The way in which degrees are taught is ever-changing. A recent such innovation in teaching has been the introduction of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. A number of universities in the UK have begun to offer these short online courses that do not provide any formal qualification, but have been said to encourage those who take them to move back into more structured education.
The University of York is not involved in this initiative. Many say this is a refusal to move with the times and to realise that in the internet age education must move into the online world.
So what exactly is a MOOC? A MOOC is a short online course that introduces a subject or topic in an accessible way – there are no educational requirements to take a MOOC.
The appeal of a MOOC is a strange one, because why would an internet literate person take a MOOC when all this information is available on the internet anyway? As MOOCs do not offer any formal qualification, how is the value of the course any greater than that of just someone flicking through Wikipedia? I would argue the value of the course comes from the course’s structure.
The internet age, and with it the freedom of information, has revolutionised the nature of learning. An argument now being made against formal education is that you waste three years of your life and £27,000 studying a degree, while the taught information is on the internet for free.
This may seem a compelling argument but anyone who goes to university should be aware of why this is a very unsound one.
The appeal of a university degree and now a MOOC is that a course at a university is structured and taught by a group of academics of a high level of education. This is the difference between a MOOC and a Wikipedia article – how many of us have looked for information on the internet and become frustrated because the relevant information was not there or it was laid out in an inaccessible way?
We need to remember that the value of education comes from the educator, not the information. Without structure information is just words. This is why MOOCs are valued more than a cursory look through Wikipedia, and also why they are not a good thing. When an academic gives a lecture, they have put a lot of time and effort into preparing and structuring that information, and this is also true of the person who made the MOOC. The key difference lies in that the lecturer is paid for the lecture, whereas every time someone accesses the MOOC, they will not be.
This is the problem we now face – the internet has changed our expectations; we increasingly wish to live in a world of free information, but if we carry on pursuing this ideological goal we run the risk of putting all those who actually give information value out of a job.
The University system works because of the hierarchy; we accept that professors are more knowledgeable than postgraduates and even more so than undergraduates. Free information undermines this because it does not distinguish between a Wikipedia article and an academic paper – it only sees information, not structure.
The reason we come to University is not because we do not think that we could have got all the information from books or the internet; it is because the academics add so much more than just the information. Their time and effort illuminates so much more, and discussions in seminars bring topics to life in the way the internet simply cannot.
Personally, I am glad that York has refused to be involved with the MOOCs. We need to realise why a University education has more value than just going online, because as more and more of us expect free information, the value of education will deteriorate. MOOCs seem to represent an increasing fundamentalist attitude now academics are expected to add value to information for free.
We need to remember that academics are professionals, and we need to value them as such and remember the importance that they have when it comes to education.