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
Christina Leichtling
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