Prof. Terry Hébert, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, comments on an article originally published in “BBC News Business”
The founder of Wikipedia is a big fan of MOOCs. Does that give you confidence in them? Like Alec Baldwin said in “The Departed”, cui bono (you can look that up on Wikipedia). Let’s hope our response is not the same as Matt Damon gave in in that movie! Maybe we can consider that a challenge to make our material more relevant and more interesting by becoming better teachers, not by driving our students to the web for more exciting lecturers.
Read the full article here.
I m a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University.
Yes, the MOOCs bandwagon is a bit concerning; see this post that I just received this week:
Excerpts from “Are MOOCs An Extension of Academic Publishing into Teaching?”
[Companies such as Udacity and Coursera] have advocated the ability of
MOOCs to provide access to education to anyone with an Internet
connection…In theory, this sounds great. Yet a growing number of
educators and critics have begun expressing concerns about MOOCs.
Specifically, I’m concerned that their business model will replicate
that of the academic publishing industry. Universities will pay their
teachers to develop and teach courses…and that labor will be given
freely, or at a reduced cost, to MOOC for-profits who will, in turn,
sell it back to the university or sell it directly to college
students.
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