Schuman, too, said online learning means less human contact. She related two stories about students from her own classroom, stories she said couldn’t be replicated in a MOOC.
Her brilliant student with dyslexia may not appear brilliant when assessed by a robot or professor who has never conversed with her in reality. Her student who overcame a debilitating shyness through class presentations could never do that by typing in an online forum.
Schuman took a moment to list every student in the course by name.
“People,” she said. “Real people. I know them. They know me. We connect.”
Nelson said Cole and Schuman were missing the potential of online learning by focusing just on MOOCs, though he is a supporter of the courses. The Minerva Project uses small classes with direct contact through webcams to a dozen students at once, for example.
“Their argument is a critique of a small segment of online education now, as it stands,” Nelson said. “It was not a critique of the potential. What we all have to remember is that we are at the dawn of high quality, interactive online education.”
Argawal echoed Nelson, saying that the debate is not simply about MOOCs, particularly MOOCs in their current form, but about where online learning will go in the future. He also pushed back against statistics commonly used to discredit MOOCs, like low retention rates and the small percentage of students taking the courses who don’t already have a degree.
Even if only ten percent of students passed Argawal’s first MOOC, that is still 7,000 students — more, he said, than he could teach in 40 years. And while only a fraction of edX’s millions of users are without a degree, 600,000 of the students are high schoolers or undergraduates, a number larger than even the most expansive university.
“MOOCs are two years old,” he said. “There’s no comparing it to an education system that has been around for 1,000 years and has failed.”
A vote from the audience anointed Argawal and Nelson as the debate’s winners. While only 18 percent of the crowd agreed with them at the debate’s start, 44 percent agreed by the end. Cole and Schuman still had the majority of the crowd’s support, however, with 47 percent of the vote.
Watch the entire debate here.
Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake.
- What does higher-ed look like in 2023? - January 5, 2015
- Are ed-tech startups a bubble that’s ready to burst? - January 1, 2015
- Are MOOCs really dead? - August 28, 2014
Comments are closed.