John Connell: The Blog

.…the same three-person team of a pro­fes­sor plus assis­tants that used to teach ana­log cir­cuit design to 400 stu­dents at MIT now han­dles 10,000 online and could take a hun­dred times more.…

So said Anant Agar­wal, the com­puter sci­en­tist appointed by MIT and Har­vard this year to head edX, a $60 mil­lion joint effort (cur­rently includ­ing UC Berke­ley and the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, as well as MIT and Har­vard) to stream a col­lege edu­ca­tion over the Web, free to any­one who wants it. Their aim, in time, they say is to reach 1 bil­lion stu­dents by this means.

MIT’s Tech­nol­ogy Review has pub­lished a busi­ness report on Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion that includes a piece that asks, is the MOOC the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years?, and another piece that takes a strangely myopic look at the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­ogy of the MOOC (myopic because it gives not the slight­est men­tion to those who actu­ally syn­thetized the con­cept and who coined the term itself). Given that this is in the con­text of a busi­ness report, per­haps the some­what pro­gres­sive, left-leaning, anti-corporatist incli­na­tions of many of those involved in the ori­gins of the MOOC sim­ply keeps them below the radar of those writ­ing for the Tech­nol­ogy Review. I gen­uinely hope that is not the case.

How­ever, while my ped­a­gog­i­cal sym­pa­thies are some­what closer to the MOOC’s prime movers, I also have a lot of admi­ra­tion for what the big play­ers are doing too. Cours­era and Udac­ity, as well as the likes of edX, are all non-profit social enter­prise ven­tures, and while their ped­a­gogy is pri­mar­ily a ‘knowledge-delivery’ model (as opposed to social-constructivist or con­nec­tivist model), they are very much part of a broad-based set of devel­op­ments in edu­ca­tion that, I believe, are coa­lesc­ing into a major storm that will sweep through the struc­tures and assump­tions of for­mal insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion in the next few years. Of course, there are many other MOOCs out there too: Stephen Downes offers a recent list of inter­na­tional providers.

Agarwal’s quote at the top of this piece itself con­firms that these big MOOC providers are basi­cally tak­ing the model of deliv­ery straight out of the lec­ture halls and class­rooms of higher edu­ca­tion and onto the Web. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but it means that much (most?) of the real power of the MOOC as orig­i­nally defined, namely that knowl­edge is dis­trib­uted across a net­work of con­nec­tions, and that learn­ing there­fore con­sists of the abil­ity to con­struct and tra­verse those net­works is dissipated.

That foun­da­tion in the ped­a­gogy of the lec­ture the­atre also means, of course, that the big providers are also hop­ing to find the com­mer­cial holy grail of trusted, authen­ti­cated and secure accred­i­ta­tion via the MOOC.

Nonethe­less, it will be inter­est­ing to watch what the effect will be on all those uni­ver­si­ties across the world cur­rently licens­ing courses from the big providers. I doubt that they are licens­ing their own anni­hi­la­tion, as some of the more lurid com­men­ta­tors might sug­gest; but i do think they are has­ten­ing a mas­sive and wel­come shift in the cen­tre of grav­ity in higher edu­ca­tion globally.

The MOOC is a devel­op­ment that, like all great inno­va­tions, is a cul­mi­na­tion of inven­tions, for­ma­tions, think­ing, exper­i­men­ta­tions, mis­takes and tri­umphs that came before it; it is also like all great inno­va­tions in that it is a game-changer. The game is chang­ing in higher edu­ca­tion, and in edu­ca­tion gen­er­ally — of that there is no doubt — and while the MOOC can only be a part of that change, it is a crit­i­cal part. The MOOC will never be able to cope with all the require­ments of learn­ing and of study: there will also be a need, in some dis­ci­plines for lab work, ground work, work in the field, what­ever. But there should be lit­tle doubt that the MOOC is a major devel­op­ment in education.

So, the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years? I cer­tainly hope so!

.…for dis­cus­sion:

• The school as we know it is based on a lim­ited under­stand­ing of human nature
• School can­not be reformed in iso­la­tion from reform of the wider soci­ety in which it exists
• School has fail­ure built in
• The con­cept of mass school­ing — one-size-fits-all-schooling — is no longer valid
• School, by its nature, is designed to build soci­ety from the top-down, and ignores the crit­i­cal­ity of cul­ture in enabling learn­ing from the bot­tom up
• School iso­lates learn­ing from life
• School is the pri­mary instru­ment for social engi­neer­ing in soci­ety today — and all such social engi­neer­ing is doomed to failure
• Ped­a­gogy in school today is lim­ited by the struc­tures that school imposes
• Dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion will hap­pen (is hap­pen­ing?) to schools — but do not look to news­pa­pers, the music indus­try or the travel indus­try as mod­els of how this will play out

Just some thoughts.….