This is an initial analysis of some of the issues in Massive-on line
education MOOC as advocated by Jerry Brown in place of adequately funding higher
education.
Geoff Shullenberger
"In the MOOC philosophy, education is
understood fundamentally as a transfer of information, in line with the
computational understanding of cognition in which the mind is a processing
device being fed input and generating output. This is a twenty-first-century
version of what Paulo Freire called the “banking method of education,” a model
that Deweyan humanists and practitioners of critical pedagogy have long
repudiated as reactionary and disempowering.
Open Online Courses (MOOCs) they offer.
The New York Times education section dubbed 2012 “The Year of the
MOOC,” and the paper’s celebrity columnists Thomas Friedman and
David Brooks have been hailing MOOCs as a “revolution”
and a “tsunami.”
Time announced in a
cover article on MOOCs that “College is Dead. Long Live College!”
and USA Today assured us
somewhat less hyperbolically that “college may never be the same.”
Editor’s note. I am an ardent advocate of the use of
technology in promoting quality education, but that is not the same as
MOOCs. To examine the
differences I took one of the MOOCs courses from Stanford. It was clearly pre collegiate in
nature.
In my own professional life and in my book, Choosing
Democracy, I argue for both critical thinking and the development of strong
democracy. MOOCs courses promote
neither. They are best suited to a
very fixed nature of learning, usually able to behaviorize such as math or other sequential
learning.
See also the NYTimes editorial on this development. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html?emc=eta1
See also the NYTimes editorial on this development. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html?emc=eta1
No comments:
Post a Comment