www.slate.com: For a year or two there, free online classes seemed like they just might be the future of higher education. Why, some influential computer scientists wondered, should there be thousands of colleges and universities around the country all teaching the same classes to small groups of students, when you could get one brilliant professor to teach the material to the whole world at once via the Internet? In a March 2012 Wired cover story about the phenomenon, Udacity founder and Stanford artificial-intelligence whiz Sebastian Thrun predicted that within 50 years there would be only 10 institutions of higher learning left in the world. Udacity, he reckoned, might be one of them.
2 comments:
Let me preface this by saying that I'm all for the classroom to embrace the digital revolution. That being said, I too feel that MOOCS may not be all they are cracked up to be. From a cost saving standpoint, they are extraordinarily wonderful. There certainly is no point in providing redundant resources when something can be streamlined.
That being said, I feel that there are powerful yet intangible benefits to students who are taught in person in a real classroom. I think there is a psychological benefit to students simply showing up to class in real life that MOOCS cannot replicate.
Anecdotally, I hated the month long experiment in flip teaching that my Calc AB class conducted in high school. The videos were boring, the material was confusing, and I had to do homework not only in class, but also at home! So now I was doing my homework and watching the lecture at home! MOOCS are a mediocre solution at best..
I do think that online classes can be a good alternative for people who can not get to a real teacher for whatever reason. I like that it can spread information across the world and teach people things they do not have access to (even though this does not always happen). Given all of this I don't think online classes are the best way to teach. There are any number of articles that look at how big tech CEO's send their children to schools that do not teach technology. Even the people who make technology for us to use to not themselves use it to teach their children. Online teaching is like watching tv. You are passive you are not an active participant class and hence you do not learn much because your brain is not actively connecting synapses.
Here is a good article about tech people and learning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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