On Education and Digital Culture (#edcmooc)

I am about to end my first MOOC course, one given by the University of Edimburgh on "e-Learning and Digital Culture". 

It has been quite an experience, being in a course with more than 40,000 students - most of them, lurkers. The EDCMOOC team clearly wanted the course to be one of discussion rather than comprehension of a knowledge capsule. We had to go through videos of short movies, adds, and lectures, plus Online article readings, and participate - if we wanted to - in one or several discussion forums. Twice during the Course there has been a hangout, where we have been able to see and hear all the members of the team give their viewpoints on the issues put into discussion on the previous weeks. 

My experience is that MOOCs are great but still in the making. Yet, I believe they will evolve very fast, as the need to access lifelong learning becomes more apparent as a feature for the 21st century professional. The business models will appear. All common sense indicates there will be a fee for accreditation, and that fee at a very accesible price. If the accreditation is done presentially it will be more expensive than if done online. People will be able therefore to create a personalized curriculum according to what each one wants and needs to further one´s career. The market for this need will be huge; hence the offer will be varied, and the competence, hard; and the prices, fair... hopefully! 

As in all experiences, this MOOC in particular had good things, bad things and ugly things

First, the good: the curation of the contents was provocative, the discussion forums were thrilling, the assigment, demanding. If you wanted to be in the course, you had to be there, read a lot, watch a lot and make yourself "heard" a lot. As in all big groups, there were some students who were very proactive, and that - given the big numbers involved - did provide a very good diversity of opinions. Twitter proved to be a great tool for engaging (I wouldn't have thought it could). And the student-to-student interaction proved a really enriching (and human) relation. 

The bad: it is extremely difficult to have a one-to-one relation with anyone of the MOOC team. They were available to help in doing the job needed, but when it came to adressing particular matters, you felt  a bit on your own. Also, when discussion threads became a bit long (and I am talking of more than 50 posts) people would not read all that had been posted, and would put their opinions on the latest matters exposed, or directly what they thought on the discussion. This made that the same opinion for the same idea would be written several times. If it had been a presential class, it gives the feeling of students who have not been paying attention and suddenly come up with things that have been long discussed. 

The ugly: the EDCMOOC team clearly had a point. Those dissenting with their point - as is my case - were not addressed, neither in the forums nor in the hangouts. As if we didn´t exist. 

The point of the team at EDCMOOC is that technology affects the human being, and in doing so, affects the ways of education. We were prompted to lectures about post-humanism and transhumanism. Week three was devoted to "reasserting the human" and week four, to "redefining the human". We were induced to think that technology produces a new way of being human. We were challenged to the idea that massive courses could be human at all. We were asked if this is the right way to educate people. I cannot say that was the idea of the Team, but the curation of the contents at least for me clearly indicated they had a position on the issue, which I disagree in. Let me explain my point of view:

Technology is a human invention, and its use may or may not be human, depending solely on the human who uses it. The terms "post" or "trans" humanism forget that humans are, above all, humans. Have always been and will always be. They evolve, they get smarter, but they still are deeply humans. No machine can be human, no matter what arguments science fiction may bring. These are always assumptions, not realities, nor data. Humanity has always indulged in "playing God" and creating living creatures who at some point of their evolution rise against their creator - perhaps because that was what we did? Yet, humans are humans, not God. 

The real issue in the matter of learning and digital cultures should not be therefore, if we are in front of a new paradigm on humanity (utopian, dystopian, post-humanist or transhumanist... who cares?). The real issue should be,  how to use technology so that our students can be the best version of themselves in a world where technology HAS become omnipresent  

Alfredo Barriga