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5 Smooches of MOOCs

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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.

Getting to the Heart of the Educational Matter

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In my work with iFoundry (www.ifoundry.illinois.edu), Olin (www.olin.edu), and now ThreeJoy (www.threejoy.com) and the Big Beacon (www.bigbeacon.org), I’ve progressively moved from thinking about education as starting from the head to increasingly feeling and believing that it starts from the heart.

Educational theorists and devotees start to get at this when they talk about the various X learnings (where X is an element of {active, experiential, project-based, challenge-based, problem-based, etc}), and experiences and projects and problems and challenges elicit emotions and discussion of human motivation more so than the usual pedagogical approaches, but the various X learnings are particular practices or techniques and invoking one or more of them doesn’t really get to the core of what it is that we are trying to achieve or the fundamental processes that might achieve it.

A recent Huffington Post article (here) takes a different tack by identifying trust, courage, connection, and joy as the pillars to successful educational transformation.  If I were to focus on one of these as primary, I would suggest that educational transformation is about moving from educating a student who shuts up, listens, and obeys to one who has the courage to take initiative, even in the face of resistance (see this article here).

These four largely cultural and emotional variables are rarely discussed, but once these distinctions are made and introduced, it is hard to stop reflecting on them and how we can enhance their presence in educational settings undergoing change.