I came across an interesting link the
other day around "MOOCs".
Think Khan Academy on 'roids. I'm embarrassed to say that when I was reading this article, I was excited in
quite possibly the nerdiest way possible-- complete with shaky hands and semi
hyperventilating-type breathing (this is how us nerds show excitement,
apparently, since it's kind of unacceptable to throw papers up in the air and
frankly hard to do when you're buried under old D&D cards, articles about
the new Avengers
vs. X-Men comic release and your friends on the WoW chat set won't stop
harassing you). But I digress.
MOOC stands for "Massive Online Open
Courses" and has been catching like a fever (for which the only cure is
more cowbell) across the country. All the big names are in on it-- Stanford,
MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology. But there are also a lot of new
players-- with fun start-up-y names like Udemy, Udacity and Change11. Some are
proprietary (Change11 for example is the in-house sourcer for GIT's classes). The
concept seems almost too good to be true. Stanford, for example, hosted a class
called "Building a Search Engine", but unlike normal online courses
that are usually a scam, and taught by the guy that looks suspiciously like the
homeless guy on your corner that talks to half-eaten hamburgers like they were
his lost puppy called "Toto", these classes are taught by some super
impressive people. (Though, I guess that any guy who can have a 10 minute
conversation with a half-eaten hamburger, thinking it's his long- lost pet and
then eat it, is also kind of
impressive. I shouldn't even attempt to define what is impressive and what is
not... who am I to decide?!) So, in my
opinion, impressive people. You know, people like Sebastian Thrun and David
Evans-- a Google fellow and a professor on leave from the University of
Virginia.
Hosted by Udacity, a for-profit startup
who is hosting the course, this course opened for registration on January 23rd.
Since then, more than 90,000 students have enrolled in this course. I'm sure
that some people are interested in learning how to build a search engine, but I
bet they really just want to know more about creating a self driving
car...which, oh wait, Mr. Thrun developed while he was at Google. (Again, not
trying to push my beliefs on what's impressive here... I'm just saying.)
I for one, tried out some classes at MIT's OCW (Open Courseware, which is
soon going to become MITx), most notably the "Global Strategy and
Organization" and it was actually pretty easy to use. Some of the courses
come with just lecture notes and assignments (sometimes with solutions and
sometimes without) and others come with lecture notes, assignments and an
audio/video component. I also tried "Creating 'Breakthrough' Products and
Services", which had an audio/video component, and I found that it was
much easier to get into, if a little annoying to keep going back to the
audio/video stuff posted online.
This new method of learning is super
exciting to me for several reasons. A.) Now I can pretend to be smart and
educated like all those other kids who got into smart schools like MIT and
Stanford, B.) There's a whole new world of opportunity now for people who want
to be pretentious and say they went to Stanford when what they really meant to
say was "Stanford online courses" and that possibility makes me wish
that I went on blind dates and finally, C.) I really like the idea that by
creating these massive courses, we as a society are making a strong movement in
levelling the educational playing field (I can't really preach here, because I
went to Notre Dame, but I have to be honest that if it weren't for a
scholarship, I would never have been able to afford higher education). For a
really long time, it has always been an equation of more money=good education,
no money= community college if you're lucky, and with the emergence of this
type of learning system, we could really be on the brink of changing that
equation for good. If people are more educated, we could begin to see a big
change in social mobility, which would lead to more perspectives at the higher
levels of business and technology, which I think is probably pretty critical to
making innovation happen. On the flip side, when we realize that education
should really be measured more qualitatively than quantitatively, I think the
inflation of tuition will decrease and less emphasis will be placed on the big
brand names when hiring. Fast Company has already noticed that this may be
happening with gaming
company IGN, who has begun to look outside of the major coding hubs for
their next generation of game developers. Just sayin'. So yay for us. Go team!
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