“You want to plant our super variety of high yield corn? Great, but it won’t grow unless you buy our proprietary fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, fungicide…”

Its what they really mean by “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

But I write the software on the server that makes it do things like present and grade quizzes, and issue PDF certificates and track progress. I got to the part of their terms of service that declared their ownership of all intellectual property including not just the design but its functions–the aforesaid quizzes and certificates and so on and on. The things in my head, my ownership of which would be contaminated by taking an up close look at how somebody else is doing it.

We tend to forget that education is a business, because the world is full of state-sponsored and non-profit institutions, and we want to think idealistic thoughts about Education and Learning. But remember too that times are tough for education everywhere, and the lean times are probably permanent. Everybody’s competing for business–enrollment–and I forgot that. Balancing intellectual property rights has long been a part of my professional life, and I let down my guard for a moment.

You described the courses as presented by the BBC, but actually, FutureLearn who offers the courses, I discovered while researching it and reading their About, is:

a private company wholly owned by The Open University…We have 40 partners from the UK, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These include many of the best UK and international universities…We also work with a range of internationally renowned organisations – from professional bodies such as the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), to businesses like the BBC and Marks & Spencer, to the UK Government.

Took ‘em two paragraphs (those were some broad ellipses) to get around to mentioning their for-profit partners. That’s The Modern Style too, those “public-private” partnerships so beloved of the “neoliberals” (how I grit my teeth over that foul misappropriate of liberal). The fact that all those non-profits spun off a private company to do this with for-profit partners tells me they intend to guard their intellectual property, and its potential wealth-generating power, with lawyers and money.

Oops.

We use that pattern of quizzes and a final test, and while, since they’re voluntary, I suppose a lot of people skip them, it’s good to know that some people do respond the way you do. Those small quizzes along the way demonstrably work the lesson deeper into your synapses, and everybody should work them the way you do.

I signed up for Religion and Conflict, so I expect we’ll cross paths on the comment threads. The estimated four hours a week may prove an issue for me, so I may drop out at some point. One of the downers about online education is that course completion rates are abysmal, at least for free courses (we charge $hundreds for some of our continuing ed professional development courses, and believe me, nobody drops out of a course after paying significant real dinero). No surprise that people devalue what they don’t pay for.

You wrote that religion and, presumably conflict, is “a subject upon which I have some very firm ideas which need to be challenged”, and that’s what I felt reading the course description. After so many years at war in the Middle East, we feel a sense of familiarity with the people and cultures there…but it could be false. It’s likely to be false, and the real question is the degree of falsehood.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I’m particularly keen on the part where students interact with each other in a forum-like environment. I go further than the comments section of a blog, and add forums to courses and sometimes individual course modules. Seems to me that online learning can be horribly sterile and isolating, mostly passive consumption of words and media; but that people learn naturally in groups through social interaction, that learning is a social process (infant development research supports this).

I haven’t been in a course yet, so I wanted to ask you, what was the interaction like? You mentioned interacting with the teacher as well as students…how much? Did they also use TAs as moderators and assistant teachers? How much lateral (between students) interaction was there?

I’m big on the certificates, too. Mine have spiffy digital signatures you can verify on a secure web site–our students are professionals who are legally obligated to take some of these courses. Certs don’t matter when you’re just taking a course recreationally, but for more serious students, it looks like the model is evolving away from a big monolithic curriculum about a whole field, toward smaller certifications of individual skills and specialties. Within a few years people won’t have degrees, they’ll have these “digital knapsacks” full of certificates from all the courses they’ve taken.

O brave new world…

There is a link at the top of this page to all the courses they have. The one I took was well worth it. Well, more than worth it, since the cost is zero. And each course has an estimate of how long they think it will take.
Enjoy perusing.