By Nathan Chang
Everyone has an opinion about online education and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, a term I grow weary of with each refresh of Google Reader). Naturally, some are good, some are bad, most are the same arguments recycled and tweaked. I have trudged through two weeks of higher education online education development stories to bring you this roundup with teaser summaries. Enjoy.
The big news since the last roundup was Coursera who announced an additional 12 universities would join them, including University of Washington who will be offering credit for courses and University of Virginia. (New York Times)
Inside Higher Ed’s take on the Coursera expansion, noting professorial skepticism, board enthusiasm (see UVA board vs. everyone else including formerly-ousted president) and the target audience of Coursera, which is not “the residential college experience.”
Further explanation of University of Washington offering credits for “enhanced” Coursera courses.
A longer essay on UVA, skepticism of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), of “branding,” and of direction of board from UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan at Chornicle of Higher Education.
Another UVA professor Mark Edmundson, in the New York Times, “A truly memorable college class, even a large one, is a collaboration between teacher and students. It’s a one-time-only event. Learning at its best is a collective enterprise […] Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue.” – “The Trouble with Online Education”
Joshua Kim of Inside Higher Ed responds to Professor Edmundson, noting that Edmundson has conflated MOOCs with “Online Education,” explaining the course design goals of online courses compared to MOOCs.
Benjamin Lima blogged about the “Massive Online Learning and the Unbundling of Undergraduate Education,” predicting that, “The basic way that these forces are going to change undergraduate education is by forcing an unbundling, or disaggregation, of the goods that colleges have traditionally provided their students in one big bundle. This unbundling will happen in three ways: for the whole college education, for the individual course, and for the way that college is paid for.”
Inside Higher Ed optimistic about the flipped classroom model, (a refreshing thing to hear after all this MOOC talk) which combines online components with in-class instruction.
Timothy Burke of Swarthmore achieves catharsis in his blog post “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads,” which is more like a rant against all of the aforementioned links in this post. Highlight: “Right now you guys sound like the same packs of enthusiastic dunderheads who thought that public-access television, national radio networks, or correspondence courses were going to make conventional universities obsolete via technological magic.”
Image Sidewalk Flying/Flickr CC
For more about online education and the future of academia, see:
Bryan Caplan “The Case Against Education” (video)
What is Online Education and What Does it Mean for Academia?‘
Online Education and Custom Tailored Learning
The University Online: How Will the University Adapt?
What About the Humanities?
What Are They Saying About Online Education?