Is eLearning as effective as traditional instruction?

  • Yes

    Votes: 8 88.9%
  • No

    Votes: 1 11.1%

  • Total voters
    9

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
Share your views here on the benefits of online courses vs the traditional classroom.
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
"Education is to undergo a computer-driven revolution".

Is online learning the future of education?
 
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Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
There is a general feeling that the free days of MOOCs and other online courses are coming to an end.
Is this a good thing?
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
When MOOCs arrived on the scene 2 years ago, they were seen as the future of education and an alternative to costly education.

According to Simon Nelson, CEO of UK-based MOOC platform FutureLearn, this is an optimistic view.

Professor Diana Laurillard of London Knowledge Lab describes MOOCs as "a bundle of video lectures, student-lead web forums, quizzes and automated testing" which ignore "educational experiments from the past 20 years".

Do MOOCs provide the answer to a divided educational system?
 

Sky

Active Member
A recent study by researchers from MIT, Harvard, and China’s Tsinghua University—all of which offer MOOCs—showed that students who attended a MIT physics class online learned as effectively as students who took the traditional classroom route for the same course. And this was the case regardless of how much preparation and knowledge students started out with.

Is this the beginning of the end of classroom learning?
 

Nina

Active Member
The study even showed that the online students actually learnt more than those in the traditional lecture-based course.
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
I don't believe MOOCs will overtake traditional campus-based learning But they do fill a gap in the educational market for skills-updating which hasn't been well provided for by higher education in the past.
 

Jaffa

Active Member
Most students who take MOOCs already have university degrees. MOOCs are simply an additional form of learning, not an alternative to traditional university courses.
 

Bluebeard

Active Member
Going to university isn't just about studying a course. It's also about learning those all important life skills of interaction, tolerance, ethics etc which online courses could never replace. Replacing the campus with a virtual world is asking for a social meltdown.
 

MattB

Active Member
People want to learn things that will get them jobs. MOOCs can provide programs on very specific things which will help people get specific jobs.
 

Duke

Active Member
MOOCs are still a new concept, and relatively unknown. At the moment, the majority of MOOCites are students who already have some form of higher-ed qualification under their belts. Give MOOCs time to develop and become more mainstream, and they may well provide the answer to inequality in education.
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
"MOOCs are not an example of high-quality online learning. Contrary to perceptions created by the media, Massive Open Online Courses’ (MOOCs’) principal benefit to students is not their learning outcomes, but their price. The fact that such “mega courses” can issue from elite brands, such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, has led some to suppose that they have invented a new form of online learning. They have not."
Tom Lindsay
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
There is a variety of opinions in the media these days regarding online learning. Depending on what you read, online education can appear to be either a cure-all or cancer. In an effort to cut through the smoke, here are the top eight established facts ... http://sco.lt/8lLJLd
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
This is a very interesting talk, and Dr Madhav Chavan is absolutely right. If the world of education wants to benefit fully from the advances in technology, it will have to change its entire structure and approach to learning. I believe it will eventually, but this will be a very long and drawn out process.

Listen to what Dr Madhav Chavan has to say on
 

Sky

Active Member
Very interesting point regarding the linear nature of education. This is still the norm in education systems across the world. The question is would a non-linear education system actually be more effective?
 

BMint

Active Member
This suggests that technology should determine how we learn. Is there a danger that teaching will become too digitalised and real-life teachers will be replaced by computers? People may become full of knowledge, but with the inability to interact socially in face to face situations. Frightening thought.
 

MDH

Active Member
Technology may be changing the shape of education, but people build technology. Technology is simply a tool that can be used in education.
 

Carolyn

Founder at MoocLab
Staff member
Group Manager
Michelle R. Weise, Ph.D., senior research fellow in higher education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation puts forward the idea that MOOCs are simply another form of higher education designed by academics around their own interests rather than focusing on the needs of the workforce.

Rather than the MOOC, what she believes is actually revolutionizing online education is online competency-based education: affordable, accessible, targeted, and high-quality programs for workers to skill-up. According to Michelle Weise, "Online competency-based education has the potential to provide learning experiences that drive down costs, accelerate degree completion, and produce a variety of convenient, customizable, and targeted programs for the emergent needs of our labor market." To read the full article, go to http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/the-real-revolution-in-online-education-isnt-moocs/

By targeting specific skills gaps, these competency-based courses seem ideal for organisations to train their staff specifically for the skills required, but does that really make them more revolutionary than MOOCs as Michelle Weise suggests? It is the MOOC concept that brought online learning into the limelight in the first place. Doesn't that make MOOCs the real revolution in Online Education?
 

BMint

Active Member
Rather than the MOOC, what she believes is actually revolutionizing online education is online competency-based education
I agree with this - the MOOC concept is a great idea offering free education to those who can't afford it, but it's not sustainable as providers can't make money from it. Bespoke skill development courses for the professional market is where people will benefit the most.
 
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