Techno-News Blog

May 29, 2015

What Disruption? Online Education and the Status Quo

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:16 am

BY WILLIAM FENTON, PC Magazine

The problem with today’s MOOCs is their elite pedigree and top-down approach to online education. Creating and maintaining a MOOC takes a village—and well-heeled one. From my conversations with faculty who developed online courses for edX and Coursera, I came to understand that an educator couldn’t possibly build an online course without tenure and voluminous institutional support. For example, the aforementioned Coursera class lists 21 contributors, including two pedagogical assistants, two producers, and a copyright consultant, under its course credits. The professor estimated that she spent hundreds of hours developing her first course, and still more time revising it for later iterations. It’s no wonder that large, established institutions dominate the catalogs of edX and Coursera. Udemy is the only platform I have encountered that challenges this paradigm by allowing anyone to create courses. However, its approach is at once logistically and philosophically limited.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484354,00.asp

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