Image by: Gabriela Colletta
Teaching is one of the oldest conventions of our culture. At the front stands a professor, sometimes accompanied by avid teaching assistants and a room full of students spanning a spectrum of emotions from utterly enthused to verging on comatose. On lucky occasions, this room holds 20 students in a state of intimacy, yet the teacher still begs for extended attention spans. Now while this paradigm is still massively exercised in the educational realm that is not to discount the recent innovations that are disrupting the traditional classroom.
Enter in the Internet and with it comes Pandora’s box of online tools – Blackboard, Wikipedia, Skillshare – the list goes on. But this was only the first step in a transformative process of learning.
Allow me to introduce you to the next iteration of disrupting education. MOOCs, otherwise known as Massive Online Open Course, have carved a growing footprint on our digital lives. What makes this different from the constellation of online educational resources currently available?
Well first, we must acknowledge a shift from passive education with sites like Lynda.com to engagement learning with MOOCs. MOOCs are designed as bite-sized content, easily digestible nuggets of knowledge. The format speaks to customization – in a world on hyper-speed, MOOCs enable individuals to learn at their own pace. An added dimension, perhaps inspired from the gaming category, the end of each segment is greeted with exercises to engage the student. Interactivity is key.
One of the facets that makes MOOCs globally appealing is the democratization of elite education. Coursera is the largest provider of MOOCs, and with it comes the roster of the world’s top universities (Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, amongst others). Did you know that over 3.5 million students are enrolled in Coursera courses globally? And Coursera is only one of the many other companies offering MOOCs. With broadband access appearing in the world’s remote corners – people from a diversity of socio-economic backgrounds are now able to access free online higher education.
While the content and instruction remains legitimate, there are fierce debates as to what this means for the future of education. Discourse surrounds the idea of making MOOC credit transferrable to universities, though this realization may meet protest by the students paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain the same Ivy League branded education. With the rising costs of higher education, free online education could narrow the growing gap between affluent attendees and lower-income candidates. Some MOOCs provide certifications for students who have completed specific courses – but what real value does this certification hold in the marketplace of jobs and wages? A host of other questions have surfaced – How does one control cheating? How is this model monetized? What is to come of the gold mine of student data? How can online courses balance their attrition and completion rates?
The evolution of online education is still underway. If we can’t answer the question of whether or not online courses will become the future of education, we can at least acknowledge that MOOCs are changing the way subjects are taught – they are prompting professors to reassess how they teach their courses and discover new ways to make knowledge more engaging. As the teaching and learning methods are transformed in the face of online education, one may ask what is the intangible value that the traditional universities offer to compete with this new wave of learning?
Written by: Gabriela Colletta @gabolletta
For more sites that offer MOOCs, check out the following:
Udacity – Offers more
EDX – Spearheaded by Harvard and MIT
