New York Times: Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls
... Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).
Consider Stanford’s experience: Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Mr. Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems.
Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages.
“Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.” ...
As a new university professor I'm both a little excited and a little concerned by this story. I'm excited by the idea of democratizing higher education and doing things to reach more and more people.
On the other hand, I really do feel like people benefit from the person attention and community that comes from in-person classes. That's part of the reason wanted to teach at a small university where I can have 15-30 students in most of my classes instead of a big state university with hundreds.
So I hope that we can develop an educational ecosystem that allows for both easy access to education material and "value-added" university experiences.
Posted by: JHM | Mar 06, 2012 at 01:51 PM
I hear ya. It seems to me that some subjects lend themselves better to an online approach and others would be significantly diminished by doing so. Don't know what the answer here is but welcome to a brave new education world. ;-)
Posted by: Michael W. Kruse | Mar 06, 2012 at 02:57 PM