Higher Education: Will MOOCs Change Everything?
Over at Inside Higher Ed, University of Prince Edward Island graduate student Bonnie Stewart weighs in on the affect that massive online open courses (MOOCs) like MITx will have on higher education:
Too often, MOOCs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it – are written about primarily as dramatic new business models.
It’s true that there’s potential in that direction. And Sebastian Thrun et al seem intent on mining it, while all of [us] watch breathlessly.
But that market lens on massive open coursework misses one of the central elements of the great disruption: education is not solely a business, or a credential-machine. It’s also about learning.
And with MOOCs, those of us acculturated to academia have the opportunity to learn new, responsive, participatory ways of fostering public knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional institutions. The disruption may be profound, certainly. But so may be the possibilities.
You can read her full post here.
