The HASTAC Guide to the Future of Higher Education: Chapter 3

To supplement the History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education MOOC and as part of the FutureEd initiative, HASTAC has created The HASTAC Guide to the Future of Higher Education: Collected Readings Contributed by our Network Members, a collection of additional readings. To suggest additional resources, please leave a comment below.

 

The world changed on April 22, 1993, when the scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released the Mosaic 1.0 web browser for use by the general public.    From then on, anyone with access to an open Internet connection could communicate anything to anyone else who had open access to the Internet--without the intervention or safety net of an editor or publisher.  That’s a tremendous responsibility and opportunity that ushered in our Information Age.  We should be training students to be productive participants in this era, but we're not. Education should also prepare us to be better, more successful participants in the world we live in now. This chapter suggests that we must do an inventory of the new skills, requirements, abilities, and "literacies" that are important for thriving in the world we live in now. It focuses on assessment methods, peer-to-peer open learning, the thirty-year downward trend in public educational funding and how it has altered the demographics of education for public and private schools worldwide.  How do MOOCs fit into the picture?  Do they help?  Do they hurt?  Why do legislators want to believe MOOCs will solve a problem caused by a thirty-year and escalating defunding of public education?   And what is the difference between peer-to-peer open and participatory learning and MOOCs?

 

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