MOOCs versus Universities

Software	None
Covers	Role of technology in education
Skills Required	Interest in education, interest in psychology of learning
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

MOOCs? Universities? University MOOCs? MOOC Universities?

Distance education is nothing new. The Open University is fifty years old. But a lot of more traditional institutions including De Montfort University are now providing distance education alongside classroom instruction, and many universities are providing online versions of courses that people can take for free. And online-only or distance education in subjects traditionally associated with going to university is increasingly offered by businesses. The Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022 pushed a lot of people into doing some online studying who wouldn't have considered it before, including people who were and wanted to be on-campus students. So what does the future look like, if going to university isn't the only way to get university-level knowledge, or even the easiest or cheapest?

But studying can often be enhanced by not being done alone. And students only spend half their waking hours studying, or less, and the other half matters enormously to the quality of people's lives as well as how well the university experience prepares them for the rest of their lives. At good universities, the experience of being there is enormously enriching, if people reach out and take what is there for them.

Providing a good educational experience involves looking at the differing needs and desires of different kinds of learners, and trying to cater for these differing needs or consciously specialising in a subset. It also involves solving problems at different levels: regulation by governments and validating bodies; the procedures and regulations of educational institutions, and how they organize courses and qualifications; how they deliver education; what physical resources such as buildings and equipment they need and offer to students; how (if at all) they support individual students; how (if at all) they facilitate social contact and collaboration within courses; and how (if at all) they facilitate social interaction and collective student activities beyond individual courses. And what attitudes and social behaviours do students need to gain from what the course and the institution offer them?

How can computer technology contribute to a good student experience? What else is needed?

Variants

You can consider how to use computer technology to organize or provide college-level education one of several different perspectives. You may wish to look at a particular discipine or the characteristics and needs of one country, or take a comparative perspective.

MOOCs How can providers of massive open online courses provide a good education in a particular subject? What trade-offs do they need to consider between cost and individual needs and catering for a diverse student body? How can they address these problems?
Universities Universities are very expensive to run, and are no longer the only providers of high-level education. How can they provide the added value beyond what is readily available in books and online resources to justify students in going to them? How can they leverage computer aided learning, online content, and so on, to do this better? How can they use computer technology for this?
University MOOCs How can universities whose main business is educating on-campus students do a better job of providing a good education to distance learners? How can they do this cost-effectively? How can they foster interaction between students? What problems have technological solutions, social solutions, or administrative solutions?
MOOC Universities The growth of providers like Coursera and Udemy is leading to a situation where doing a degree-equivalent programme of study entirely through MOOCs is or soon will be feasible. What is involved in enabling this? What is involved in giving students recognized qualifications? (Ought these to be degrees, or only degrees?)

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