Size
matters when it comes to developing enhancements for college and university
courses, in the view of an Inside Higher
Education contributor who has taken multiple massive open online courses,
better known as MOOCs.
In educational
researcher Jonathan Haber’s opinion, the “massive” aspect of MOOCs allows
schools to spread the cost of high-tech wizardry across many more students. One
of his MOOCs, for example, included videos of a number of professors discussing
Chinese art and history on location in various museums and sites around the
world.
“Try
getting the budget to do that for a 50-person live class,” he wrote.
A MOOC’s
inherent hugeness also means a large number of the enrollees already possess a
degree, raising the quality of discourse about the class subject. In a
Shakespeare MOOC, Haber had a question about Greek mythology relating to Troilus and Cressida, and got a prompt response
from another MOOC-taker.
“Try
finding that level of expertise in a class full of 18-19-year-olds,” he said.
Haber took
a variety of MOOCs in an effort to show that it was possible to accumulate the
equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in the space of 12 months.