The launch of FutureLearn earlier on today brought to mind a passage from J.G. Farrell’s Booker Prize winning novel “The Siege of Krishnapur”.
For several nights the Collector had stayed up until dawn reading his military manuals by the light of an oil-lamp in his study to instruct himself in the art of military mining… what an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a general overnight if the fancy took him. As the Collector pored over his manuals, from time to time rubbing his tired eyes, he knew that he was using science and progress to help him out of his difficulties and he was pleased.
There is a danger that the current uncritical enthusiasm and marketing claims being made for the transformational power of MOOCs might just turn out to be every bit as fanciful as the Collector’s 19th century perspective on the transformational power of books.
But once the hype has finally died down, the providers of MOOCs do have a real chance to improve both access to knowledge and the ability of those that choose to receive it to be able to apply it effectively.