Can MOOCs Offer A Viable Alternative To Traditional Education
Over the past five years, there has been a terrific rise in the popularity of online courses available over the internet. Dubbed MOOC for Massively Open Online Courses, this medium of learning has taken over virtual classrooms and distant education platforms as a viable alternative to the traditional classroom systems. So how exactly does MOOC work?
Remote learning, in the traditional sense, referred to universities sending study materials to their students through postal mail. Over time, with the advent of technology, classroom sessions began to be streamed over the internet or satellite to students located in other locations. However, these platforms had their own disadvantages. While the former method completely removed the student-teacher interaction that is necessary for proper transmission of knowledge, the latter method required extensive investment and was also difficult to be accessed by students from remote locations that either were in a different time zone or did not have sufficient infrastructure to access the live feed.
MOOC is thus a cheap and efficient alternative to the other forms of remote learning. With MOOC, the students accessing the classroom only require an internet connection. Also, unlike satellite streaming, MOOC courses are stored on third party servers so that students may access the courses at their convenience.
Besides universities, a number of third party organizations today offer courses on various subjects through MOOC. Khan Academy, one of the leading non-profit organizations in this segment, reaches out to over 10 million students every month with more than 300 million lessons delivered till date. Coursera, another third party MOOC service which operates on profit, has nearly 7.1 million registered learners on the service.
The MOOC industry is still at its infancy with a majority of learners still from the first world or in third world countries through the support of help-groups. However, for the industry to mature, there needs to be a public-private partnership that will enable governments to involve private enterprises in infrastructure building. For instance, AllStream, one of the leading broadband operators in Canada has recently announced that their nearly 30,000 kilometers of optic fiber across the country will be used to connect universities with remote locations of the country to help in education. Similarly private institutions like Harvard, Stanford and MIT have tied up with various governments to make their courses available as MOOC to the outside world.
The future is definitely bright for MOOC. The New York Times declared the year 2012 as the “Year of the MOOC”. With better infrastructure and greater cooperation among various governments, the real benefits from MOOC will be reaped by students from the impoverished regions of the world who may not afford to study at Harvard or MIT in their lifetimes.
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