MOOCs are used by different people with different requests. Today we offer to your attention the author’s opinion of A.J. Jacobs, the editor of Esquire magazine, and the author of the book “A Year Lived in Biblical”, quite famous in the West, about 7th grade math books online his experience of learning through MOOC.
Over the past few months I have taken some online courses and, you will not believe it, I have learned a lot of interesting things. It turns out that in 1932 a political conspiracy was uncovered in Japan, the instigators of which wanted to kill Charlie Chaplin; I was told this at a history course. During the course of genetics I learned that the ability to move our ears was inherited from our distant ancestors who were able to change the direction of the organs of hearing.
But guess what I learned in the first place? If you are a student of mass open online courses, such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, you’d better forget about direct contact with your teacher. The professor is as unavailable to students as the Pope. Most Coursera courses begin with a strong request to refrain from emailing your teacher. Students are asked not to “french” professors on Facebook. You would not believe it – if a student accidentally meets a faculty member on the street, he or she should pass by like nothing ever happened. After all, tens https://argoprep.com/blog/7th-grade-math-online-practice/ of thousands of students are taught by just one teacher!
At the beginning of the modern history course, our teacher, Professor of the University of Virginia, Philip D. Zelikov, explained that the best way to learn is through dialogues and discussions. But trouble is, students have absolutely no access to either dialogue or discussion.
On the other hand – how can one complain? After all, I get all the wisdom of Ivy League universities for free. It doesn’t matter if you live in Senegal or South Dakota, if you’re on a computer in the morning or near the night, if you’re a billionaire, or if you’re completely bankrupt – Harvard professors, MIT, and other universities have already recorded their lectures for you; you can study them, and at leisure you can do test work.
The popularity of MOOC courses is growing with the Big Bang: more than 5 million students around the world have already signed up for courses ranging from physics to Aboriginal world views.
And here is the paradox – online courses teachers are simultaneously the most accessible and the most inaccessible teachers in history. And this is not the only weirdness of MOOC-courses.
MOOC propagandists talk about these courses with such an aplomb that you might think – after the open lectures in the squares of ancient Athens we did not know any education, and so the Great MOOC appeared to free people from intellectual poverty. However, as always, there are skeptics – including Aron Badi, a doctoral student at the University of Berkeley and a blogger – who believe that the MOOC provides students with a “liquid” education, but gives politicians a reason to gut budgets of public universities.
To see everything for myself, I signed up for 11 courses. Most of them were within Coursera (if anyone doesn’t know, this project was founded in 2011 by two professors of computer science from Stanford University, and was funded mostly by the famous venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, John Derr). The https://argoprep.com/blog/kids-not-doing-homework-3-ways-to-win-the-homework-war/ rest of the courses were from edX and Udacity. So, here is my report on the current status of MOOC courses.
