I can’t remember if it was “MOOCs are Everywhere,” or “Rise of the MOOCs,” or what headline I had just read when I finally lost it. I yelled out “Oh God! STFU about MOOCs already!” into the dark corners of my Spartan, tech-nerd-bunker, like a crotchety old loon of 34 shaking my angry fist at nothing (repetitive).
It had been a long day of hustle and grind, I had lost it for a few seconds, and I’d like to share those few seconds of thinking with you here today, Fast Company reports.
I won’t bore you with the details, but at the same time I’d still like to provide enough context to make my complaints as personally gratifying as possible. So, let’s do this by imagining that we took the last two years of media coverage related to “education innovation,” pureed it in a Vitamix, then drank it.
Our Jacob’s Ladder style fever dream that ensued sounds like this: “MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs. College is expensive. Student loans. Debt. Unemployed graduates. Is college even worth it? MOOCs will solve everything. Wait, hold on. Is college really worth it? MOOCs. Wait, how come no one’s actually said that out loud before? MOOCs. Pfffft, college is totally worth it, as long as my parents are paying. MOOCs!”
… The nay saying blog commenters of the world and the contrarian-for-the-sake-of-being-contrarian groanings of teachers or otherwise invested parties who are unreasonably concerned about being made obsolete by MOOCs certainly have a point that online education will not boldly improve live learning unless it includes genuine, specific, individual interaction between students and teachers (run on sentence).
That’s simply a fact and something to keep in mind as online educations evolves, but it is not by any means a reason why online education “doesn’t work.”
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