Is technology itself a cause of reform in education or an instrument used to encourage reform?
Thursday, 29 Jun 2017, 16:20
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As we have seen, technology has been making massive waves in recent years in education and the impact can be seen in the ways in which courses are delivered and also in the way students are interacting with their courses, this can be seen both in the class and on distance learning courses. Education itself is notoriously slow on the uptake of new technologies but of course these technologies are no longer new and the people that are innovating have grown up with these technologies. Chris Jones asks the above question in the context of an activity as part of an MA module. In my view, technology can not cause reform in itself as people need to be willing to use the technology and see the value in its use. In my opinion though it is being used as an instrument of reform, just look at the explosion of MOOCs the sheer number of courses available online now is incredible and the surge in uptake of these courses is equally phenomenal. According to class-central.com the number of students has more than doubled in the last year up from 16-18 million to over 35 million ( https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-2015-stats/) These are obviously headline figures and the real story is a lot more nuanced than this, for example are these students that are registered to a platform, or registered to a course, have started a course, partially finished or finished a course, the permutations are endless, but it is plain to see that the interest in massive online courses is growing at a rapid rate. This is a massive subject in itself and is in danger of spinning out of control just like the MOOC figures, so to come back to the original question, I think it is reasonable to say that, yes, technology has been an instrument used to encourage reform, after all the big players in this field aren’t creating all this content out of a sense of social justice or just because they can. This is becoming a very big market as people are changing their learning habits, and see the MOOC model as one that is very flexible and one that they can jump in and out of as they see fit. People obviously have different reasons for wanting to learn but the point is that with the MOOC model, the previous barriers of large time and financial commitments have been lowered a great deal and in many cases the financial commitment has been completely removed. Society at large is changing continuously and education is and must change also.
Is technology itself a cause of reform in education or an instrument used to encourage reform?
As we have seen, technology has been making massive waves in recent years in education and the impact can be seen in the ways in which courses are delivered and also in the way students are interacting with their courses, this can be seen both in the class and on distance learning courses. Education itself is notoriously slow on the uptake of new technologies but of course these technologies are no longer new and the people that are innovating have grown up with these technologies. Chris Jones asks the above question in the context of an activity as part of an MA module. In my view, technology can not cause reform in itself as people need to be willing to use the technology and see the value in its use. In my opinion though it is being used as an instrument of reform, just look at the explosion of MOOCs the sheer number of courses available online now is incredible and the surge in uptake of these courses is equally phenomenal. According to class-central.com the number of students has more than doubled in the last year up from 16-18 million to over 35 million ( https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-2015-stats/) These are obviously headline figures and the real story is a lot more nuanced than this, for example are these students that are registered to a platform, or registered to a course, have started a course, partially finished or finished a course, the permutations are endless, but it is plain to see that the interest in massive online courses is growing at a rapid rate. This is a massive subject in itself and is in danger of spinning out of control just like the MOOC figures, so to come back to the original question, I think it is reasonable to say that, yes, technology has been an instrument used to encourage reform, after all the big players in this field aren’t creating all this content out of a sense of social justice or just because they can. This is becoming a very big market as people are changing their learning habits, and see the MOOC model as one that is very flexible and one that they can jump in and out of as they see fit. People obviously have different reasons for wanting to learn but the point is that with the MOOC model, the previous barriers of large time and financial commitments have been lowered a great deal and in many cases the financial commitment has been completely removed. Society at large is changing continuously and education is and must change also.