My spin on the MOOC's is that they set teachers free to teach rather than wasting everyone's time posing as authorities dispensing lectures. Most teachers cannot be authorities in all the courses they teach, and very few people are really good lecturers. Though we're doing undergraduate and graduate courses right now, the model is going to spread through the education system.
The next stage in the development of MOOC's should be organizing tutorial lesson plans to accompany lecture series. These should identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them. These are "Cliff Notes" for facilitators, people who want to help other people learn. Teachers do not need to be experts in the material content of the courses they're facilitating. They need to be experts in getting people through courses. They need to be good at learning things, or relearning them, faster than their students. They do not need to pose as omniscient authorities in the subjects that they teach. The stage beyond that would be providing second tier support to answer those questions which the prepared materials fail to cover, which the clever facilitator isn't able to work out. Wikipedia sans wackos. What we're doing is redistributing the labor of education in a way that the internet now allows us to do. It's going to be really interesting when we get to the seminars where two or more lecturers start presenting contrary views of a subject in opposition and response to each other. -- rec --
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