28 ] September 13-14, 2014 The Weekend Australian


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immediately entered the zeitgeist. Since then well over 10 million students have enrolled in 1200 courses from more than 200 of the world’s best universities.


With numbers like that, it’s got a lot of people talking.Why would super-elite universities give away their courses for free? And if courses are free, what’s the business model? Could it be the end of the campus based university?


Why would students pay fees, bother turning up to lectures, spend three years of their lives grinding away at a degree at some diploma mill if Harvard and its ilk are giving them away?


Maybe they are just a fad and the hyper connected, attention-span deficient, mollycoddled, middle classes will abandon MOOCs just as they did MySpace.


What everyone agrees on is that MOOCs are changing the way education is delivered and received. Chances are the lecture is well and truly dead.


“A student said to me recently a lecture is where a professor stands at the front of the class and drones on and on for 55 minutes,” says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, a two year old MOOC with $60 million backing from Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was in Canberra recently.


“If that’s how students feel then we should listen to our customers and do something different and engage them with multi-media and online technology.


“Every university needs at least one lecture hall in the future, just so our grandchildren can understand this is how people used to learn.”


Sean Gallagher, a research associate in higher education at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre agrees.


“Like traditional online education, MOOCs aren’t mere recordings of lectures; they are typically high production videos cut into modules of less than 10 minutes – through mini-progression quizzes – focused only on a particular concept, idea or argument,” says Gallagher, who has followed the MOOC phenomenon from the outset.


“Students can select, repeat or fast forward through each module according to their ability. If a student is having difficulty in grasping the concept, the algorithms behind MOOCs can identify the learning obstacle and take the student off to a side tutorial before coming back to the main lesson. No longer is learning a linear pathway from A to B according to how the academic who wrote the textbook thinks a student should learn.”


In other words, MOOCs are a “disruptive innovation” and they are attracting a lot of interest.


Universities in Australia and the world over are clambering onto the MOOC bandwagon lest they be left behind. An early adopter was Brian Schmidt, an astrophysicist at Australian National University Australia’s most recent Nobel Laureate.


Schmidt’s first foray into teaching a MOOC was in March this year when well over 10,000 students enrolled in his course Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe.


“For me, MOOCs are about how I can be a better teacher and how I can teach people who aren’t students at ANU, such as secondary students and people overseas who might want to take my course,” he says. MOOCs aren’t without their critics. They point to massive drop-out rates – of the 150,000 who enrolled in Agarwal’s first course, just 7250 passed .


“It would be unacceptable for a university to have attrition rates like that but its comparing apples and oranges. Open means anyone can take it – we have 11 year olds enrol right up to 88 year olds enrolling in courses; people from all walks of life,” says Argawal.


While Agarwal is a cheerleader for changing on-campus learning, he does not think, for a single moment, that the physical university campus will disappear anytime soon.


“The university campus is a rite of passage; you have discussions with other students, who learn by how you interact with others, you are growing up, learning how to research and work with professors and get inspired by those around you,” says Agarwal.


Schmidt agrees. “MOOCs are putting some universities on notice that they will be a proverbial dodo bird if they don’t adapt. But to do MOOCs in a non-trivial way is not cheap. We want to make the on-campus experience better, not replace it.”


Since completing Maps and the geospatial revolution, Close has enrolled in and dropped out of two IT-related MOOCs saying they were too technical and diff cult. But he is enjoying --and plans to complete his fourth MOOC, ‘ An introduction to computers’ on edX.


“It’s not just about trying to keep up with changes in IT, but going to the philosophy of programming and being able to see through some of the corporate clutter when I am trying to make decisions about buying some product or platform.


“I want to be able to get to the essence of the problem and then marry that with physical technology to solve the problem.”


As to whether he is a convert and evangelist for the MOOC, Close says definitely. “More people should take advantage of them,” he says. This article first appeared in The Weekend Australian Magazine.


Open means anyone can take it – we have 11 year olds right up to 88 year olds enrolling in courses; people from all walks of life.


Image: Two men of MOOCS: Brian Schmidt and Anant Agarwal.


 


For more information
In conversation with Brian Schmidt and Anan Agarwal.
www.theaustralian.com.au/pg


 


 

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