The
topic of education raises a lot of questions, issues, problems, the list could
go on but one of the main thoughts that can come up is the future of education.
Professor Philip Zelikow at the University of Virginia is a history professor
and has taught the course “The Modern World: Global History Since 1760” for 16
years now. He is still teaching it this semester but there is one aspect that
is different. He usually teaches this course to about 120 students on campus,
this semester he is teaching it to 42,000 students around the world. You may
think to yourself that online courses are not new, which they are not, but the
ability to have access to professors from high-top professors from prestige universities
such as Harvard and Stanford University is.
Along with the University of Virginia, there are dozens of elite and
prestigious universities have paired up with start-up companies such as Coursera,
Udacity and edX. They have paired up with these companies so that they can
deliver Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCS.
It was
stated that Greek history at Wesleyan University, poetry at the University of
Pennsylvania and astronomy at Duke, just to name a few are now offered online
and are free. It was said that millions of students have been enrolled in MOOCS
and even though they are not offered for completion of college credit and the
completion rate is actually low, experts and educators believe that this is an
insight to the potential of what education can revolutionize into in regards to
higher education. Quite a few professors such as Professor Zelikow, who I
mentioned in the beginning, was very hesitant to going through with this but he
has seen the benefits and he believes that it has actually improved the course
for the students that take it with him on campus. He has used this as an
opportunity to invent a new way to teach the course.
A student
who has taken some courses felt that it gave her a heads up before entering
into a program and she gained some knowledge before starting. She also stated
that she had met people from Germany, Australia, Japan, China and Africa. She
recommended MOOCS but she did state some limitations such as lack of
professor-student interaction, not having a question answered immediately and
no one standing in front of you showing you how to do something. Another concern
from others was how to measure a student’s progress over a long period of time.
Some professors such as one from the University of Virginia believe that this
is an interesting experiment but he does not believe that MOOCS can replace the
traditional college education. There are
many who are against this and many who are for it. Time will only tell where
MOOCS will have a place in the education system but for right now it is pretty
interesting to see how it works.
Jennifer Aiken
2/4/2013 5:39pm
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