MOOCs

There has been a lot of noise in the media about MOOCs recently.  You may have heard Sir Michael Barber on the Today Programme on 11th March or read the accompanying article on the BBC News Website.  The main drift of the interview/article seemed to be that universities are dead and Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs were the only way forward.  Sir Michael’s reasoning seemed to go along the lines that students offered the choice of a celebrity tutor such as Niall Ferguson on the internet or some physically present nobody professor would opt for a class delivered at a distance by Prof F.

Not the most comforting of thoughts if you just take the sound bite at face value.  However, what Sir Michael didn’t point out was beneath the serene delivery of Professor F, there needs to be a lot of work going on for it to be anything more than a streamed TV programme.   And further to that, much of that work that needs to be going on is already happening in institutions across the UK including here in Lewisham as part and parcel of normal teaching and learning.

A MOOC is neither a machine for making better education nor a new channel on your sky box.  It is instead a container for delivering education and it will work better if the users understand what tools are there and how to use them.  Luckily for people at Goldsmiths, you have an environment which has just the tools you will need in a MOOC enabled world and it’s called learn.gold.

A class of 3,000 students could watch Prof. F deliver his lecture on the first world war wherever they want.  But in order to do something with this information the students need to be engaged and the way to do this is through discussion, assignments, further reading, collaboration and individual work.  The tools for all of these activities are in learn.gold.

MOOCs are perhaps a new(ish) way of delivering and receiving content, but they are not completely alien or the base of some Himalayan learning curve as it’s quite likley that you already use learn.gold to a lesser or greater extent.  And even if you don’t, there is plenty of support available through GLEU Studio including a new programme of courses to help you get the most from navigating around learn.gold which in turn will help make MOOCs more relevant and less scary.