Picture this. You're in a Harvard classroom, taking in a spellbinding lecture on financial economics. Whenever you don't get something, you can pause and rewind, controlling the Nobel-Prize-winning professor with your fingertips. In this class, there's no homework and no pressure for exams, just pure unadulterated learning for any topic you fancy. It seems like a learner's heaven, but anyone with an internet connection from Maldives to Makati can now attend Harvard and other top schools. Very few people are taking notice, but I think it's one of the biggest revolutions of our time.
Computers are often villified as time-suckers and 'electronic opium.' There's this impression especially among older parents that computers are no different from video game machines and that they should keep their kids as far away from it as possible. In reality, there's no more escaping the computer revolution. It's as ubiquitous as it is powerful, and we should simply find the most balanced and productive use of it. Marc Andreesen, the inventor of the internet browser, declared in a recent Wall Street Journal article that "software is eating the world." Indeed, digital technology continues to disrupt every facet of our lives, from how we know about friends and current events, to how we work and play. In just a decade, it has flattened organizations, toppled governments, and shrunk the world. Whoever is stuck in the old paradigms has to adapt or risk being 'eaten'. Schools are no exception. They are finally rolling with the times after sticking with more or less the same methods for the past five hundred years.
Free online courses are proliferating fast. In addition to the Ivy League universities, world-class institutions like Stanford, MIT, and UCLA are also extending their reach online. I myself have finished a few of them already: philosophy and computer science at Harvard, finance and psychology at Yale, history at UCLA... These are universities with annual tuition fees in the millions of pesos, but I've already taken five courses at the convenience of my home without even spending a cent.
The wonders of online education isn't just exclusive to the walls of the university. Salman Khan, who founded the Khan Academy to address the study needs of high school students, believes that online education is so effective that we could actually 'reverse the classroom.' His idea shakes the very concept of school itself. It goes without thinking that students listen to teachers in the classroom and do homework at home. In Khan's vision however, students watch video lectures at home at their own pace. They can pause and repeat when they don't understand without feeling embarrassed in front of their classmates. Teachers can then take on a new, more managerial role in the classroom. They can split class time between organizing class activities to apply the lessons, and guiding students to keep them up to speed with their homework. Khan did a pilot run of this radical idea in a California public school and it resulted in a significant performance increase, especially for those students in the middle of the pack who normally get left behind.
The Khan Academy has over 3000 lectures spanning algebra, advanced calculus, science, geography, and even art history. I've seen my little brother use it for his biology class, and I saw how effective it could be. I then realized that those lectures can be even more helpful for adults who have been out of school for many years and simply want to refresh on their high school lessons.
The Philippines can benefit greatly from online education. We are perpetually suffering from a shortage of classrooms and a lack of qualified teachers. Smart investment on IT infrastructure can augment some of that. Maybe the government should partner with local internet cafes in the provinces to achieve scale faster. Maybe top local universities like Ateneo and UP can start recording lectures of their best professors and distribute them online for free. With the elites enrolled in top instituitions essentially subsidizing learning for everyone else, online education can be a huge democratizing force for society.
With around half the population already online, internet access has reached critical mass in our country. The problem is that people still continue to see the computer mainly as an entertainment device. Take just half an hour away each day from Facebook or gaming and pour that to an online lecture, and you could finish up to 9 university courses a year. If only more students realize that the internet has already erased the barriers to a good education. If only more people know that the world's best educators are just a few mouse clicks away, ready to open their minds.
Some websites to start: www.khanacademy.com for high school lectures, www.coursera.com amd www.academicearth.com for university-level courses
5 comments:
As usual, your post is shallow and just follows trends, which is why it and you will never be great. To be great you have to think differently and be truly good at something in order to be able to show how something can be thought of differently. Technology posts that so many other people write about in much better ways just does not cut it. Your post here on online education is misleading. MOOCs are hotly debated issues here. Many of the best minds in the very universities where you claim to have finished courses question the whole idea. Just because MIT, Yale, etc have started it doesn't mean their intellectual community wholy embraces it. Taking an online course is still no substitute for being in class and getting a degree. Will a company hire you on the basis of your claim that you watched an online course? Even if you did take online courses I still doubt and the world probably doubts too if you are credible in the fields you mentioned. How about the social value of being in a classroom or school and meeting people? Something you like to reminisce about? Why criticize people who don't take up internet education because it is free? Haven't you forgotten that access to internet is a luxury and even if you did, time to go through the lectures plus understanding them (especially if they are in academic language, not to mention a question of english proficiency) is another luxury that requires schooling in most cases. Your point of view is utterly unrefreshing and best described as pretending-to-be-revolutionary-when-it's-really-just-jumping-on-the-bandwagon. Get a subscription of Chronicle of Higher Education and you'll know your point of view about MOOCs is seriously flawed and disconnected to the real world. Most importantly, have a sense of commitment because having a mediocre brain plus a weak commitment to anything is a recipe for insignificance.
