Is Higher Education broken? Are MOOCs any kind of fix?
One of the biggest snowballs in this supposed avalanche is the MOOC (massive open online courses) phenomenon which has captured the imagination of so many observers. It’s a rather simple and utopian ideal: education for all, free, delivered to your laptop, time-shifted to your schedule not the university timetable. It’s also the notion of unlocking quality knowledge from elite campuses like MIT, Stanford, Harvard andUCLA that makes it such a seductive idea.
This story is also inextricably linked to the Silicon Valley meme oftechnology for good, and the alluring narratives of disruption and technical fixes that will create a new culture of mass learning. One of the noticeable things about this vision of the future is that it is (the launch of FutureLearn withstanding) very much an American story, and it’s easy to see the reasons why.
Read full story in the Guardian.
One reply on “Is Higher Education broken?”
An interesting piece on MOOC experience at Edinburgh 2013 http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/6683/1/Edinburgh%20MOOCs%20Report%202013%20%231.pdf