Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD (The Business School of the World), appreciates the advantages of communicating through blogs and other technologies with his students, but he wonders what MOOCs might eventually do to our educational systems. When asked if he’d offer a MOOC, he answered, “I envisioned myself walking to a digital guillotine in tattered academic garb, whispering, ‘Let them eat MOOCs.’” He compares MOOCs to colonialism in which the culture of the powerful “extends control over weaker people or areas.” Petriglieri believes that a liberating education, not a MOOC-type education, “makes students not just recipients of knowledge and culture but also owners, critics, and makers of it.”
Although Petriglieri’s ideas are focused on high education, what is happening in colleges and universities is trickling down to pre-college education. MOOCs are there to offer free coursework to all, and that is good. But, will this movement lead away from the human element in educating students? If a teacher has a class of 70,000, the students may be getting content and the opportunity to watch and listen to a world-class teacher, but what are they missing?
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