Discussion: Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been around for several years, with large companies like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX battling for marketshare, their flexibility endgame being to offer every element of education from K-12 through college, graduate and professional schools online, largely for free, with the potential to completely disrupt existing education institutions and global markets for learning. The initial hype surrounding MOOCs hasn’t been fulfilled – yet – but the battle is far from over.
523 Inspiration: It isn’t necessarily MOOCs specifically, which may not be the winning solution, but the mobile frontier they have opened in challenging the friction-laden post-secondary education system. Nobody knows yet who the winner will be, but it is certainly worth researching how the battle is going.
Looking at Massively Open Online Courses, e-Learning can be clunky, disorganized, and frustrating without an educator present. I have personally seen my students be frustrated with sites like Khan Academy and IXL for the above reasons and more. However, as our instructor has indicated, the battle is far from over. I still see great potential for MOOCs. Technology is changing and so are MOOCs; they are becoming more adaptive, more streamlined, and more helpful. Take for example IXL adding Science curriculum pieces to their site and how more and more ‘how to’ videos keep popping up for each skill where before there were very few.
The reason I chose this area to explore is because of its immediate potential for education. I believe MOOCs are getting better and in doing so have extreme potential for education over the next several years, starting now. The immediacy of recognizing correct and incorrect answers and the autonomy and directedness of personalized skill level challenges alone can best any human trying to oversee and educate a full classroom of humans. Especially as human experience becomes more mobile—like the breaking down of costly overhead cubicles at workplaces in place of working from home—education could greatly utilize these tools.
As a past alternative education/outreach teacher for students who were struggling to attend the regular school system, I had to rely on online courses as an educator. These courses would instruct beyond the little time I had to spend each student and beyond the expensive classroom that could not be afforded. For others, if learners have access to devices, the possibilities for education with MOOCs become exponentially enhanced. Thinking of countries outside of Canada, where school buildings or houses may not exist, this mobile technology is an immediate possibility for education which only has possibilities to get better and better. So, what are the possibilities? Can we use them? Can we make them? Now? A few years from now?