As computers become cheaper, more powerful, and more widespread, they are changing the focus of education, along with all parts of modern life. There are far more potential students than places in universities. So many bright and capable students have no opportunity of getting a seat in a school or college. Instead of standard school applications, students of all ages and locations are enrolling in MOOC or massive open online courses for free, such as the Shaw Academy.
What Is a Massive Open Online Course?
At the end of many of these courses, students who have completed tests and assignments can fill out an application for a certificate of completion. While these do not grant academic credit in the department that created the curriculum, many students can negotiate these certificates of completion for credit for prior learning or educational equivalency at the educational institution of their choice.
MOOCs aren’t set up for writing-intensive classes, but that could change through the use of peer-editing courses. It functions as online writing programs, much like a MOOC in many ways, teaching experienced writers the elements of search engine optimization to get their websites and articles noticed by Google crawlers.
Why Choose MOOC?
The course content is clear, well-structured, and easy to follow. There is an arbitrary textbook for anyone who wants to expand on the course concepts. The online course is accessible at any time and is available to the student. These are valuable supplemental learning assignments. You will find conversations to chat, share messages, comments, and interact with other students from around the world. You’ll find Meetup classes on Google Hangout or live meetings hosted in cities with significant numbers of members that students can coordinate and anyone can participate in.
Where Is MOOC Going From Here?
In addition to rendering translated variants in the de facto languages, a monumental area for potential development is the advanced ESL or EFL vocabulary support. It accompanies students whose language is not English, which could include language training, short-term message summaries, and simplified language structures, along with additional content-specific practice exercises.
These tremendous open online courses are also useful in neighborhood learning facilities in rural areas of developing countries, where facilities could be established to enable face-to-face or independent classroom learning. For example, agencies in Ghana (West Africa) are working to collect obsolete but still usable computers from U.S. companies to install in rural schools. It could become satellite learning facilities for the entire community, eliminating the need to build libraries and provide books in places where roads are rough and resources scarce.
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Opponents of online courses point out that, especially for teens in high school and young adults new to college, these skills are critical to success in the business world, where terms are nearly useless unless they are incorporated in compelling ways that enable them to scale and finance themselves. Acknowledging the validity of this perspective, some educators use MOOCs as part of the core course material in their regular on-campus classes and reverse engineer them so that students arrive at the planned course structure after working through the assigned segments of the MOOC.
The instructor can then build on this learning history to use class time for larger learning tasks, such as small group assignments or problem-solving. In the nearly five years since the first MOOCs appeared, teachers and students are just beginning to grasp the power and capability of this tool to create education that is free, global, and available to anyone, anytime.