Online Learning Update

May 31, 2013

Online learning poised to transform the world: MOOCs to be as transformative as ‘BOOCs’

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

By Rik Myslewski, the Register

Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe was asked what surprises were on the horizon due to the ever more pervasive advance of the internet. “The most exciting surprise, I think, is going to be MOOCs,” said Metcalfe on Wednesday, referring to online education – Massively Open Online Courses. “Education is about to be disrupted, like iTunes did to music.” Some educators have called MOOCs a bad idea, raising the objection that online education destroys the one-to-one relationships between teachers and students. Metcalfe disagrees. “Here’s how I handle those [objections],” he said. “It goes back to the invention of another ‘bad idea’ – the BOOC, which is spelled today B, O, O, K. It was obviously a very bad idea, because before BOOCs, we would sit around the campfire and we would hear the story directly from the storyteller, but now we have these damn BOOC things. “You’ve read The Great Gatsby but you’ve never met F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said. “That’s a problem – so the BOOC is really a bad idea.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/22/metcalfe_on_moocs/

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