How important are MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)?

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Teddy Wyly

Very. I've taken many classes through Udacity, Khan Academy, etc and have really enjoyed the experience I had. There are many upsides: being able to watch lectures multiple times, at your convenience, in small chunks, and having access to some of the best and most inspiring teachers in the world.

See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7...

There is a pretty apt analogy popularized by Elon Musk that I subscribe too. When we go to see a movie, we expect to be entertained by the best actors, and expect to see a film filled with high - budget special effects. Imagine watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy if it was put on by your local theatre troop? This is the current state of teaching. Instead of having thousands of teachers attempt to teach their students the same material but with varying effectiveness, it seems sensible to have the most inspiring and knowledgeable teachers teach the world.

In my field (technology), credentials are becoming worth less and less every day and the hiring is championed by meritocracy (although not always). You are measured on what you can build, not on where you went to school, and thus online teaching is a major contributor to how people learn. Particularly now, with a rather large bubble in higher education, being able to circumvent the system and learn without a huge investment is a really powerful notion.

In fact, I believe in the vision so much that I have helped launch Immersive Online iOS Development Course, a MOOC that aims to teach iPhone development. I really believe that MOOCs are a key tool in the democratization of education. If you look at the top universities in the world, many of them are firmly standing behind and contributing to MOOCs which might be an indicator of what is to come.

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Robert Talbert

Important? I'd say they are pretty important. Effective? Not so much.

MOOCs are important to the extent that they have given traditional education a much-needed system shock. Traditional education can no longer assume that simply putting students in front of a lecturer and giving the occasional quiz is sufficient to educate someone. Because the MOOCs do this, and they do it better in many cases than traditional education does. If traditional education continues to adhere to the lecture model of education, it will be replaced by a machine -- is already being replaced by a machine.

For decades, knowledgeable people have been saying that traditional education must migrate away from the lecture model towards something with far more interactive engagement, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines. And traditional educators largely ignored this advice. Now, MOOCs have finally catalyzed some foundational change in education to move torward a more student-centered model, and that is a good thing.

But that exposes the weakness of MOOCs: Putting students in front of lecturers and giving quizzes is all they do.

As you can see in at least one of the answers already given, there's a feeling that excellent education consists of finding inspiring teachers and just putting people at their feet. This is a tremendously flawed conception of education that equates education with entertainment. If this analogy worked, then after watching NFL football every Sunday for an entire season, I ought to be able to play football in any position I choose and be reasonably good at it. But of course this is absurd. Without practice, one-on-one coaching, and a change in my lifestyle there is no chance I would ever play on a football team even if I were in my prime.

No -- education is more than just sitting at the feet of smart people. It's even more than being around smart people and having a discussion board with other people who are around the same smart person. Education is a deeply human activity that requires personal involvement, intelligent adaptation to individual learners' needs, course design steeped in what we know scientifically about how people learn (among which is that lecture is a terrible means of getting people to learn), and more. MOOCs as they are currently constituted just don't do this and will not do this until they themselves undergo some sort of systemic change, which I do not see on the horizon.

TL;DR -- traditional education is better because MOOCs are forcing it to adopt practices that are more student-centered and research-based than MOOCs.

EDIT: Just a clarification -- Khan Academy is not a MOOC. Khan Academy is a collection of videos. That's not the same as a "course" (the "C" in MOOC) -- the difference is coherence, overall structure, and assessment. KA may be moving in that direction but not there yet.

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