MOOC and Higher Education

Disruptive technology and how to compete for the future

MOOC in this students-weigh-in-on-value-of-massive-open-online-classes.   The crisis in higher education tells a great story.

Debating the flipped classroom at Stanford elaborates on how flipping the classroom has changed the way online education is done.  We all may have experienced these flipped classroom in certain ways.

Here is a professor’s real time interaction with the students in the classroom.

Why some of the best universities are giving away their courses?

“Each has answers. But basically it comes down to these: To serve the greater good. To win a public-relations race. And, most especially, to enhance reputations.”

“We’ve had MOOCs and open learning resources for centuries,” says Dave Cillay, executive director of WSU Online. “They’re called libraries.”

Interesting to relate MOOCs to libraries, and in reflection, libraries could be one such study platform where individual learners would pursue their own studies through interaction with the artifacts, books and various media.  The concept of libraries has been changed dramatically when each of the learners could build their own libraries, in the form of PLE/PLN, with a pull basis, such as RSS, delicious and Diigo, Scoopit and Paper.li etc.  Other forms of libraries include the public aggregation and curation sites which are now ubiquitous, and are easily accessed.

How would Connectivism play a part in this networked learning?  When I reflected on the comments I once made with Matthias Melcher’s post on Connectivism:

Hi Matthias,
I have been thinking about those concepts on network, patterns, and similarity also in the past years, and these have been casually mentioned in my blog posts. How would we be able to apply complexity to “rule based” education and learning? Would that be similar to putting a round peg (learner centred approach/learner based teaching/learning) into a square hole (rule based teaching – lecture, broadcasting)? I agree on the wider application of Connectivism.  How would such informal connections “conform” to the rule based “corporate world”? I could see more opportunities, but equally interesting challenges, if informal connections are to “confront” the formal institutional settings. It is not just evolution, it is revolution, and it is happening, it is ubiquitous, and it is in constant flux. What do you think?
John

I think the revolution that is going on in the education world is now coming alive, first in this xMOOC, with the following features:

Traditional institutional education      x MOOC

limited size                                                      massive

closed, fee for education                          open to public, free for education

credit granted                                                no credit granted

face-to-face/online                                     online

rule based teaching                                    skills based teaching

content knowledge                                     declarative and procedural knowledge

didactic – question – answer                   mastery learning – learner – paced

mass or video lecture                                short video based lectures

face-to-face discussion, LMS – forum  LMS – forum, social media &  technology, internet

broadcasting within institution              broadcasting with flipping the classroom

Assessment – assignment                         Assessment –  machine graded assignments

projects, quizzes, tests,                             projects, quizzes, tests,

examinations                                                examinations

institutional based education model   entrepreneurial based education business