number of Coursera registrations have sky rocketed to 680,000 (though a large number have since dropped out).
As a college student, I am happy to see anyone that wants to pursue higher education get the opportunity to do so. At the same time, with the job market becoming slim (one third of college graduates are taking jobs that were once held by people with less or no education according to the Bureau of Labor), more people taking these courses is not going to change the student’s chance in the job market, as they are not worth credits. Once you complete a course, you do not get a degree or credit, but a “statement of accomplishment.” You cannot take that with you to a job interview and expect to get the same results as someone with the formal, four year college education. Until these courses hold some type of value to employers, they are nothing more than a more advance version of the For Dummies books.
And if they did hold value, they would not be free. Case and point, the University of Washington is offering a different version of Coursera—with more work—and the students have to work with an instructor, according to David P. Szatmary, the provost of University of Washington. And this once free service will no longer be free, but a little less than the similar programs offered at the school already, which range from $2,500 to $4,000, as stated in an article posted by Inside Hire Ed. Also, those students will have to enroll into the university to get the credits.
Another issue I have with MOOCs is that there is no face-to-face interaction. The classroom helps teach interpersonal skills and molds students into better functioning members of our society. If students do all of their learning behind a computer screen, they will not learn the necessary skills for being in a working environment, even if they are learning what is intended to be taught in the lecture.
Being in a full classroom and speaking your mind in front of classmates also builds confidence that will be necessary when selling yourself to a potential employer. Plus, in a MOOC, you cannot interact with fellow classmates. A professor can be the best teacher and know what they are talking about, but this may not be enough to allow all students to absorb the information. Often after class is the time when other students share their personal experience of not understanding, share notes, and aid one another in a way a professor could never do. I also think study groups, where students share their study methods and help their peers understand a concept are an integral part of the classroom experience that is missing in online coursework.
I do, however, think MOOCs can be helpful for some areas of studies over others. Test scores for science and math can be easy to determine because the answer is usually black and white. But for humanities courses, where the work is subjective, a computer cannot say that a paper is an A-worthy or D-worthy (acccording to the New York Times, this type of work is graded using a peer-to-peer style of grading, where in order to get a grade for your paper, you have to have five other students willing to look over your work).
Again, MOOCs are great for those who have the free time and want to pick up a second trade or a hobby and do not want to go back to school, or for someone who does not have time to attend a traditional university and is thinking about entering a new field. Other than that, I see no true value in taking courses that an employer will not take seriously. Though these students may be equal as far as knowledge goes, their schooling method likely suggests otherwise.