MIT and Harvard Offer Courses Online for Free

“When you talk about exposure to different ideas and points of view…I just think about the different depths [needed] to enter into that college environment,” says Nancy Duclos, staff member at Andover high school.

Online vs. On campus

But will online courses be enough to give students a well-rounded education?

According to the website, edX is “committed to research that will allow us to understand how students learn, how technology can transform learning, and the ways teachers teach on campus and beyond”.

Shirky, however, writes that “the fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them.”

According to Shirky, the real issue is that people will be left without a means to achieve their goals if they lose their conduit—in-class university education.

In addition, there is a concern that online education won’t be able to present students with the same atmosphere they have in class. Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, writes: “[Online education] tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms.”

Jean-Paul Restoule, a professor at the University of Toronto and a teacher with Cousera, similarly believes that there is a definite disadvantage to online courses.

“You can’t have that conversation,” Restoule says. “Basically all the communication is one way attempt or reactive with marking dialogue and trying to engage.”

In his experience, Restoule has prompted dialogue through discussion forums and in their course assignments. However, discussion forums online are not always enough, Restoule admits, as certain students won’t participate in these groups, which is not so different from formal in-class education.

Though MOOCs may be limiting, with less student-teacher interactions than in-class, formal university education, Restoule suggests that classes be brought outside, perhaps on tours of the city or various places that touch on the course.

The pressure with MOOCs is not always merely on students, however, but the teachers themselves.

“You almost feel pressured to make the very best lecture you’ve ever done because its’ going to be saved for posterity,” Restoules says. “I think that is very intimidating and probably why we’ve scraped most of our first takes.”

However, teaching an online course is not only anxiety and pressure.

“What’s been really meaningful is unsolicited emails, letters, cards and that sort of thing that people have sent to say they got a lot out of the course,” Restoule says. “I’ve run into people and I don’t even know who they are. I meet them in the street and they say: ‘I’ve been taking your course, it’s great!’”

Indeed, MOOCs like Coursera and edX can still offer a number of benefits. MOOCs may be helpful for people with disabilities or accessibility issues, or even for those who are shy and can more easily put themselves forward in an online discussion board.

Though MOOCs like edX are still limited in certain senses, such as teacher-student activity, Bell believes that these websites will continue to become more stable in the future, with more universities taking centre-stage when it comes to online learning. He states:

“From this chaotic mixture will emerge a few winners, and at that later stage, a more stable set of standards in shared digital platforms”.

Photo courtesy of begincollege.com & vimeo.com