The Daily Caller can now report the rest of the story involving the college prep academy where a bunch of students participated in a college-level massive open online course — MOOC — but didn’t have sufficient computer access and nobody realized it for three weeks.
San Jose State University suspended a much-ballyhooed pilot partnership with privately-held MOOC giant Udacity designed to offer very cheap, for-credit online courses. The collaboration fizzled primarily because over half of all enrolled students failed across all the classes offered. (RELATED: San Jose State’s big experiment with massive online courses fails massively)
That all sounds like a fiasco. However, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ryan, the superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute says that the online College Algebra course in which his students took part was a tremendously positive experience.
In an interview with TheDC, Ryan estimated that virtually every kid enrolled at the public charter school (grades 6-12) represents some ethnic minority. Perhaps 80 percent qualify for reduced or free lunch, he added.
Ryan explained that it’s true that his students didn’t have access to computers outside of class. However, they did have access to iPads and high-end desktop computers at school from 6:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., six days each week.
“About the third week, I got a call from the Udacity people saying, ‘They aren’t moving fast enough.’ The kids weren’t working at the pace of the syllabus and I didn’t do a good enough job of working with the kids to maintain the pace of the syllabus.”
Ryan also emphasized that the College Algebra course — roughly the equivalent of an Algebra II course in high school — was hardcore, which was the plan.
“Many Algebra II classes in high school are watered down,” he said. “One of the things we agreed to is: We would not lower the bar. If they didn’t meet it, they didn’t meet it.”
Several Oakland Military students had already failed Algebra II in high school before they took part in the Audacity course.
“The kids who had already failed the course viewed it as, ‘Basically, I have nothing to lose,'” Ryan said.
The $150-per-student course was also free to students, thanks to a federal grant.
The superintendent also said he believes the lack of good grades doesn’t reflect badly on Udacity, or its CEO Sebastian Thrun, or his school or anyone else.
“Part of the reason Sebastian and I wanted to do this here is because we knew that if we could make it work here, we can make it work anywhere,” Ryan told TheDC.
“The online delivery model has some major advantages. The fact that a kid can watch an eight-minute video 20 times and have access to a live, one-on-one tutor is extremely powerful,” he said. “Almost every single kid would have passed if they had time.”
The biggest lesson learned, the superintendent reflected, was that high school kids must be made to manage their time much better to succeed in a future College Algebra MOOC.
“Our kids needed to watch the videos three, eight, 12, 20 times before it clicked,” Ryan explained. “And they needed times when school computer labs were not open.”
Ryan said the school plans to work with Udacity again in the spring, applying what was learned from the most recent batch of mistakes. There will be many more syllabus checkpoints, for example, so that the course is broken into a lot more chunks.
The Oakland Military Institute has alumni at great colleges around the country including at Yale, West Point and a slew of schools in the University of California and California state systems.
In the three spring math courses San Jose State and Udacity offered — remedial math, college algebra and elementary statistics — pass rates ranged from 20 percent to 44 percent. On the bright side, over 80 percent of the students who participated completed the courses. (It’s not clear how completion was defined or policed.)
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