Today's Canon asks the question: What is Columbia's role in Online education. Mark Hay, Prof. Sree Sreenivason, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, and Rega Jha provided their answers. Here's one more take:
This summer, “MOOC” was thrown around a lot, and while at first it may sound like a monster from a children’s story, the acronym actually refers to one of the most controversial subjects in education these days—massive open online courses.
I first heard the term when the President of the University of Virginia (in my hometown, Charlottesville) was fired, apparently after objecting to the idea of her school jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. However last week Columbia officially joined that same wagon by opening registration for two classes administered through Coursera, joining the ranks of Princeton, Brown, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and many others.
There are without a doubt many benefits to online courses, not the least of which is making high quality education available to nontraditional college students or those who can’t swing the astronomical costs. But is the online education model really high quality education? The Coursera sales pitch says yes, mainly because their classes are affiliated with “elite” (not to mention fully accredited) institutions—you know, like this one.
