Monday, April 15, 2013

Coursera: How online education works today. A short description.


Long gone are the times when education was provided through school and universities, where physical attendance was necessarily needed. New Media devices and software carry knowledge and education into people’s homes and work places all over the world. 

Nowadays, educational systems and culture of learning are at a stage of development. The shape of education transforms beyond formal schooling, due to the effects of new media.  Knowledge can just be a click away. The internet offers a broad spectrum of non-commercial and commercial wikis, dictionaries, online-advice communities, forums, online archives (e.g. Ubu ), and  learning platforms, (e.g. Open Culture ). Among the colourful diversity of online educational resources, I will introduce shortly before its first anniversary a growing online learning environment: Coursera; a site that puts up open access to university classes to the World Wide Web.

Coursera was launched on April 18th 2012 and currently embraces more than 370 courses offered by 62 widely acknowledged universities. Basically, it is a sample of lectures, divided into brief videos of 10-25 minutes with added questionnaires and quizzes. Similar to ordinary lectures the courses have a start date and a weekly proceeding by means of updated videos, integrated readings and regular requirements. For testing created an own account and experienced that the lectures of Coursera got a workshop and seminar character, where the user's active participation is necessarily needed.

The design of Coursera follows the MOOC's  principles of interactivity and connectivity between users. Hence, the ability to follow lessons and to carry out requirements is strongly linked to the necessity of consulting with other users also known on the web-environment as Courserians.
These principles bear rudimentary signs of participatory culture, a term coined by Henry Jenkins and collective intelligence, coined by Pierre Lévy. The emerging phenomenon of participatory culture is caused by new media that shifts the roles of passive consumers and spectators into active users and participants.  A performance of spectators arises and Coursera utilizes its dynamics and the play of its users to generate an in-class effect and collective learning process. 

Two noteworthy examples are documented on the platform's blog. Therefore, you can take a look here  and here. In the case of an Iranian students group and “The Learning Café” in Ohio, Coursera evokes a gathering of peers that undergo the learning experience collectively. Both are small networks of people, who are concerned with the same problems and contents during the course. The individuals of a peer encourage each other to stick to the courses and enable the individuals to fulfil the requirements and course homework by discussing the topics and sharing their knowledge, ideas and opinions. An individual possibly couldn't successfully end a course on his/her own.

But are the Courserians really participating in the learning environment? Nico Carpentier differentiates between audience participation and interactivity. Taking into account the conditions of Coursera, the use of the term of participation is questionable. On the surface, participation and interactivity seems to be the same thing, but in the end they differ in their impact on the development of the learning environment. Coursera provides space for interactivity within a limited framework, for instance in forums and online quizzes. In other words the Courserians have no chance to influence the online learning environment itself.  Their activity is just valuable for their own learning progress.

But it is needed to mention that the blog enables users to post suggestions that concern user friendly design and give the website providers feedback, the user is still taking a very limited part in conceptualizing and creating the Coursera environment.

Slow beginnings of participatory culture within online education are noticeable; however, they remain in limited fields. The significant improvement concerns the outreach of online learning environments like Coursera, which are globally open to educational advantaged and disadvantaged classes. Coursera has currently more than three million registered users and the number is still growing. It is worthwhile to observe the consequences of the growing mass and an emerging participatory culture on the future formation of education. 

Christina Leichtling

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