5 Smooches of MOOCs
I just posted a piece (here) about massive open online courses or MOOCs on www.bigbeacon.org. The piece is entitled MOOCs, Moola, and Love: 5 Smooches of MOOCs, and in it I consider why students are signing up in droves for these courses and how these ideas connect to the emotional/cultural emphasis of the Big Beacon and ThreeJoy. I identified the central question as follows:
Why are hundreds of thousands or millions of students signing up for “bad” old boring lectures taught to thousands or tens of thousands simultaneously when the future of education supposedly lies elsewhere?
The 5 answers to the questions I call MOOC smooches. In short, students love MOOCs because they love (1) good lectures, (2) high status lecturers, (3) choice, (4) novelty, and (5) community. The article connects these things to the pillars of the Big Beacon: joy, trust, courage, openness, and connection.
Read the full post here.