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Amherst determined it was not a fit for edX and the MOOC model. I don't see what one school turning down edX has to do with the future of online education. I'm not a fan of the model either, but dozens of top colleges are still signing up to participate. Older people who are slow to accept change will eventually retire and die anyway.
Quote:
Agarwal said he spotted a 17-year-old named Amol Bhave, from Jabalpur, India, who had aced his MOOC on circuits and electronics. The edX president recommended Bhave to MIT’s dean of admissions. In March, Bhave said, he was admitted to the Class of 2017.
That's a really nice story. I also read a couple of stories of how people found jobs after completing MOOC courses in computer science. I think they were Udacity courses.
One of the biggest problems with these MOOCs is that the universities have found no way to monetize them. There is as of yet no viable business model to support one group of people getting for free what others are paying maybe $40,000 a year in tuition for. What will they do, keep raising raising tuition so that they can offer these courses? Families are already starting to pushback on the cost of education. And the more bells and whistles that are added to these courses to make them resemble traditional ones -- i.e., live additional isntructors, proctors at test sites, and more elaborate software and technology -- the higher the cost will be. Cheaper than bricks and mortar education? Probably so. But free? Technology is never free. Somebody, somewhere along the line, will have to pay to make the MOOC model sustainable. They just haven't gotten the bill yet.
The most interesting thing to me about these courses educationally, is that they seem to work againt the "specialness" of traditional admissions criteria at the big-name universities. When community college students can handle MIT style lectures it proves that maybe being smart isnt the only thing you need to get into MIT. Of course these top schools have always had a holistic admission process that considers more than grades and test scores -- they conisder the "whole" student. But these types of course may end up eroding their exclusivity more than they imagined if they become more widespread, a factor, no coubt, in Amherst's refusal to participate.
Oddly enough, knowledge has always been free, or almost free. After all it is found in books and people can read (study) them for free. What we pay for in a college is (1) a system (someone tells you what books to read, and how to think about them, and how to organize books into a body of knowledge) and (2) a credential.
I am amused about how we are using expensive technology to replace cheap technology that does something very similar. The web-based course presents information like a book; powerpoint and the computer projector replaces chalk.
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