Blog 3: Davos Forum Considers Learning’s Next Wave
The inflation and modernization of education is leading
instruction into the realm of MOOC’s- massive open online courses, which are
spreading quickly around the world. Professors
of some of the best universities (including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Stanford,
and Duke) are taking part in the expansion of MOOC’s. For example, a girl from Pakistan has been
taking courses from Udacity and Coursera, two of the primary sources of the
MOOC institution.
One reason for the rapid increase in MOOC’s, is said to be
that Coursera at Stanford to date has only existed for a few months, and
already provides 214 courses which are available to students in 196 countries, and
so far 2.4 million students are in attendance of MOOC’s at Coursera. MOOC’s bring up a few academic concerns: first being the issue of whether or not these
MOOC’s are able to provide students with the same potential and quality of
instruction that they would benefit from within the classroom. The second pedagogical issue is the concern
that the type of learning MOOC’s provide may potentially “upend American and
perhaps Western academic institutions”. As
Udacity was introduced into the MOOC program, it was said that in 2011, more
than 160,000 students were already enrolled into an artificial intelligence
course. This shows that as technology
continues to grow at a hasty rate, so will the progression of technology within
the educational system; thus, the concern for American and Western academic
institutions to be overturned by MOOC’s.
To prove once more how the world is changing and increasing
in modernization through education and technology, one computer science
professor at Stanford stated, “’We don’t know where the next Albert Einstein is…
Maybe she lives in a small village in Africa.’”
With online learning and the success of MOOC’s, means that professors
need to focus on not just being an instrument of academic success for their
students, but also to serve as mentors, making the classroom setting that much
more unique, in order to compete with online learning.
Last year, Harvard and MIT began offering free online
courses through their universities, enrolling about 753,000 students. Among the various countries around the world
participating, a few from the top 10 list of countries were mentioned: India,
Pakistan, Russia, and Brazil.
Education is expanding and becoming more accessible all over the globe.
Education is continuing to move forward, and with technology
constantly changing and growing, it is continually integrating within the
classroom and by way of MOOC’s. What is
so neat about online courses is though there is an experience that only student/teacher
contact may provide, there is so much more that MOOC’s may offer students. For people all over the world, in various
countries (196 as the article stated), those students are being offered
opportunities that they may have not had before. They are able to embark onto academic avenues
that allow them to stay home, when they do not have the means to travel to
universities, as many if not most do not have a local college in their backyard. In addition, these online courses are free,
making them even more accessible to students who did not have the financial means
of obtaining an education. So even
though online courses are competing with a highly important classroom
experience which will undoubtedly never fade out, MOOC’s are helping people all
over the world in gaining higher education, which is an honor that most are
probably extremely grateful for.
Jessica Hanley
2/15/13
4:36 p.m.
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