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A few weeks ago, I decided to apply
to go back to college--to one of the 20 top liberal arts colleges in America. It
turned out to be deceptively simple: No SAT exams, no mammoth tuition fees, no huge
student loans, no nail-biting wait to see if I was admitted.
I simply signed up and now I’m
now taking a course at Wesleyan given by Michael Roth the President of the University,
a brilliant, entertaining lecturer, an expert, among other things on the
Enlightenment and
Modernist thought.
The current fees for tuition and housing
at Wesleyan are about $60,000 a year. I’m taking this course for free.
Wesleyan is located in Middletown
Connecticut. I’m taking the course in my home office in Paris. Professor Roth
is not here on sabbatical. He’s on my computer screen. Whenever I want him.
The course is a product of a brave new world of education called MOOC, which stands for Massive On Line
Courses. Massive indeed. I was one of more than 25,000 students across the
globe, of all ages, all nationalities, all with different goals, who signed up
to take this course which began last month.
This could be the beginning of
an enormous revolution in education. Or maybe just a very glitzy but ultimately
ineffectual technology. Rather
than write about it from the outside. I decided to sign up for a course myself.
I logged on to the site of
Coursera, a startup founded just a year
ago by two Stanford University professors, which now has more than three
million students taking 320 university courses in 210 countries.
I scrolled through the
catalogue of hundreds of on-line courses offered by professors from Stanford to
Cal Tech to Duke to the University of Pennsylvania—Astronomy, Advanced
Calculus, Marketing, Music, Art, Creative Writing, Computer Engineering.
One survey course given by Wesleyan University caught
my fancy: “Modernism and Post Modernism”.
We’d be covering the likes of
Kant, Marx, Manet, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Virginia Wolfe, and so on. The
last time I’d been confronted with such a challenging intellectual array was in
college fifty years ago. To my shame, I’ve shied away from such reading ever
since.
The course would be starting
in a few days. It would run for fourteen weeks.
Signing up on line took about
two minutes.
We’re now a little more than half
way through the course, and it’s been great. I’m already recommending it to friends.
There’s nothing to lose but your
own time.
This is the way it works: Ever
Monday, Professor Roth uploads an hour’s video lecture to the course site, the
lecture usually split into four 15 minute segments. Whenever they choose, course members simply log on, download
a segment, and watch it on their PC’s or laptops or IPads or whatever.
We’re not in the classroom
with the professor, true. Many years ago, my father paid a pile so I could
study at a top ivy-league university. I sat in cavernous lecture halls, often
with hundreds of other students, listening to different Great Minds on the
podium, scribbling notes as I tried to stay awake and keep up, jotting
something down even if I wasn’t sure I understood it. I had precious little
personal contact with those Great Minds.
I also take notes as Professor
Roth talks. He’s on the screen just in front of me, most of the time, full-frame,
dynamic, entertaining, comparing Emmanuel Kant with Jean Jacques Rousseau,
reading poetry by Baudelaire, analyzing Sigmund Freud.
But if I drift off or the
telephone rings, and I need to review what he’s said--no problem. I put the
professor on pause, go back a couple of minutes and play it again.
I also download written
material—essays or articles or books by the figures we are covering that week. That
material is also free.
True, most university courses
usually break down into sections, giving students the chance to discuss what
they’re studying face-to-face, directly with teaching assistants and each
other.
There’s no such possibility
with the kind of massive on line course I’m taking. Nor can we go personally to
the professor at the end of class or during office hours to ask our penetrating
questions.
On the other hand, there is an
on-line discussion forum that any of us, from anywhere on the planet, can log
on to and create a new “thread” related to the material we’re studying.
Some threads are predictably
pedestrian. Others, more provocative. “What would Karl Marx have thought of the
Arab Spring?”
The obvious interest and
maturity of many such threads keeps me reading, thinking, and commenting myself.
With some of my fellow students, a bond is already forming.
Several threads were launched
by students looking to hookup with others from their area to form their own
study groups—from India, New York City, Seattle Bulgaria, Melbourne, Turkey,
Iran. There are Spanish-speaking and Russian-speaking groups, but the most
active is : “the Online, Older Study Group.”
What about exams or tests? There
are 8 written assignments, limited to a maximum of 800 words, the subject given
by Professor Roth at the beginning of the week; the essay due about five days
later.
I do a lot of blogging, but I
was surprised by how warily I approached the task of writing a cogent 800-word
essay about such daunting figures as Darwin, Flaubert, or Nietzsche.
Because of the thousands of
people taking the course, there is no way that Professor Roth and his two
teaching assistants can grade the mountain of essays. Instead, we grade each
other.
After submitting our own
essay, I download the essays of three other students. i have no way of
knowing who they are, but, furnished with instructions on how to evaluate them,
I proceed to pass judgment. I
probably learn as much by agonizing over the essays of my peers as by writing
my own assignments.
I was also surprised by the
tightening in my gut as I logged on to the site to find out what kind of marks
my own essay received.
In a breathless blog, Coursera
has just notified me that, though their company is less than a year old, students
around the world have now signed up fro a “staggering 10 million courses.”
What Coursera doesn’t say, is
that, though millions may sign up for free courses, millions also drop out
before finishing. Of the 25,000 who signed up for the course I’m currently
taking, probably only about 10% will finish.
Where is this phenomenon
headed? If the courses are free, how can Coursera and the universities who are
flooding into this market make money?
What’s in it for them? What’s
really in it for the students?
And how am I going to deal
with the essay I’m supposed to write on Freud and Virginia Wolfe?
More on all that in my next
blog.