MOOCs: massive, open online courses. And that’s according to
no lesser personage than Bob Metcalfe, widely recognised as the co-inventor of
ethernet and the formulator of the prediction on networking now known as
Metcalfe’s Law.
In a panel session at a conference organised by NetEvents
last month at the Computer Museum in Silicon Valley to celebrate the 40th
anniversary of the invention of ethernet, Metcalfe was asked: “What's the
biggest surprise you think we're going to see in the next three to five years,
coming out of the telecom space?”
“The most exciting surprise, I think, is going to be MOOCs,”
he said. “Education is about to be disrupted. Most of us in this room probably
got educated along the way, and that whole thing is about to get [disrupted] …
like iTunes did to music.”
And for the doubters who had “serious questions about the
loss of interpersonal contact between the teacher and the student,” Metcalfe
had an answer. “Here's how I handle those,” he said. “It goes back to the
invention of another bad idea, the BOOC, the B-O-O-C, which is today spelled
B-O-O-K. It was obviously a very bad idea. Because before books we would sit
around the campfire and we would hear the story directly from the storyteller,
but now we have these damn book things. You've read The Great Gatsby, but
you've never met F Scott Fitzgerald. That's a problem. So the MOOC is really a
bad idea.”
One consequence of MOOCs, Metcalfe suggested, was that
“education is not going to occur between the ages of five and 22 anymore.
Education becomes a lifelong learning thing.” He conceded that MOOCs are not
yet very good at supporting either interactions with the instructor or between
students but suggested these problems will be solved.
MOOCs are gaining momentum in Australia. In March Open
Universities Australia launched Australia’s first MOOC platform.
It already has a good selection of courses on offer. In the US things are much
more advanced. In November 2012, the New York Times declared that 2012 was “TheYear of the MOOC.”
Last month US web site Inside Higher Ed release acompilation of articles on MOOCs, the MOOC Moment, reflecting “long-term trends
and some of the forward-looking thinking of experts on how MOOCs may change
higher education.”
There’s an interesting and useful post on MOOCs on the US
New Enquiry web site, by Aaron Bady, which would suggest that the momentum
behind MOOCs in the US is considerably greater than in Australia. He says the
word MOOC was first coined in 2008 by a set of Canadian academics “who needed a
term to describe the experiment in pedagogy they were putting together,” and
that in the last year, the MOOC concept has “gone from a rather singular
experiment in connectivist and distributed learning to a behemoth force that we
are told and retold is reshaping the face of higher education.”
Behemoth it is not in Australia, not yet at least, but it
will certainly have some synergies with another trend that is emerging in IT:
self-learning, driven in part by the rise of open source technologies. Peter
James, managing director of cloud service provider Ninefold, told me recently
that, with the increasing use of open source languages like Ruby On Rails, many
software developers were self-taught. “Many of the people we see don’t have
computer science degrees. Their IT skills are community taught and they are
passionate about learning. They learn through community based programmes, they
go to meet-ups and they are passionate about learning,” he said.
I’ve taken a couple of MOOCs, one in networking technologies
that was very good - the lectures were well-structured, well-sequenced and
well-presented - and one in information security that was not so good - massive
reading lists (which seems to defeat the purpose) and lots of short videos of
dubious value simply extracted from classroom presentations.
It is of course early days for MOOCs and for large-scale
online education in general, but there seems no reason to believe that the
Internet will not disrupt online education to the same extent that it has
disrupted the music, news and retailing industries and is now disrupting the
video entertainment industry.
MOOCs are free, but somebody has to make the investment so
they will likely become simply one component of an online education industry.
The better courses are likely to be put on by those educational institutions
that have seen the writing on the wall and have realised that they must gain
experience and establish a reputation in the online world if they want to
survive the inevitable disruption.
The author travelled
to the Ethernet 40th anniversary conference as a guest of NetEvents.
This article first appeared on iTWire, Australia's leading independent IT&T news and information source.
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