The Wrong Turn to Learning: An Analysis of Research on Modern Online Courses to Determine the Negative and Positive Effects on Student Performance in Universities

According to the children’s rights activist organization, Humanium, “More than 72 million children are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness to find an education” (“Right to Education”). In order to fight this world issue, online courses have been created to bridge the gap of education between the world and the classroom. Through these Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s for short, those seeking knowledge are able to become students at a university of their choice by the simple click of a button. With the so-called, “MOOC Mania” explained by David Kirp, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, lawmakers and school administrators all around the world, especially in California, have been trying to implement online courses into the daily curriculum of prestigious universities. As a cheaper alternative, MOOC’s are able to cut costs through the enrollment of hundreds of students with no need of a physical classroom, which is very attractive to people such as Khadijah Niazi, an eleven-year-old student from Pakistan, who had been deprived of an education because of her country’s political struggles explained in an article of the Times Magazine. Although MOOC’s have gained much popularity, a study conducted by Tatiana Semenova and Lyudmila Rudakova, students at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, showed that “the odds of successful completion will differ for participants with differing educational experiences” (230). Although this truth has been proven to not be efficient for certain students, “venture capitalists are on the hunt for the next Facebook, the next Google, the next eBay— particularly the opportunity in MOOCs” and it is not long until that sweet spot of traditional education and online education is found (Kirp 16). As online education becomes a practice in universities, education has become somewhat more accessible. However, many studies have found that MOOC’s are not capable of serving the vast spectrum of the different types of students, which is why, in order to fix the issue of traditional curriculum being ousted by online education, university administrators must challenge their implementation for the benefit of student achievement and determine what the institution values educationally