Are MOOCs destroying education?

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Peter Baskerville

No. MOOCs are actually desperately trying to maintain relevance for the industrial-aged education system as we know it. MOOCs are a last gasp response from a system of learning that while relevant for an industrial-age past, has little relevance for the Conceptual Age that is now upon us. MOOCs simply repackage an old paradigm that leverages the extensive and low cost distribution power of the Internet, without actually embracing the real disruption that the Internet is ushering into the education sphere.

The real destroyers of the education system as we know it will be those forces that embrace the total disruptive power of the Internet to:

• Embrace crowdsourced teaching: To allow everyone who can to become a knowledge-sharer/teacher in the same way that it allowed everyone who could to become a blogger/journalist. To learn from a network of teachers, experienced people and peers rather than the solitary 'sage on stage'. (See Udemy)
• Deliver just-in-time learning: To create bite sized solutions to the pain of everyday problems and deliver the learning just-in-time via mobile devices rather than via the passive just-in-case class room/seat/course time learner paradigm. 10 Ways That Mobile Learning Will Revolutionize Education
• Curate highly contextualise learning content: To re-focus content away from the big picture generic content that lists all possible researched options, to the jigsaw pieces dealing with the best way of doing something based on the learner's highly contextualised work position, learner level, organisational type, industry and location. (See quora.com)
• Use democratisation to identify and feature best content: To allow the democracy of the crowd to identify and validate best learning content rather than rely on the corruptible in-house and severely limited system of academic peer review. Peer review: a flawed process
• Facilitate individualised learning - Changing the structure and process of learning to accommodate the learner needs for different start points, pace of learning, intelligence and style of learning. MOOCs built on the industrial-age paradigm of cohort and ordered sequential learning struggle to embrace this feature. (See Khan Academy)
• Accredit by the ability to do: To make doing rather than knowing the highest learning outcome. Where Bloom's higher level learning outcomes of creation, evaluation, synthesis, analysis and application are applied to digital tools, platforms and processes and so ushers in a global Neo-Renaissance's age. Success in the the digital conceptual age is measured by your ability to meaningfully do/apply and places no value on pieces of paper issued by accreditors applying arbitrary standards from a bygone era.

I believe that it is these forces listed above, rather than MOOCs, that are the real creative disruptors of the current education system as we know it, and these are the platforms doing it.

Peter Baskerville's answer to What are the most disruptive educational startups in the world?

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