newspeak

I find Moocs at best problematical, not for the idea but for what I have learned is its sad implementation, seemingly rushed in most instance for reasons that have more to do with money (to get or its lack) than the desire to expand learning to actual communities. Moocs seem to me to exemplify a notion of the user as individual consumer. And unfortunately, that’s probably not incorrect for the majority of community college and college students, for whom the campus is probably less a community than the place one goes to for this or that class or text. Of course there are exceptions. And even places like York University, here in Canada, or Berkeley, where I went both as an undergraduate and graduate, are infamously anonymising and bereft of the sort of community smaller and more focused universities boast. (In my last years at Berkeley, I ran the SLED program that sought to provide discussion session community for students enrolled in huge lecture classes. That worked, but it was too early, 1997-1998.) But I found the below article interesting, if only for how the student consumer of the Mooc is characterised:

“Despite the fact that college students presumably would be greatly affected by widespread adoption of MOOCs in higher education, very little attention is paid to current college students’ perceptions and attitudes toward MOOCs,” write the authors. “It is heretofore unclear how familiar college students are with the MOOC concept and how they view MOOCs as a source of learning.”

Source: 6 concerns students have about MOOCs – eCampus News | eCampus News