MOOCS and the Future of Education Essay

All Students, Regardless of Social Status, Race, Gender, or Minority, Have Equal Opportunity to Pursue a High Quality Education

Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera and professor at Stanford University, gave a talk at TEDGlobal in 2012. The audience involved a variety of people with different backgrounds and levels of understand of technology. Nonetheless, she ensure the topic was well suited to the entire audience.

Getting into college are the goal for many students, yet MOOCs are a much cheaper option for students who are ready for the material and the challenge. Cristina mendoza is one of three students, along with James Gregory, and Hugh Gallagher, who’s goals are to go into into a good college and acheive success in life. She is one of many smart and diverse people who are capable of completing a MOOC. There are many things, such as her acceptance of her diverse nature, her smarts, and uniquness of her work shows that she is the most capable of taking part in and completing a online learning environment successfully.

The system of higher education in America could be in trouble. Due to dramatic change in what society values, they could soon be under attack. In the two articles that I analyzed, these issues were discussed in further detail. The first article was titled, “The Future of College” and was written by Graeme Wood. Its purpose was to draw attention to a new approach at education. The second article, “The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities”, written by Gary King and Maya Sen, focused on the obstacles that universities are facing and gave suggestions of ways to overcome them. Along with this, both articles, addressed what education may look like in the future. With the development of technology and information from new studies, many wonder what the outcome could be. Will lecture style classes remain? Could higher education convert to a completely online experience? What is the most effective teaching method? In the first article, Wood argues for a completely online education. Whereas, the other article believes that universities need to focus on the importance of research. However, students learn in different ways, therefore, today’s higher education institutes should offer a variety of instructional methods.

Today, the Missouri Online Colleges is one of the country's largestt pushed direction relationship, with more than 77,200 understudies on four grounds and an Extension program with exercises in each region of the state. The Missouri Online Colleges keeps impacting Missouri and its local people in each territory, dependably.

Even with these disadvantages, Massive Open Online Courses are still a positive aspect for the current and future online students because with the free and easily accessible MOOCS classes, perspective online students have an alternative to education and it’s free! In order for the online universities to stay competitive, it is likely that MOOCS may force online universities to significantly lower online courses that are for credit (Casement, 2013).

In the article, “The Year of the MOOC,” by Laura Pappano, I think that James Gregory would be the best applicant to take open online courses. I think that James has the character and the correct mindset, that will help him accomplish anything he wants to accomplish.

In the article, “Year of the MOOC”, by Laura Pappano, she states that “some students are also ill prepared for the university level work”. This means that students aren’t ready for a MOOC assignment. After looking over, “Chunky Peanut Butter” by James Gregory, I believe that Gregory would be an amazing applicant for MOOCs (massive open online course) because he’s determined, selfless, and works out of the public view.

The University of Florida’s (UoF) realization that brick and mortar schools no longer serve as the only means to attaining a higher education established an institutional paradigm shift (Kuhn, 2012) on education delivery. The university’s evolution of an online education developed alongside the growth of technology (Blocher, DeMontes, Willis, & Tucker, 2002) and the needs of the community (University of Florida, Distance Learning, 2016). For the UoF, online programs began transforming as early as 1947 when challenged to adapt during world events such as the need to deliver GED home study courses to nearly 6,000 immigrants (University of Florida, History, 2016). In years that followed, an increasingly competitive environment (Volery & Lord, 2000) led to the video taping of lectures in 1991 and to the online courses and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that initiated in 2013. In its early development MOOCs were housed under the Coursera website since it provided an opportunity to test online courses (Coursera.com, 2016; College Factual, 2016). Today, the UoF houses both MOOCs and online programs within the Division of Continuing Education (DCE), which the university established in 2009 and dedicated full-time faculty to it due to the steady growth of online education (University of Florida, Distance and Continuing Education, 2016).

MOOC providers have created video lectures, readings, and problem sets that seek to modify, and in some cases, replace entirely the need for a physical campus to complete a degree in higher education. The most notable MOOCs, Coursera, Udacity, and edX, emerged in 2012, “The Year of the MOOC” according to the New York Times, and have since attracted millions of registered students. Coursera and Udacity are both for-profit spin-offs from Stanford that offer a wide variety of courses taught by professors from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, such as Stanford itself, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto. edX, on the other hand, is a non-profit partnership of MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley that offers both a platform that universities can customize to create their own courses, as well as a range of courses that are pre-developed by edX. In many cases, MOOCs are offered for free, incentivizing students to expand their knowledge with essentially nothing to lose. In other instances, when MOOCs have partnered with educational institutions to supplement or replace a physical classroom education, the MOOCs are offered for credit and at a lower cost than an in-person education.

In today’s society, so many people are continuing their education beyond high school. We realize that in order to make a decent living, a degree is most likely a requirement. In some cases even a bachelor’s degree is not enough to qualify for many positions. Nevertheless, thanks to technology, we now have the option to learn online or in a traditional classroom setting. There are very few differences between the two, and students need to understand that as much time and energy will need to be devoted to the online courses as on a campus. “A 2010 meta-analysis and review of online-learning studies concluded that online learning was as good as or slightly more effective than traditional face-to-face instruction” (Mendenhall, 2011).

Computer based learning, as it stands, has plenty of disadvantages, but many in business and educational arenas remain optimistic about its future. There are two indisputable truths about computer-based learning, or e-learning. First, it will revolutionize education and second, such a future is just around the block. Educational experts agree that most types of study are not yet effective when delivered purely online, mainly because of bandwidth limitations, expensive set-up costs, continued resistance to the medium and a shortage of quality course content.

It is no secret that technology plays a critical role in our society. In fact, it has become one of the most used items in the world, starting from personal computers and ending in smartphones, thus it was only a matter of time when educational institutions would start to utilize these gadgets in order to improve the overall state of current education. According to a U.S Department of Education (UDE, n.d) report, all 48 states, including the District of Columbia are now offering online education. Additionally, the report states that these schools operate on all kinds of scales, including state scale, district scale and charter scale, thus it would safe to assume that the whole state of current education in the United States is large and the whole approach is clearly technology based. However, despite the

Technology is changing every aspect in our lives, even the way we learn. Online classes are a rapidly growing trend it today’s society. Online classes are a cost-effective substitute for traditional courses and more convenient for many, so more schools and universities are offering this option. Due to the increase in online course enrollment, people are questioning if students truly learn something from online classes because it’s not a traditional learning environment. Online classes are just, if not more, effective as traditional classes because grades have increased and online discussions provide students with the chance to interact through networking while earning a degree for less than what it would cost to enroll at the same university.

(“Online Classes”). Due to the increase of young adults taking online courses, researchers have been able to collect data to compare the grades of online learners to the grades of those learning in the classroom. According to the article published by the University of the Potomac, 90% of students will successfully reach higher achievements beyond what traditional in-class students will attain (“Online Classes”).