Educational Technology

December 7, 2014

Learning online worth the cost?: What’s the value, agenda of ‘free’ courses

Filed under: Educational Technology — admin @ 12:40 am

By Kelly Gorkoff, Winnipeg Free Press

Primary and secondary online learning materials are a resource to a curriculum. My daughter uses Kahn Academy for math, but only because her teacher tells her to. It’s a great resource for home-schoolers, too. It has a place as a resource for those who guide the education of youngsters. Youngsters themselves would rather watch cat videos on YouTube. Then there is higher learning (a.k.a. post-secondary education), advanced learning and the newest buzzword, lifelong learning. Many of the innovations here in online offerings claim to be a silver bullet, a way to overcome the problems of a traditional bricks-and-mortar university education, which has become too expensive, complicated, ideological and detached from the masses. Anant Agarwal is the president of edX, an online learning platform and provider of MOOCs (massive open online courses) many of which are free and offered worldwide. It’s also open-source. It sounds like it’s a solution.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/learning-online-worth-the-cost-284294121.html

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