By starting up massive open online courses, the doors to higher education might become more open. But that depends entirely on how those courses affect our ambitions towards access, writes Elisabeth Gehrke.
Have you heard of the word MOOC? It stands for Massive Open Online Courses. When it comes to higher education it was probably last years biggest buzzword. We are in the beginning stages of an evolution in higher education, one with the potential for good, and bad.
The good is obvious, the rise of MOOCs can be a brilliant development. If anything in recent years would help usher in an age of student centered learning and enable teachers to engage in more immersive activities, it would be MOOCs. If used correctly we all stand the chance of learning better and more. MOOCs can also be a great source of entertainment. But the bad is something we cannot turn a blind eye to, we have to be aware of how we use the courses and in what way they are promoted to whom.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a defense of an old world order for the sake of conservatism and tradition. It is however a defense of an old ambition that in the wake of austerity measures seems to have lost its appeal. The idea that education is one of the key factors in changing lives and to combat social stratification. What we cannot let MOOCs become an ointment for our guilt towards those outside higher education and abandon our ambitions for wider access. We have a responsibility to be completely honest about what they are and what they can give.
Online courses are of course better than no courses. However with online courses alone, other highly sought after soft skills attained in higher education risk becoming accessible only to the few. As always certain groups in society will always be more aware of what those skills are and how you get them. You have to ask ourselves: would someone like the CEO of a fortune 500 company encourage their children to take only online courses? The answer is most certainly no.
At the end of the day, higher education can be an agent for social mobility, but the social mobility is not only in the subject matter. It is for instance also in the activities you do outside of class, the connections you make with your peers and the interaction with teachers. Knowledge is undoubtedly power. A piece of powerful knowledge is knowing the limitations of what you can learn where. Those who have that knowledge have a responsibility towards those who do not, a responsibility that should not be taken lightly.
