27 ] September 13-14, 2014 The Weekend Australian
All onboard for the MOOC express
Massive open online courses are changing the face of higher education. Why? Read on.
LAST August, Diccon Close went back to university, enrolling in an esoteric sounding course called ‘Maps and the geospatial revolution’ from Pennsylvania State University in the US. It was the first proper study Close, 49, had done since he passed his economic degree in the 1980s. He was pleased with himself when he passed with distinction.
To do the course, Close didn’t have to f y to the States or turn up to a campus. He did the five-week course from his laptop in moments etched out from his frantic schedule while living and working in Sydney. For all he knows, he might have had a classmate living around the corner. After all, his cohort consisted of 48,000 people from 150 countries and they were all connected through chat rooms and social media.
Best of all, it didn’t cost anyone a cent. Having worked in the technology space since the 1980s, massive open online courses – or MOOCs – had been on Close’s radar. He knew they had emerged from Stanford University in California, the alma mater of the czars of Silicon Valley. He knew they were internet-based programs that could handle tens of thousands of students simultaneously. He knew they had the backing of the world’s best universities – Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT, for starters. Better still he knew the courses were taught by the world’s best professors, including Nobel Laureates, and that an early focus on IT and computing courses had blossomed to include subjects across the spectrum of human knowledge.
“I’d had a look at what was on offer a few times,” says Close. “As you get older you probably get a bit more curious about your brain and stuffing a bit more knowledge into it. I’d always told myself I’d enrol in one and last year I did just that.”
Close says once he’d got his head around being a student again. The course was “lots of fun”.
“Using maps and geography was a really positive way to deal with the problem I was dealing with. It really helped me see the wood for the trees,” he says. “I wasn’t doing it for the grade or the qualification; I was doing it for the knowledge.”
With sublime timing, MOOCs exploded onto the scene at the end 2011 and (continued on page 28)
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