Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.If only it can happen easily :-) A typical reason why this is not happening, given the level of technology we already have:
Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.I have always believed that my online classes are strictly about education in that grander sense of it being something way above and beyond "producing workers." So are my "regular" classes. If anybody took a look at, say, the syllabus for this course, the work that I ask students to complete in order to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas, the kind of feedback I give them, I cannot imagine anybody even remotely thinking that this undermines the grand idea of what education is all about.
Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”
Now, I don't want to give any impression that my work is under criticism--far from that. It is just that I always prefer using my personal examples; this way I do not then unintentionally insult/hurt others.
