To Share or not to Share
Friday, April 26th, 2013
I am glad I did not post my week 22 before after all. It all comes for a reason, they say J
I must admit I did not have an opinion formed about “sharing” in general. But, something happened this weekend in San Francisco that made me learn and understand much more about open education and sharing knowledge.
As an associate faculty representative of my college I had the opportunity to attend the Spring Plenary Session of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The keynote presentations were both about MOOCs, one given by the Co-founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller, and the other by the Academic Director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education, Armando Fox. For about two hours I heard them explain passionately how MOOCs benefit education. Mr. Fox talked about how much more contact he can have with students on his large online classes. Large face to face classes never permitted him to detect and guide students with special talents or special needs. TAs did most of the job. Now, he says, he can see any work presented online, and the TAs have less pressure. According to Dr Fox, everyone has the opportunity to hear his lectures a lot “closer” than F2F and he has no problem sharing his knowledge with the entire world. Both speakers talked about wanting to make an impact in education and affirmed that that impact will be make in community colleges and public universities. I felt like I was living in the future.
I must admit that the idea of taking an art history class from the University of Florence, or a Roman architecture course imparted by a Roman professor right there in Rome sounds very attractive. However, wouldn’t my students prefer to take a class from a university in Spain or Mexico for free and then pay the cheap community college credit? Should I be concerned since my college gives credit by exam for Spanish?
Like everything, I guess, these new classes are going to develop into something that society will regulate and control. So we’ll see what happens.
I am not sure if “sharing education” is a moral imperative, but sounds like it is the future. How we share and respect one another will be an education experience for all of us.