The Hinckley Institute Radio Hour (Air date: June 18, 2014) – Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have appeared on the digital landscape promising to make education more efficient, convenient, and cheaper. Udacity and Coursera, two Silicon Valley start-ups offer free education through MOOCs, although they still struggle to find an effective business model. Needless to say, traditional higher education institutions are skeptical and concerned about how this information technology shift will impact their existing model. Schools like the University of Utah now offer MOOCs, which have unlimited enrollment and are offered on a variety of subjects. Still, critics say they limit human-to-human connections, that there’s no way to measure their effectiveness, and that they can never replace the experience of “the great lecture” in a classroom.
This Hinckley Institute Radio Hour was recorded live with an audience of students on March 4, 2013. The panelists include: David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psych and Tech at Brigham Young University, Jason Pickavance, Director of Educational Initiatives with Salt Lake Community College, Jack Newel, Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, and Fernando Rubio, Associate Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Utah. The moderator is Dean of the University of Utah’s Honors College Sylvia Torti.
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1 Comments
What a load of garbage. If you are an unselfactualized teen, I could agree–in part–with the face to face aspect of this argument. But that’s it. The argument against this is nothing but a weak attempt to justify the horrendously expensive cost of “Higher Learning”. Welcome to the 21st century.