There are lots of interesting conversation relating to MOOC and university education. Here making universities obsolete, Matt says: “I think there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to higher education, and (2) Leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning.”
Whether the new courses would threaten the traditional model is still unknown to us. Here Mr. Reif says: “First of all this is not a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing. The second important point is it’s a completely different educational environment. The real question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, “What if in a few years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that’s enough to get me a job?” Well, let’s see how well all this is received and how well or how badly the traditional college model gets threatened.” What would be the reactions and responses of other universities and colleges to these sort of challenges?
We have already witnessed how technology has disrupted many sorts of media, including news, music, and even big businesses. Education as a business would not be immune to the disruption due to technology.
Here new technologies won’t help companies survive and grow. It’s the business process that must be optimised to add real value.
How to optimise the business process in education? Is open education a promising solution? Given the ever changing complex and emergent education and learning environment, it may be important to transform education, in order to add value to higher education.
In this post relating to disruptive technology, Matthew summarises: ”
While you can debate the academic value of some of these programmes (and many do) their methodologies are pushing the boundaries, providing a new, disruptive way to offer higher education and I believe that more UK institutions should look to these developments and seize the opportunity to harness the amazing creativity in our universities to build new platforms and leverage them internationally before the market leaves us behind.
Does it mean that institutions should seize such opportunity to transform education? Would more institutions open up their education to the public and adopt an open educational practice?
What would such education transformation look like? How to ensure that such transformation is economically viable and sustainable? I will continue to explore in my coming posts.
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