by Catherine Armitage, Sydney Morning Herald
The era of the ”rock star professor” has arrived with the explosion in popularity of Massive Online Open Courses offered free on the internet by the world’s best universities. The development has left Australian higher education agape – and nervous. A senior lecturer at RMIT University, Mark Gregory, pondered on The Conversation website this week whether the advent of the courses was the start of ”a perfect storm where technology will provide a means to centralise courseware and provide for automated assessment for undergraduate courses”. Richard Buckland, who has more than 1.5 million views of his University of NSW computer science courses, likens it to a tsunami: we have felt the earthquake but the wave is yet to come. But he disagrees with the ”rock star professor” vision because it puts teachers, not students, centre stage.
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