Teaching is a social action. The interaction within a class between students, the connection between teacher and students, the context in which such conversations take place…all of these are part of the social reality that reflects teaching. One of the (legitimate) criticisms of online education is that the inherently social aspect of teaching and learning is removed. Instead of occupying the same physical space, students and instructors interact virtually, and typically passively, on-demand. From my viewpoint, this is a dramatically inferior learning environment.
And yet, online teaching does not need to be solely passive and solely individual and virtual. During the first week of 207x, students began to introduce themselves on the discussion forum. I was amazed at how, within the first few hours of the course being live, students began to materialize on the virtual world of the discussion forum from seemingly ever corner of the Globe. A facebook group had already been put together with 1000+ members, a discussion group at Nature sprung up, and a twitter hashtag (#207x) began to appear.
This week, I provided the students with a discussion forum specifically intended to enable and encourage in-person meet-ups for students in the course. I don’t know how many of these will actually happen, but again, the students have responded in dramatic fashion. Just looking down the first page of entries, I have students trying to arrange meetups in Oslo, Lima, St. Petersburg, Lahore, Sofia, Singapore, Manchester, Oman, and Mexicali. And these are all from just the first page of about 140 total entries.
While the passive and virtual aspects of online teaching are certainly limited, the distributed nature of the experience, properly socialized, is potentially incredibly powerful. The thought that groups of learners might congregate at coffee shops, bars, and homes over the next 10 weeks to discuss human evolution…simply for the enjoyment of it…gives me goose bumps. I remain highly skeptical of the notion that MOOCs provide an alternative to traditional higher education. But that they might allow for academic resources to be leveraged in the production of something complementary and valuable…that is an idea that I am increasingly in support of.
