Who goes there?

The MOOC system is such that - as an massive, open, online course - you study along with a whole load of people from, literally, all over the place. Students such as myself come from all over the world, and though I am sure there are far more students following the course than the ones who chose to write a short greeting on the cite's discussion forum, the immensity of the student mass is clear. There simply seems to be hundreds of us.

Now, I do not know if that is true, that there are hundreds, and I would be interested in seeing the statistics on the course or courses such as these. I can't source it right now, but I believe I read that although there are a very large amount of students who follow or just sit in on the course, not so many actually go on to take the final or get their work assessed in any way. I found a Forbes article that discusses this briefly, and I think it is safe to say like the Forbes article indicates that finishing the course is in itself not the most significant outcome of taking a MOOC.

Don't get me wrong, it is great if you do; but the majority of people taking a MOOC seem to be doing it for knowledge aquistition (behavioural) or for personal gain (humanistic) reasons. Others may be doing it for the social aspect, although the community you become a part of online is a totally different kettle of fish than a college community or a professional community. What they don't seem to be doing according to the Forbes article, however, is taking it for a degree or some formal sheet of paper giving you the rights or not work in a certain profession or what have you. And in the case of the MOOC I am currently taking, What Future for Education, this is actually not an option.

So who are we, those of us who decides to take a MOOC? MOOCers would probably already have a degree in place - if not a higher degree such as a Masters or a PhD. We are in other words people who are already familiar with the formalised educational system. We are learning conscious in that we have actively set about a process which facilitates learning, and we are already familiar with the concept of reacting to that facilitation of learning (in other words, we know how to inexact with the learning material which is presented to us, and we have already been socialised into a learning continuum which ranges from task-conscious/acquisition learning to learning-conscious/formalised learning.

That is not as easy as task as it would seem. You actually have to learn to be a student, if for example, you have attended a 'stand-and-deliver' classroom all your life. If you are a pupil, you should learn to take responsibility for your own interaction with the learning episodes made available to you - if not encouraged by your own, intrinsic curiosity. Here it gets even more complex, because pupils may inadvertently learn to take responsibility for their own learning in order to please a teacher, or to fit in a group (a community or social interest in learning) - the milieu of the class. There are other reasons and reasonings as well, I am sure, but my point is that with these students the internal motivation for learning does not stem from their own belief that they can use that knowledge to look at the world in new and different ways, manipulate it and change it for others. I think.

This doesn't necessarily mean, however, that MOOC students are all academically good students either. You can of course have formal, academic weak results and at the same time be incredibly bright, yet in an autodidactic kind of way, be drawn to the guided episodes of learning that a MOOC offers. You may in other words be interested in the process of education, but have lost belief or access to the formal educational system which supposedly facilitates for the process. Sounds like Good Will Hunting. So unless there are hoards of unidentified math geniuses out there just waiting for guidance or intellectual challenges to be presented to them where the formal schooling system or their social setting failed, I think it is safe to say that MOOCs realistically offer (for the most part) those educated, more education, more tools, and more opportunity.

Therefore, I wasn't very surprised to find a Times Higher Education supplement article criticising MOOCs saying that MOOCs won't solve all the problems related to higher education on a world wide basis, but I would have to say it would be incredibly naive to think it could. It is not a far step between MOOCs and online, university run education either, unless we are to say that is is the 1:20/25 ratio which is the crux of the matter. And maybe it is - and if you were to look closer at who we are and who they are as well as at outcome motivational factors, I think we would come far in finding solutions to the greater educational problems of today.