Topic 2 Discussion

I noticed a lot of new terms in the material, and I was most impressed by the MOOC, which came about because only a small percentage of kids really had access to good courses at prestigious schools due to space limitations. So some educators proposed to spread the word through the power of the Internet: to put these courses online.

I’ll try to make an interesting classification below. If we compare knowledge to meat (nutritious and good for people), online education is insect meat (more nutritious, but less accepted); offline education is poultry meat (nutritious and accepted, but bad for people if they eat too much).

In my opinion, the goal of MOOC is to enable those who cannot eat poultry meat to eat insect meat and ensure their health. The difficulties faced by the hope of ensuring the quality of the meat through various improvements to the MOOC (assessment, certification, etc.) are that there are too many places without internet and equipment, requiring a lot of human and material resources, and little possibility of profit.

And the purpose of online education is to hope that people who can eat poultry meat can also eat insect meat. The difficulty is that the acceptance is so low that a small percentage of people can be attracted to try it, but most people can’t eat it. But at one point I heard the phrase: The hope for meat is in insects. (Less consumption, high nutrition).

Finally, I have a very concerned question: Is there any other value of the MOOC certificate besides the commemorative value? For example, can it be used to apply to universities? When I browsed the webpage, Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions noted that the act of taking a MOOC course is “something very interesting that we want to know about you.”

Although this comment from Harvard could be interpreted differently, the tone at least sounds like taking a MOOC doesn’t help the application as well, and can’t be compared to an applicant’s official degree or transcripts. So I consider the MOOC to be more of an extra-curricular activity.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)