Dive Summary:
- Ann Kirschner, the former head of Columbia University's online learning program "Fathom", took Ezekiel Emanuel's Coursera class, "Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act".
- The lecture videos and interactive quizzes, she says, were information-packed, comprehensive and even compelling while she found the discussion group aspect of the course to be flawed because they resembled comment threads on the internet and, as with such, it was tough to separate insight from ignorance.
- Mrs. Kirschner found that she lacked the self-discipline to "go to" all of her classes and that this will be an important issue to consider in the imminent debate over traditional learning versus online education.
From the article:
"MOOOOOOOOC! Surely "massive open online course" has one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up).
I'm not a complete neophyte to online learning. Back in 1999, I led the start-up team for Fathom, one of the earliest knowledge networks, in partnership with Columbia University and other institutions here and abroad, and I'm a board member of the Apollo Group. So I was understandably curious about these MOOC's. With fond memories of a thrilling virtual trip a dozen years ago to Ephesus, Turkey, via a multimedia-rich, self-paced course created by a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I decided to check out a MOOC for myself. ..."
