MOOC's

This thing is about online learning, at present I am doing a course online and although having access to everything at any time is handy I personally like to have a class to go to and talk to people face to face.  I think it is clear however that online courses will have an important place in the future of education and I point to this excerpt from one of the articles;

{ Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?” }

 I think this shows that if operating MOOC’s is more cost effective than tradition schools that they are a better option for areas of the world that are very poor.  For me I thought that the point being made in the excerpt does not necessarily reflect on traditional institutions as much as I think it relates to attitude, it is sometimes easy to take things that you have easy access to for granted.  But MOOC’s or any form of online learning could benefit students that do not do well in traditional schools, I think this is where online learning could be at its most effective as an alternative.

 As for where online learning is going that is always difficult to say about anything, but generally speaking where it goes will depend on money and profit.  As for the negative

I think that providing the infrastructure and the maintenance required on it could be a problem and given that I haven’t done one of these the provision of help if you start a course and are struggling.