The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offering a
new certificate option for a popular online philosophy course through its MITx
platform. It’s the first massive open online course (MOOC) to provide students
with the opportunity to have written assignments graded by professional
philosophers.
“Listening to lectures and reading books is great, but
philosophy is all about taking complex ideas and organizing them in a simple
way,” Caspar Hare, the MIT professor running the course, said in an article for eCampus News. “You learn by writing, specifically writing to someone.”
Philosophy: God Knowledge and Consciousness introduces students
to the basic topics considered by philosophers and the development of critical
reasoning and argumentative skills. Writing helps combine those skills and
feedback from trained philosophers lets students know how well they actually understood
the material.
“Writing
is essential to developing these skills,” Hare continued. “Just answering
multiple-choice questions isn’t enough. You need to interact and bounce ideas
off of other people. And from MIT’s perspective, the new feature helps bring to
light different ideas from people with different cultural backgrounds. Writing
enables these insights to pass through the community, which benefits everyone.”