Week 5 of our EDC course has ended and we are well on our way exploring MOOCs. In my case, I’ve been developing ideas for my course on songwriting. So far I’ve been learning about a variety of tools I can use to write a song in a very structured process. As the course progresses people are using the discussion boards more and more which will be interesting to see over the following weeks as I work on my ethnography.
In our Hangout this week we discussed the ethics of researching within MOOCs as well as the chapter on netnographies by Kozinets which I found particularly useful as reading it somehow felt like I was seeing knowledge I had intuitively gathered from my own experience verbalised in a very distinct fashion. My classmate PJ developed an excellent summary of Kozinets’ main talking points which I’ll gladly use as a reference in developing my netnography.
Considering the wider issues of the future of education I stumbled upon three interesting pieces online which I felt were worth sharing on my lifestream. One was a TED talk by Brazilian entrepeneur Ricardo Semler who has chosen to use wisdom has his guiding force in life, running his company very successfully with a radical focus on participation and transparency. With this democratic ethos in mind turned his attention towards education to improve the way schools are run and children are taught. The results so far seem to be very promising.
Another article I stumbled upon was about how Coursera has recently started to collaborate with tech industry giants Goolge and Instagram as accreditors for their online courses. While there are reasonable objections to be raised here – the most striking one being that the tech companies are essentially outsourcing business projects to students and paying with their good name. They’re profiting heavily from the vast problem solving capacity of crowdsourced MOOCs while the students are merely rewarded with an “accredited by Google” stamp they can put on their CV. Nonetheless, it is good to see MOOC providers finding revenue models to sustain their business without resorting to tuition.
Finally, I found a guest editorial by Bill Gates on The Verge about the future of online courses and their possible effects on the developing world – a well rounded analysis of the promises and challenges that lie ahead in trying to educate students in the third world by means of educational technologies.