Social media and the internet have provided people with greater abilities to connect. As pointed out in Eli Pariser’s , Beware Online “Filter Bubbles” Ted Talks some of the topics of these connections may be quite trivial, but as proven in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, some of the topics of these connections are of life-changing importance and purpose. Different events in history have affected the motivation of people and society, whether it be food, family, intellect, philosophy, information, technology, the arts, power or freedom, historically we have a diverse list of factors that have largely described the motivation of societies past. As Dan Pink points out in in his book, Drive the latest… real motivation of people is purpose.
And perhaps all those other factors that characterized societies of the past were also just looking to purposefully contribute to information, or the gathering of food, or the creation of freedom, but in any case, now more than ever today’s society wants to know that we made a difference, that our time on this planet had purpose and even that our education has purpose. Not just the purpose of getting a job or making one’s family happy with a good grade, but we want education to be meaningful – to have personal purpose. The way I see it MOOC is one of the many products derived from people demanding something different from education. Taking some time to look at one MOOC course called Change: Education, Learning & Technology I noticed that:
- The course was FULL of stuff and that the learner had to treat the content of the course like a buffet, picking and choosing what suits their individual taste, rather than trying to eat every dish on the buffet table! Take what’s relevant and quite possibly no more.
- Learners are expected to be active contributors, interacting with others, acting as a sharing, caring collaborative learning community.
- There is a remix culture within the community. There is a large emphasis on how you can take what you have learned and change it around to make it more meaningful and personal to you. Relevance is key to MOOC.
- That the learners seem to also become the teachers, re-teaching the remixes of the same materials to the learning community.
But actually that sounds quite a bit like a flipped classroom experience. It also sounded like it could be an online course and you could most likely also get that from an open campus university like University of the People. Depending on how instruction is offered, whether it is free, online, in person, you name it, instruction has the potential to although students purpose. Whether it’s through a MOOC or an online course, or even a paid tuition course, the point is that a society that demands purpose wants to feel that they are contributing to a better good with their learning. In a time of technology where we demand instant feedback, we don’t want to wait 15 years from now to know that we had purpose from our learning – we want to feel that now. As the number of universities increase, and the amount of free information that is offered on the web multiplies, I predict schools and universities will have to do a better job at providing purpose for their consumers. MOOC and open-campus free instruction courses offer students a feeling of purpose by allowing students to become active contributors in learning and educating through their course work and explorations.
MOOC also does a fantastic job of providing personalization to learners. The “pick and choose culture” that exists in MOOC and open campus universities like University of the People offer students the opportunity to make learning relevant. Today’s society wants to know that content has been personalized to who we are, perhaps just as Facebook and Google personalize our experiences on the web. But perhaps as long as enough learners value the input of teachers adding balance to computer generated “filter bubbles” (as referred to by Eli Pariser), education systems will remain diverse and competitive. Schools and universities will need to transform present practice to compete with the tuition-free models of education like MOOC and University of the People, but I am convinced that there will always be a market for education.
Five, Ten, Fifteen years from now I hope that I will be the teacher that whether in person or via online interactions, is getting to know my students not via a computer derived algorithmic online profile, but instead from a deeper understanding of who my students really are, helping them in exploring their purpose and how I might challenge them to think beyond what they think they believe. I hope that I can take the best education practice of educators past, present and future to help make learning meaningful, relevant, and purposeful to students – making connections all the way.
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