The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education.
It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 13 Sep 11Howard Rheingold interviews George Siemens on MOOCs, May 2011, 21 minutes long video Youtube based, Week 1, September 12, 2011 EXCERPTS that intrigue me: At 2.12 into interview: "We encouraged people to create their own spaces. Our assumption was that educational institutions need to stop providing spaces for learners to interact, and allow learners to bring their spaces with them which means they have an archive. So people were setting up spaces in Second Life. We had the course syllabus translated into 5 languages, we had 2,300 people signed up to join. We let people do basically what they wanted." At 3:22 -"We wrap the social elements around the content. That's how traditional education is done. Here is your text, here is your readings, now talk about it. Our assumption was partly that we wanted the social interactions to actually produce the content which doesn't mean that we wanted to run through open meadows learning randomly. We still started off each week with readings, literature that we wanted them to engage in, videos, we wanted to keep everything open. We did have a closed journal but those were optional." 4:11 "The content isn't what you are supposed to master at the starting point. The content we provide you with at the start is the catalyst to converse, to form connections with other learners in the course, with other academics around the world, to use the content as a conduit for connections. Because once the course ends, the learning experience typically in a university setting typically stops. It's done. And even if you are really passionate about it, the university severs those connections on your behalf. But with the internet, those connections exist well past the course." But if your colleagues are blogging ... or are active on the internet, it's easy to stay connected. 6:05 HR question: In regard to Moodle are you using a Discussion Board or chat board, what parts of Moodle are you using? 6:12 "We are continuing to experime
