{"id":1881,"date":"2012-09-26T22:13:26","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T04:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1881"},"modified":"2012-09-27T21:02:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T03:02:15","slug":"moocs-whats-real-whats-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1881","title":{"rendered":"MOOCs: what’s real, what’s hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have an article in the new issue of Technology Review<\/em>, The Crisis in Higher Education<\/a>, that looks at the phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The free delivery of college classes over the net is stirring a huge amount of excitement this fall, and the organizations pioneering \u00a0the MOOC model \u2014 notably, Coursera, Udacity, and edX \u2014 are grabbing a lot of attention<\/a> and investment. But outsized expectations about revolutions in education have accompanied virtually every major new communication medium in the past, including the postal system, motion pictures, radio, TV, and personal computers. (In 1927, the University of Iowa declared that \u201cit is no imaginary dream to picture the school of tomorrow as an entirely different institution from that of today, because of the use of radio in teaching.\u201d)\u00a0So is today different? Will the combination of breakthroughs in cloud computing, data mining, machine learning, and social networking at last enable distance learning to achieve its grand promise? That’s the question I wrestle with in the article.<\/p>\n

Here’s how the piece begins:<\/p>\n

A hundred years ago, higher education seemed on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication network \u2014 the modern postal system \u2014 had made it possible for universities to distribute their lessons beyond the bounds of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed University of Wisconsin historian, wrote of how the \u201cmachinery\u201d of distance learning would carry \u201cirrigating streams of education into the arid regions\u201d of the country. Sensing a historic opportunity to reach new students and garner new revenues, schools rushed to set up correspondence divisions. By the 1920s, postal courses had become a full-blown mania. Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation\u2019s colleges and universities combined.<\/p>\n

The hopes for this early form of distance learning went well beyond the broadening of access. Many educators believed that correspondence courses, by allowing assignments and assessments to be tailored to each student, would actually be better than traditional on-campus instruction. The University of Chicago\u2019s Home-Study Department, one of the nation\u2019s largest, told prospective enrollees that they would \u201creceive individual personal attention,\u201d delivered \u201caccording to any personal schedule and in any place where postal service is available.\u201d The department\u2019s director claimed that correspondence study offered students an intimate \u201ctutorial relationship\u201d that \u201ctakes into account individual differences in learning.\u201d The education, he said, would prove superior to that delivered in \u201cthe crowded classroom of the ordinary American University.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re hearing strikingly similar claims today. Another powerful communication network\u2014the Internet\u2014is again raising hopes of a revolution in higher education. This fall, many of the country\u2019s leading universities, including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, are offering classes for free over the Net, and more than a million people around the world have signed up to take them. These massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are earning praise for bringing outstanding college teaching to multitudes of students who otherwise wouldn\u2019t have access to it, including those in remote places and those in the middle of their careers. The online classes are also being promoted as a way to bolster the quality and productivity of teaching in general \u2014 for students on campus as well as off. Former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett has written that he senses \u201can Athens-like renaissance\u201d in the making. Stanford President John Hennessy told the New Yorker<\/em> he sees \u201ca tsunami coming.\u201d …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Also check out The Library of Utopia<\/a>, a somewhat related article I wrote for Tech Review earlier this year.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have an article in the new issue of Technology Review, The Crisis in Higher Education, that looks at the phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The free delivery of college classes over the net is stirring a huge amount of excitement this fall, and the organizations pioneering \u00a0the MOOC model \u2014 notably, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1881"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}