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Monday, July 7, 2025

Sci­ence and So­ci­ety

Will MOOCs make more mooks?

by

20140622

MOOCs are Mas­sive Open On­line Cours­es. They typ­i­cal­ly last for sev­en weeks and are of­fered by well-fund­ed Amer­i­can en­ti­ties like Cours­era, Udac­i­ty and edx.Cours­era works with uni­ver­si­ties to make their cours­es avail­able on­line, Geor­gia Tech is in­volved with Udac­i­ty and MIT, Har­vard and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley with edx.

The prof­fered in­tent is to make cours­es from pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties avail­able to stu­dents world­wide. There is al­so quite a sig­nif­i­cant ar­ray of of­fer­ings for sec­ondary school stu­dents. MOOCs are be­ing hyped as the next big wave in ed­u­ca­tion. A "mook" is Trinida­di­an slang for a shy and or so­cial­ly awk­ward/dys­func­tion­al per­son.

One crit­i­cal out­come of tra­di­tion­al school­ing, at all lev­els, is the de­vel­op­ment of so­cial skills through in­ter­act­ing with fel­low stu­dents and teach­ers. The MOOC ap­proach to ed­u­ca­tion is one to one: stu­dent and com­put­er screen ("com­put­er screen" here is used in a gener­ic sense to in­clude tablets and smart phones). What im­pact will this have on stu­dents?Al­ready the ex­pe­ri­ence is that Face­book, What­sApp and the In­ter­net are pro­duc­ing dis­rup­tive be­hav­iours in both the class­rooms and in so­cial sit­u­a­tions.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers


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