Happy New Year to all you Critical Voter readers and listeners.
It’s been a few weeks since I last posted, weeks spent doing the whole holiday thing, such as learning about truth tables and how to organize arguments into standard form.
Yes, I have become one of the hundred thousand plus people to partake in the educational experiment that’s been making news lately: The Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC, for short).
This is a phenomenon that hit public consciousness when one of the companies promoting a free, online course (in this case, on a hot computer science topic) received over a 100,000 subscriptions, surpassing its developer’s estimates by more than an order of magnitude.
The factor separating the MOOC phenomena from other sources of online learning (such as this site) is that courses given by MOOC providers such as Coursera, Udacity and EdX are taught by professors at some of America’s most prominent universities, giving students living anywhere in the world the chance to partake in classes taught in the Ivy’s and other big-name institutions at no cost.
In order to kick the tires of this newly popular educational modality (as well as compare it to other alternatives for online learning, such as iTunes U), I enrolled in a Coursera’s popular course entitled Think Again: How to Reason and Argue.
The course is organized along twelve weeks, with a new set of video lectures (usually totaling 1.5 hours in length) released weekly, alongside exercises accompanying each video lecture and other course materials (syllabus, reading recommendations, graded quizzes released every three weeks, etc.). I’ve got some catching up to do since I enrolled late, but one of the benefits of the MOOC phenomenon is the ability to join up mid-steam (if you’re willing to cram).
And how is the experience so far? Well instruction by the two professors teaching the course is solid and clear and since video lectures were shot outside the classroom, they avoid some of the problems associated with many iTunes classes where a professor is simply miked while teaching their regular class (problems such as pauses to answer student questions that you cannot hear off-mike).
That said, the videos are definitely home made with audio, lighting and focus levels doing whatever they want whenever they want, which can be distracting. And I strongly suspect that these videos were shot at different times and out of sequence (given that at least one of the lecturer’s beard keeps appearing and disappearing, sometimes in the same video).
These distractions are somewhat mitigated by the fact that most of the talks can be just listened to, rather than watched (at least if you can hold the image of text-based syllogisms or truth tables in your head). And given that most live lectures involve watching a professor pace while talking, I’ve never thought video (or audio) compares that unfavorably with the traditional lecture class (at least with regard to communicating content).
I’ve only gone through the weekly exercises so far, which consist of standard, auto-graded multiple-choice questions of decent quality (I’ll see how they – and I – do on the graded quizzes later this week). And the professors just announced a “contest” involving students submitting and voting on arguments constructed and shot on video, which seems like a creative means of engaging students in a process where manual grading of complex assignments is impossible due to the huge number of students enrolled in the class.
I’ll report more on the experience as I get to the end of the class, as well as comparing this MOOC to other free resources available for learning the tools of critical thinking. But for now, Think Again provides a nice mechanism for learning more of the formal methodology described but not taught in great detail in Critical Voter, so feel free to join the other 150,000 of us in class sometime.
