MOOC good vs bad

I have undergone a dozen of MOOC courses with cool groups like coursera, udacity, khanacademy, edx etc

As expected I completed a few and dropped off a few...

From a student's point of view, I am convinced now that the success of a MOOC depends on the following in the decreasing order of importance:

1. Teacher.
2. Course content.
3. Pedagogy.

The knowledge/educational qualification of a teacher plays an unimportant role in motivating/convincing a student over the internet. Remember, this teacher can't be reached beyond the video. In my understanding, a teacher's job is to install the basic building blocks and motivate the students so that the students rediscover the wheel by themselves. Spoon feeding doesn't help at all if you really want to "learn". I found that a number of teachers on the MOOC just failed to convince/motivate me. The were lecturing as if a student will approach them outside the class to clarify the doubts!
In at least four courses I found an interesting pattern. If you don't have access to the books, you will fall flat on your face. I could smell that the content was designed as a teaser, you know what I mean, like those movie teasers! No free education. hehehe

So you have started hating Khan Academy

he he he

So people have started calling Salman Khan a bad teacher. In contrast it is his this gifted ability to explain things which made him popular. Without any doubt he is a very good teacher. If he was not we wouldn't have been discussing him.

But he has also publicly criticized the teachers who teach for the sake of working. You know people get in that comfort zone, regular salary streaming in. Who cares about teaching after that! The initial enthusiasm drowns and laziness and muscle memory sets in. Khan has hit them on the right spot. They have woken up. But instead of correcting themselves they are lobbying around the media houses and howling.

And there is another group of people who want to sell themselves riding the hype around all this. They are great trained teachers who have worked for years to create those error-free contents. They appear in front of their students with that additional halo around them and start their lectures. But students don't connect with soul-less and robotic teachers! It is true and all of us have experienced it sitting through those factories called schools. Confess it!

he he he

Teachers!

For last few weeks I have been studying online with Andrew Ng on coursera.org  and Salman Khan on khanacademy.org. Both them are superb teachers and I observed these similarities:

• They have a very warm and straight forward approach while discussing matters.
• A good sense of humor.
• They know what to hide and what to share on a topic. When you have teachers like that even an average learner like me won't get intimidated with the vastness and complexities of subjects.
• They strongly encourage learning attitude against the attitude of outshining others. 
• They are very modest and always discuss their shares of failures very constructively.

This is going great! May they continue to succeed in their endeavors!