We want courses designed for casual learning and that means flexible hours, fewer homework assignments.
That's why a online class will never educate anyone.
You're assuming he's being lazy, rather than analysing his point. The main promise of internet learning was supposed to be accessibility in terms of where you want and when you want. The timetable in MOOCs is often just too rigid, and if you've got something big on at work, you might just need to be able to tune out for two weeks.
They get "achievements" for lots of things like taking classes, doing tests to make sure they understand the material, etc. The education-as-a-game incentive system is a fun way to encourage continuing education.
Nah. If you need to gamify then the material and methods are not intrinsically stimulating. You learn by stimulation. Little badges may encourage you to continue using the platform, but they rarely encourage learning. None of the MOOCs I've seen use any of the potential of computing to personalise the learning process - for example, Udacity shows you the same "feedback" video after a "quiz" regardless of the answer you choose.
What are you even talking about? Why are you dissing ANY free program for people to educate themselves? If even ONE person did it, it is not a failure. The fact that thousand of self-motivated, self-paced individuals take advantage of world-class education systems, all for free-- it's by definition a success.
If its goal is to educate one person, and it educates one person, it has not failed. If its goal is to provide universal university level education, it has failed.
The history of education consists of many long traditions of direct interaction between teacher and student (and to a lesser extent between students). MOOCs undermine that, so really it would be more surprising if in any permutation they did work for any more than the small minority of autodidacts.
I'm not sure, but I think the potential is there. The problem with MOOCs is that no-one ever lived up to one of the big promises: improvement. As a teacher, if I deliver the same lesson repeatedly, I will try to improve it each time based on student difficulties in the previous session. I try to identify what gap in knowledge caused the student to fail, and take pre-emptive steps to fill that gap for future students. In some places, I've had 3 students in a class, in some places almost 30. Some university lecturers might have 100 or more. And after each cohort, the lesson improves. But MOOCs often take in a cohort of thousands, deliver an identical course to all of them, and then what...? Many courses only run once. No lessons learned. Ones that repeat may not change, and even if they do, there's not enough contact to determine whether the change is for the better... until after the course.
The revolution requires a change of mindset. Small cohorts and continual improvement. Run the course twice a month and you'll get more feedback and revision within 1 month than a university lecturer might get in 24 years of teaching the same course. This isn't cheap, which is why the free MOOC model is nonsense. Instead, free courses have to be nothing more than "Beta tests" of a future commercial course. 1 year of free with massive dev investment with the aim of selling the course for credit for five-ten years. Ideally it would be sold across institutions rather than just used in a single place.
Oil of Olay now comes with added liquid light complex to give your skin a warm glow.
Considering light was slowed down to zero a few years back, you are now just catching up to it?
Well given it had a 10 millisecond headstart, he'll be catching up for a fair wee while....
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce