By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
Online courses may not have overwhelmed undergraduate education in a disruptive “tsunami,” as once predicted. But teaching and learning technology is “going to change the landscape of everything we do,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told an audience at Stanford University on Friday. Dirks made that prediction in conversation with Stanford president John Hennessy, kicking off the fourth annual “learning summit,” held this year on the Stanford campus. “We’ve seen that online resources can be very important,” Dirks said. “But at the same time they don’t substitute for being there” – for personal contact with faculty or the sense of community that residential undergraduate institutions provide. So far, he added, MOOCs have been “most spectacularly successful for students who have graduated.” Hennessy concurred, observing that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gotten their greatest traction among professionals already working in their field.
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