Online classes are slowly taking over
Could it be true that in the future students never have to leave their beds anymore? Not only is the Dutch Education minister Jet Bussemaker slowly heating up for the idea of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), president Obama is also embracing the concept.
Minister Bussemaker spoke about the future possibility that MOOC’s will earn students points. She calls online courses ‘a revolution’. Through MOOC’s, teachers will be enabled to spend more time on providing feedback and on contact with students. According to Bussemaker, we will still need a lot of teacher’s to help students find their way and process all the information that they gain by watching classes online. An advantage is that education can be customized for the individual student.
How the system is going to work isn’t completely clear yet. The government and the universities have to develop a rating system. Bussemaker says that the changes are going to happen soon, a new evaluation will be done within six months. The minister said she is going to spend 1 million euros a year to improve The Netherlands’ reputation online through MOOC’s.
In a recent advice from the ‘President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’ in America, the same remarks are made by the country’s top professors. According to them, MOOC’s has ’the potential both to increase access to higher education and to reduce it’s cost’. Negative aspects are, for now, the minimal contact between student and professor, and the fact that one-way information input doesn’t encourage the critical thinking of students.
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