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MOOC as an alternative to Masters

I am currently researching a lot about MOOCs and online education in general. I have come across a few TSR threads in which people suggest MOOC courses to supplement continued formal education. I would like to hear what experiences you might have made with that.

Did you manage to keep up with the MOOC next to having a job?
Did you find that MOOC were better or worse than University?

I personally find that MOOCs have not found the right balance between self-directed learning / connectivist learning and traditional teacher directed learning. Yes they do give you the time to work at your own pace, as you can re-watch lectures as much as you like, but does that really do the trick? :confused:

Are we not still wasting so much potential by trying to squeeze people into educational environments that are only suitable for a flexible sub-population with the right funding?

Cheers!!
Dennis

Reply 1

Kalivha

I'm doing one MOOC for supplementary learning (it's a particle physics course; I do those for silly reasons). That particular one is trying for too wide an audience. On the plus side, it claims to be 2 hours a week and turns out a fair bit less if you're not completely new to the topic, so that is helpful.

On the other end of the online learning spectrum, I am also enrolled in a few inter-university video conference courses geared at Master's and first year PhD students and they are much nicer. Submitting the coursework online makes me actually more likely to do all of it (in my actual degree, most coursework is formative) and teaches me a lot of transferable skills (how to make anything possible in PDFs, for example). Of course, the courses I'm currently doing have 1 TA per 2-3 students grading coursework which will probably not work for most MOOCs; even the last one had a class size under 30. I think they are definitely doing it right.

(Note that these courses are all independent of my actual studies; it's doable, sort of. The MOOC is certainly the least demanding part of this.)

As for re-watching lectures, I record all my normal lectures anyway because my attention span is far too short to follow them most days, so it's kind of normal to me.