Today, educational content is cheap and abundant on YouTube, in newsletters, on blogs, and on social media. People view learning-related content on YouTube 500 million times every day; the free YouTube channel Crash Course, for instance, features instructors with PhDs in everything from physics to organic chemistry.
This gap between the grand promise of online education and its results has led to the rise of cohort-based courses (CBCs), interactive online courses where a group of students advances through the material together — in “cohorts” — with hands-on, feedback-based learning at the core. The key difference between this phase of online ed and the MOOCs in the past decade? They are engaging and real-time, not just self-paced, and involve community-driven, active learning, as opposed to solo, passive content consumption.
One challenge for “online learning” has been a tendency to recreate old forms online. As noted above, that’s not it. There are many new and old learning tools to weave into a fully functional online learning strategy or implementation, and this development has been scattered and often the left-hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. To say nothing of what’s needed to create a comprehensive learning platform that unifies all the tools in one “educational space”.
Our still proceeding experiments with LFH on a universal level will eventually bring forth the best practices and tools that were developed and “tried out”. That’s for down the road sometime, and our understanding of just what learning is, and how it should be done in the internet age, is a work in progress, for sure.
It says here, that best practices will include all sorts of approaches, from the cohorts, praised below, and envisioned years ago by PSA, to the solo self-paced at-home approach denigrated in the same article.
IOW, if we thought useful educational strategic planning was hard to achieve currently, with local and national approaches often failing to mesh…we should expect a lot more of the same confusion about “just how do we do education in the US” as online learning continues to develop.
Kudos to Gary for the link.
In Online Ed, Content Is No Longer King—Cohorts Are - Future