I believe that personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.
- Khan, Salman (2012-09-27). The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (p. 44). Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.
Any new technology replacing another is socially disruptive for better or for worse, more accurately, for better AND for worse. Free quality education, accessible by anyone anywhere is bound to have great social implications, especially since education has been so closely associated with the term “elite”. But if something shifts, tremendously, something else must take up the space left behind. We no longer have to stand in line, waiting to reach the soup lady, because that is our only dinner option. No, the line is gone and every person is provided an entire buffet. It is now up to us to dish up. MOOCs are busy blurring the cracks of social dividedness, and the value of one’s own education is becoming nothing short of a personal responsibility.
Shrinking the Gaps of Social Dividedness
The gap that divides those who get to be educated and those who don’t, is shrinking, and it will continue to shrink from being a canyon to a single crack. Commonly shared perceptions exist when we think about the social status of the educated. The unjustified terms that come to mind in association to the term of educated are sophistication, pride, advanced, privileged, civilised, intellectual, respectable, cultured and refined. With Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by successful and technologically sophisticated online academies, the crack that has separated social classes, will become a blur.
No More Excuses – Money, Education, Social Discrimination
No more paper workbooks. No more pricey printings of individualised exercises. Everything needed for self-paced learning is right there in the computer; the cost of delivering it to students is miniscule. The old excuse that new-fangled teaching methods are just too expensive— or are only the province of elite schools.
- Khan, Salman (2012-09-27). The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (p. 42). Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.
Education, a privilege that has been reliant on finances, location, and in some cases, even race and religion, will now rely on two things only; an Internet connection and the willingness to learn.
You have to be willing to learn and you have to be committed to your own learning process. At the end of the day, you and you alone are responsible for your own education. The true technological disruption here is that you have no reason not to be educated anymore. You have no excuses left.
With eLearning courses provided online, location is irrelevant, except if you are in a place where an Internet connection is impossible, like the middle of the ocean, but even then you can consult your previously downloaded learning materials, or work in offline mode, which many LMS systems do support. Money is irrelevant when MOOCs are free, and in a great number of countries a certain amount of band width is freely supplied to citizens as well.
In my experience in doing a Coursera course, I actually paid specific attention to how cultural diversity would be managed in a course with 70 000 persons from all over the world enrolled. I have to admit that the questions asked in exercises, examples used in explaining concepts and so forth, accommodated cultural neutrality to a great extent. There will always be something here or there that might be perceived as confusing or offensive to a certain group or individual, but the main thing is that the Coursera or the Khan Academy does not investigate your religion, cultural belief systems or the colour of your skin before you are allowed to enrol.
What Does “Taking Responsibility” Mean?
Taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning. From the student’s perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible…
- Khan, Salman (2012-09-27). The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (pp. 42-44). Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.
Responsibility for your education means three things; commitment, determination and discipline.
Commitment to learning is essentially this; don’t give up when it gets difficult. Determination to succeed in mastering concepts is essentially this: try again and again and again until you succeed while keeping yourself motivated and positively inspired. And that entire discipline means, every day, for however many hours, NO MATTER WHAT, make your learning a routine that cannot be shaken. And never stop being teachable.
In Closing
It is not that every person can now become privileged, elite, or any of those silly terms that supposedly define educated persons. It is instead that something that should be a basic human right, i.e. good education, free education, and education that does not discriminate, now has become a reality. More and more people are granted the greatest privilege of all; the privilege to be able to help themselves.
Sound Idea Digital specialises in Learning Management Systems and eLearning developments | soundidealearningmanagement.co.za
Carla van Straten is a Writer for Sound Idea Digital | Carla@soundidea.co.za
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