Ever heard of a MOOC?

After first making waves in the fall of 2011, MOOC's, or “Massive Open Online Courses,” have been stirring up both positive and negative reviews from experts all over the country. These courses are offered online, completely free of charge, from universities as prestigious as Stanford University and Princeton University. More can be learned about MOOC's and who's using them, here.

And these courses are making a huge impact. When then-Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun opened his graduate-level artificial intelligence course up to any student anywhere, 160,000 students in more than 190 countries signed up.

These free online classes have been described as “revolutionary, the future; the single most important experiment that will democratize higher education and end the era of overpriced colleges,” according to TIME Magazine’s article.

Praise can be heard everywhere about this new idea on higher education. Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and hopes to revolutionize higher education "by allowing students from all over the world to hear his lectures, do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school."

“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained to the New York Times. According to the article, last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”

But some experts worry that this revolutionary idea may, “leave some students behind.” According to Noliwe Brooks in her article for TIME Magazine, offering free classes from elite colleges could actually widen the learning gap. In this article she describes some of the inevitable downfalls to these online companies that are offering these MOOC’s, including their intention to eventually make profit. She writes, “they just haven’t figured out the best way to do that yet.”

She also describes how students, statistically, do not learn as well from online courses, thus widening the learning gap between those who can afford to attend these elite colleges and those that simply take their free online courses.

Though I think this is an interesting concept, I’m not sure how effective it will be and for how long…and neither are most of the experts as well as those trying it out for themselves.

Reportedly, several TIME magazine staffers have enrolled in MOOCs this semester, including technology writer Harry McCracken. One of his observations: “There are 76,000 people registered for the class, which is more than twice the entire current enrollment for my alma mater, Boston University. Only 13,000 turned in the first written assignment on time. I wonder how many of us will still be at it when the final exam rolls around?”

The Future of Technology...recorded on a cassette tape

In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to a relatively small audience at a little-known segment of the event called the International Design Conference inAspen (IDCA). The conference’s theme, “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, seems all too fitting because, despite the vastness of the World Wide Web, very little is available on the Internet regarding this particular Steve Jobs speech. The recording of a formerly unknown 40-minute Q & A section of this speech, found on a cassette tape, was released this week and the content has proven shocking. A full recording of the speech can be found on this blog by Marcel Brown.

 

Shocking because the speech is a very accurate “prediction” of sorts, in which Jobs describes what he wants out of his then company, Apple, Inc., within the next decade (by 1993). 

Jobs states in 1983 that in the future, we will “spend more time interacting with personal computers than cars” and, “people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail.” He also discusses how one of his goals is to make Internet information “possess-able by everyone.” Taking a look at our mobile devices, tablets, computers and the extent to which the Internet has become embedded in our lives, we can see that these predictions are startling and chillingly accurate as the internet became much more popular and commonplace in the decade after this speech.

Along with these statements, somehow, Jobs preconceived 20 years ago the difficulty we would face with voice recognition technology. "This stuff is hard," he said toward the end of the discussion. This is an intriguing statement, considering the often criticized Siri app on iPhones today. 

Brown, considered the “Most Trusted Name in Technology,” stated in his blog, “Regarding the speech, it is amazing to hear Steve Jobs talk about some things that were not fully realized until only a handful of years ago. This talk shows us just how incredibly ahead of his time he was.”