It’s easy to be cynical and suggest that MOOC’s are just BOOK’s for students with low literacy.  There’s more to it.

With 80,000 other students from around the world, I recently took the ‘Gamification’ course from Coursera, provided by the Wharton School and presented by the wonderful Dr Kevin Werbach.  https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification

It was an awesome experience, but also a non-trivial amount of effort: I spent about 10 hours per week for 12 weeks on this course.  Most students did far less, but I treated it as a grad course and dug up extra readings, sweated the assignments, and filled up a workbook with lecture notes.

I finished a Master’s degree last year, so I have something to compare it to.  The MOOC was better organized, better presented, and an all-round better learning experience than most of the grad courses I paid for. 

I could have merely read Dr Werbach’s book (which was published after the course ended).  It would have been MUCH faster, and I would have gotten more detail that the video lectures provide.  But I wouldn’t have chatted with other students on the message boards, kept notes, or bothered with assignments.  The 12-week long course cycle gave me opportunity to research deeper into the issues presented in each lecture.

I also read a lot of BOOKS.  In the last four weeks, I have read about quantum field theory (The Particle at the End of the Universe), how Lucretius’s manuscript was recovered (The Swerve), how to deal with explosive children (Lost at School), inner city schools (The Freedom Writers Diary), and perhaps an equal amount of fiction.  But I haven’t taken notes on these books, haven’t researched deeper background, and mostly haven’t discussed their contents with anyone.

MOOC’s are still in their infancy.  But they will be just as disruptive and wonderful as Gutenberg’s invention of BOOK’s was.

Funny how you mentioned BOOKs for students with low literacy - today I read in the Huff and Puff - “High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels far below those appropriate for teens, according to a recent report.

A compilation of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school shows that the average reading level of that list is 5.3—barely above the fifth grade.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/22/top-reading_n_1373680.html?utm_hp_ref=literacy

No doubt Canada is the same - to which an observation that I have observed in the last 12 years or so, is that e-learning for the K to 12 students is usually reserved for the students with the better reading skills.

The first time the lame excuse was presented to me, was when my child was in grade 4. I was even willing to pay for the software and subscriptions that would allow my child to used the software and subscription sites to learn and practice while in class. The education officials, said that it would not help my child, and she be better off with the teacher. Of course I objected, and the next excuse its a concern about copyrights and licenses.  I kept pushing, and the next thing I knew, my child’s devices were banned from the classroom for a couple of years.

Meanwhile I continued on with what I was doing at home, using the web as the doors for my child to access, to increase her general and specific knowledge banks despite her weaker reading skills. All made easier, on the subscription sites where one has the ability to go back and forth on topics that posed a difficulty. It was no big deal, because we could dropped down to grade 3,  learned the basics in order to understand the grade 4 topic. We still do it today, on topics we know nothing about, and learned the ABCs on the kids’ web sites, and then make our way back up to near mastery or mastery of the material.

In the process, my child became a crackerjack on researching and using the web to learned on topics she was having great difficulty in mastery. Her difficulty in word decoding was never corrected, but all the web learning sure had a positive effect in developing an impressive large bank of vocabulary words and massive improvement in comprehension of text, despite her word decoding difficulties. 

E-learning certainly kept and helped my child to achieved consistently, and yet the public education K to 12 will not take advantage of e-learning and what it can do for children with learning difficulties. In fact there was a time, when my child was better off sitting in front of computer screen, than she was sitting in a classroom. By the way, the American subscription site that I signed up my child for, is used by the home schoolers.  Even though she learned all about American geography and history, she ended up acquiring the necessary vocabulary words and knowledge to understand the poorly designed Canadian social studies textbooks. It was at that point starting in grade 5 she was participating in class. By grade 6, her classmates found out about her subscription site, and it became a great hit with them. Everyone was having a lot of fun, learning knowledge. Note, it was still against the rules because the web site was not on the approved list, and so it was all done in secret, away from the prying eyes of the teachers.

Disruptive, it was. And yet the public K to 12 education system will fight tooth and nail not to provide and take advantage of e-learning that best serves the individual students’ learning, that will allow the individual student to progress and achieved at higher levels than the required 50% achievement. Instead, the students are condemned to sit in the inclusive classroom, learning at a standard rate that is fixed by the teacher and the school district regardless of ability of the students. More importantly,  the students with the difficulties in the 3 Rs, will sit in the classroom falling behind, and maintaining their 50 something averages.