Taking advantage of open education, MOOCs is often mentioned as a good example of opening, flexibility, and sharing. In the lectures, the teachers talked about privacy, misuse of content, and so on. Here are some of my thoughts about the challenges in open education, for instance, MOOCs.
How much freedom does individual have?
The first thing I think about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the institutions’ role in open education? The most popular MOOCs platform gather the resources from
innovative startups, top colleges, and other reputable institutions around the world. I have observed that many universities participated in opening educational learning formally. They designed the course, recorded the course, and launched the course on the MOOCs platform. But regarding the individual employee, the policy is a little bit obscured. As an employee at the university, the question is how much freedom we have regarding open education. What kinds of materials that we own as teachers? How can we know that we could make these materials open without violating the policy of the university? Universities advocate open access to research output, but I do not have the same impression that they aim for open education. We still need to have a rigorous enrollment process for admitting students to programs or courses. During the covid-19 period, many courses have been recorded and shared with the course participants. Here raises the issue of whether we, as a teacher, can share the lecture video as well.
Are they free anymore?
Many people applause MOOCs because they are free to avail of education broadly. But to my experience, more and more MOOCs need to pay to get a full course package. For instance, on Coursera, the “join” is free, but “continue” is not. Compared with other educational alternatives like university courses or professional training that can cost thousands of dollars, the open course payment is relatively tiny. But my question is to what extent, these payments in the MOOCs violent the open education when “free” is one of the critical components.
The influences of the algorithm
I think most open resources place on MOOCs platforms also adopt algorithm. We search for content and most likely will get content that we high ranked. But as a learner, we know little about the algorithm that impacted the result we get. Do we need to trust the resources just because they are high ranked? Do the searching results meet our learning needs, or they only most read? In other words, do the content we really need for learning, or they just popular in the MOOCs platform.
Flexibility may also mean nothing
Training usually requires taking time off work. For those “formal” training, some employers are willing to invest so that employees could take some time to improve work-related skills. But it is not the same case with the MOOCs. Normally people will do it in their own free time. But the issue is that most of us still need to struggle with work and family balance while at the same time thinking of improving our skills. That means that MOOCs require more self-motivation and time management skills. But these two things are difficult for most people, I is a typical one of them.
