Learning Ecology in the Land of the MOOC: FutureLearn? Coursera? How about HarvardX for Toddlers?



Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) turn kids on to learning in ways that traditional settings cannot?  What should the classroom of the future look like?  Here’s the proposed recipe:  let’s create a massive, open online ecosystem (MOOC-E) for 10-year-old children who would benefit from strengthening their reading skills by developing and enriching their vocabularies.  Or perhaps we want to help English-speaking kindergartners become proficient Spanish speakers. To this MOOC ecosystem we’ll add sophisticated, three-dimensional graphic elements, live feeds for People Sessions, a dash of gaming framework for the fun of it, and a rigorous curricular platform.  The year is 2031 and we are not envisioning parking small people in front of computer screens for dozens of hours of monotonous brain drain from which they will absorb a relatively small percentage of what passed before their eyes. We will engage them with team projects that will require them to collaborate with other students in virtual learning spaces.  We will reconfigure the MOOC ecosystem so that tools to aid Tuesday’s lesson and every lesson thereafter are at the fingertips of every user.  We are imagining an academic space much bigger than an app, a website, a tiny corner of the Internet.

The central goal:  to identify ways to use MOOC platforms to enrich learning and improve outcomes for children who may not thrive in conventional classrooms but who may respond positively to re-engineered MOOC environments.  The question: Is it possible to re-imagine the MOOC?  Can we envision technologies to create learning that transcends the limitations of the Internet by re-engineering networked environments?  

What are the possibilities for improving adult literacy?  Can we combine virtual learning platforms and robotic interfaces to create demanding learning leaders?  For some, MOOCs present a baby-with-the-bath-water dilemma when it comes to their usefulness as learning tools.  Systems shouldn't replace teachers, but perhaps they can rejuvenate systems that use resources more efficiently.  Therefore the dilemma becomes what part of MOOCs can we retain to apply to a process to build brand new models of successful public school education?

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