The Mentor-MOOC Continuum
Robinson Greig,
The Synapse,
May 11, 2015
The error in this post - and it is an error - is obvious in the title and first diagram, which depicts the MOOC at the far end of a teaching scale that begins at "one-to-one" (ie., the personal mentor) and ends at "many-to-one". The author then hypothesises an "equivalent learning experience" in which a MOOC is no different from an in-class class of, say, 100 students. All very fine and the graphs all look very convincing. But it's too one-dimensional. The scale (if we must express it as that" is not between "one-to-one" and "one-to-many". It is between "one-to-one" and "many-to-many" - at least in a cMOOC. The whole idea is that students do for each other what a professor used to do for them. If you accept this premise, then the level of "equivalent learning experience" drops dramatically, and MOOCs become a much more viable option.
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