Thanks for the insightful and provocative comment. I agree that online education is not a panacea for all the troubles facing higher education. Indeed, there is no substitute to the level of interaction, rich networking opportunities, and credibility provided by actually attending courses. But this is starting to change. Some online education websites distribute these lectures for free, but charge money if you want to get a certification from the school. Of course, it will take time before these will be socially recognized, but I believe it will happen sooner than we think. The value of live education is undoubtedly great but it continues to be a luxury experienced almost exclusively by the intellectual and financial elites. What about for the 99%? Free online education can somehow level the playing field for them by augmenting the subpar education they might be getting. The next concern is whether these people have the intellectual foundation for these courses, but try watching any Khan Academy lecture or even surprisingly the Ivy League courses, and you will see that these educators are so gifted that they can make complicated concepts accessible and easy to digest. IT infrastructure is admittedly still a major concern, but this is also changing fast. At least for the hundreds of thousands of lower middle-class students enrolled in second or third-tier colleges, they can reap the value of online education now. As I also mentioned, the same goes for those who have been out of school for awhile or those who simply want to explore other interests. I don't mind writing about something which is unrefresing and un-revolutionary when many people don't even have the awareness, so I think the most important thing right now is to first be aware of the value of online education and to have a big picture sense of its potential.
If I am right that Western education remains the gold standard of the world, here what is prized is critical thinking achieved through discussion and interaction between student and professors. No matter how brilliant the speakers are, my point is, people like you are prone to absorb the things you listen to easily. There is no medium here for the questioning and exchange of ideas. And you might think it will come upon us soon but again you miss my point. It will have to overcome the many intellectuals here who are against it and it requires infrastructure and opportunities of money and time that are still not available to most people in this world. Not to mention that the social value of being in a university or school remains prized. I listen to you give praise to the people whose lectures you listen to. But here that's not what education is all about. We learn to question the ideas of people even from Harvard, Yale. We don't get IMPRESSED easily. If it does push through sooner it will be because admin want to and likely for reasons not related to real education but for promotional purposes and conceivably for financial reasons.
well, not posting the reply to the reply is quite convenient of you so that you have the last word. let me write more amicably so that you do not take it as a personal attack. my point is you see MOOC's from one very narrow perspective (which is tinged with a jump-on-a-bandwagon [especially if it's technology-related] mentality very typical of you). You fail to see that MOOC's could very kill the very academic community that allows you to listen to great lectures from learned professors. First, US higher education is now suffering from loads of increasing budget cuts. More and more positions are no longer tenured. People (new phds) are hired to teach as adjuncts with no job security. Budget cuts also decrease funding for new graduate students who will be the future of the academe without whom you could not listen to lectures. Universities here are increasingly being run by corporate people who want to make the universities profitable (in short promoting sciences and business) at the expense of liberal arts (which you profess to admire and be proud of). MOOCs are part of this corporate move. Why don't you go search some things like the SIU faculty strike? Or the attempt to fire the president of the University of Virginia because she wasn't into MOOC? Many of these issues show that liberal arts are under attack from the increasing drive to make schools profitable. MOOCs hardly help. Should they one day be institutionalized, they will justify management decisions to cut staff. Because you don't need so many staff to teach as many classes since one person can lecture to thousands of people watching him/her online. It means a shrinkage in the number of scholars per department who have the luxury of tenure to conduct the very research and writing that advances our knowledge and produces critical insights into our world. You need to see MOOCs in conjunction with all these other facets of what is going on in higher education now in the US and elsewhere. But you obviously cannot. Myopic in your usual ephemeral excitement over something and gushing with some kind of claimed but false expertise (which results in your bold claim that this is the future). Your Ateneo education would have warned you against such simple one-note predictions and teaching you instead to see things more holistically and to understand things as complex. But what else is there to expect from you?
Thanks for the insightful and provocative comment. I agree that online education is not a panacea for all the troubles facing higher education. Indeed, there is no substitute to the level of interaction, rich networking opportunities, and credibility provided by actually attending courses. But this is starting to change. Some online education websites distribute these lectures for free, but charge money if you want to get a certification from the school. Of course, it will take time before these will be socially recognized, but I believe it will happen sooner than we think. The value of live education is undoubtedly great but it continues to be a luxury experienced almost exclusively by the intellectual and financial elites. What about for the 99%? Free online education can somehow level the playing field for them by augmenting the subpar education they might be getting. The next concern is whether these people have the intellectual foundation for these courses, but try watching any Khan Academy lecture or even surprisingly the Ivy League courses, and you will see that these educators are so gifted that they can make complicated concepts accessible and easy to digest. IT infrastructure is admittedly still a major concern, but this is also changing fast. At least for the hundreds of thousands of lower middle-class students enrolled in second or third-tier colleges, they can reap the value of online education now. As I also mentioned, the same goes for those who have been out of school for awhile or those who simply want to explore other interests. I don't mind writing about something which is unrefresing and un-revolutionary when many people don't even have the awareness, so I think the most important thing right now is to first be aware of the value of online education and to have a big picture sense of its potential.
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