Education globally is undergoing a profound shift in emphasis from teaching to education. Much of this is related to the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) that are generating both excitement and concern around the role of digital technology. After numerous years of false starts, universities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford have cracked early elements of a broader code to achievement. Enterprises like Coursera, Udacity and EdX are partnering with these and many other universities to launch classes connecting faculty and students around the globe.
The achievement stories are inspiring. Last year more than 150,000 people signed up for MIT's first MOOC on "circuits and electronics," in which a teenage boy from Mongolia achieved a perfect score. Coursera at the present has nearly 5 million students taking 400 courses in seven languages. In the meantime Michael Sandel's online Harvard ethics class is so popular that he has achieved celebrity status in countries like Korea and China, thousands of miles away from his Massachusetts lecture hall.
The backdrop is a university delivery method that had changed little over numerous centuries. We can call it the "One to N" experience, meaning one teacher in a room, standing in front of some N number of students. In the past, a small N has been preferred for its richer presumed student-teacher interaction, though this is subject to luck regarding the quality of the relevant professor. Nowadays the formula has been flipped. MOOC efforts centre on both growing the N and preventing the role of luck. The core idea is that any number of people, even millions at a time, has to be able to take a course with the best university lecturers in the world.
The natural worry is that large-N courses become moreover mechanized, sacrificing quality for quantity. World class lectures may help students in the first instance, other than if a million people take the same class then only a little fraction get the chance to interact with the lecturer. What are the broader social learning consequences if a million students "go to school" together via an equal number of dissimilar video screens scattered around the world? How may the institutions without superstar professors survive?
The experience can prompt to recognize and discard own "One to N" presumptions. It also led to recognize as a minimum five distinct learning products that modern university learning systems require providing, each with its own formula of providers and participants.
Motivation: This is the winner-take-all empire of the superstar professors and lends itself to "One to Large-N" experiences. Students feel marvellous inspiration by being able to access live lectures given by world leaders in any particular field. For instance-In a class on genetics, students will expected want to listen to legendary MIT professor like Eric Lander, pioneer behind the Human Genome Project. Though only a few of the massive-N audience are able to ask live questions, being part of an interactive classroom with a world leader can rapid a sense of accessibility and motivation for further study of which previous generations might only dream.
Explanation: The most famous researchers and professors are not of necessity the best explainers of material. People like as Salman Khan of Khan Academy and Hans Rosling of Gapminder have developed enormous global followings by pioneering innovative ways of explanation on topics through online videos. Evenly importantly, there is no single best means of explanation for any topic, as students have so many different learning styles. Therefore this is also a One to Large-N product, but one might differ for each student in each subject. As the global library of online explanations grows, students would have even more opportunities to find out the best One for them.
Tutorship: This is where the N gets small once more. Still with access to the worlds most inspiring and lucid instructors, students still require the opportunity to ask questions, feel openly engaged and explore certain topics in more detail with a lecturer who has mastered the material. MOOCs do not kill local classroom; they just focus its role. The local lecturers' monopoly on content provision is over, but their role in enhancing learning is more targeted and open to be enhanced.
Interaction:
Students wants a chance to talk about concepts among themselves. This seems to grow in importance as they mature and obtain greater autonomy and skepticism towards authority figures, including during professional experience. A relevant generational shift may also be underway for youth who have grown-up up with the world's information at their digital fingertips. This learning is "N to N" among students themselves. The scale of group depends on the means of interaction. In-person groups are scale to local class size. Online interactions be able to be as vast as any platform allows.
Feedback: Most people are grateful for objective comments when framed in the right tone. Learning outcomes require to be assessed, so that students can appreciate their own progress and how to improve. Usually this has come down to grading, where N was constrained by an individual instructor's available time. Technology is fast improving in this realm, with new machine-reading technologies still marking essays. It is uncertain how far automated grading can go, other than the odds are that it would soon cover a larger N with higher quality than most of us currently imagine. One potential implication is that local professors would shift time allocations from ex-post evaluation towards ex-ante coaching. In its place of "how did you do yesterday?" the question becomes "how can you do better tomorrow?"
These aspects may well be universal. However, one ought to be cautious in predicting trends in a realm subject to such profound innovation. The changes might reshape many universities' core business models. But the key point is that this suggests death of neither the university nor of the classroom. In its place it should be seen as a source for targeted renewal. As the ancient overarching One to N model is unbundled, institutions and professors can process their products to compete on the areas where their relative offerings are best. Some schools may face a hard time keeping pace with the want for change. At the end, where things go well, outcome must be dramatically improved opportunities for those who substance most: the students of generations to come.