In the world of nowadays the power of technologies, their popularity and influence are very impressive. The technological progress has created a significant impact on various spheres of people’s lives. Life without the Internet today is simply impossible to imagine. Internet serves as means of connection people, it allows the businessmen arrange their deals and make money, Internet supports the banking systems of the world.
Besides, it allows people to work without leaving their homes; it speeds up the process of globalization immensely. Moreover, it makes trading and purchasing easier. Finally, the Internet is gradually taking over the educational system of the whole world. Twenty years ago students used books to search for the materials and wrote their papers in hand.
Today they can find all kinds of information online in encyclopedias and electronic libraries. In fact, they do not even need to leave homes to study. There are online courses that allow people learn and receive qualification through the Internet. Many modern experts started to argue about these changes in the educational system. They point out various advantages and disadvantages, have different points of views.
This paper is focused on the works of Thomas Friedman and Neil Postman, which make good points about the online courses and discuss different sides of distance learning, stating that even though the introduction of the technologies into the learning process seems positive and promising, it has the capacity to distort the true essence of education.
The rise of online courses has incited many hopes about the future of education and the economic opportunities that can come out of that project. Thomas Friedman (2013) is the author of an article in which expresses great hopes about the potentials distance education.
He wrote, “nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity” (Friedman 2013).
By citing numerous examples, Friedman (2013) argued that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) can improve job opportunities, transform the teaching experience and the entire educational system. He considers MOOCs as a great opportunity for many people to obtain new qualifications in order to be hired for better jobs. In his view, these courses will lift a large number of people from poverty.
In addition, Friedman (2013) claims that MOOCs can improve the teaching experience of college professors as they provide a vast amount of feedback and force them to think about their teaching process from various perspectives and improve it when necessary.
Finally, by describing the experience of one autistic boy who took his first formal educational course when MOOCs appeared, Friedman (2013) points out that this new form of education has a potential to reach out to those groups which have not had the opportunity to participate in the educational process until now. Friedman (2013) concludes by writing,
“I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion”.
In closing, he is very optimistic and believes that MOOCs will have an enormous positive impact on the future of education.
Of, course there is an opposing view on this subject. For instance, Postman (1995) expressed his concern over the overall impact that technology might have on our educational system. He did not write specifically about the rise of MOOCs as they did not exist at the time when his book was published, but his critique of technology in education holds true even for MOOCs.
Indeed, MOOCs might be the perfect embodiment of the ideas that Postman (1995) critiques. Against a wide range of literature that expressed a great deal of optimism about the application of technology in education, Postman (1995) launched a critique in which he argued that the essence of education might suffer a deadly blow as technology takes over all of its aspects.
He believes that those authors, who praise the application of various gadgets in education and claim that children might someday rely on those gadgets alone to learn what they want and need, fail to grasp the true essence of education.
Citing a book titled Everything I Really Needed to Know I Learned in the Kindergarten, Postman argues that the basic goal of education is to teach us to acquire basic social norms and values like sharing, solidarity, respect for the other, etc. (Postman 1995, p. 21).
Postman (1995, p. 22) writes, “you cannot have a democratic – or indeed civilized community life – unless people have learned how to participate in a civilized way as part of a group”.
If we think about the experience of attending a MOOC, we realize that it is precisely that aspect that Postman (1995) sees as crucial that is lacking. Specifically, learning is individualized and despite the lively discussions that can take place on forums, the real sense of community never emerges. Every student in the class remains merely a nickname and an avatar.
Thomas Friedman (n.d.) also looked at MOOCs from other aspects. In a recent talk, Friedman (n.d) discussed economic forces that drive the development of MOOCs. The author argues that traditional college education is becoming old-fashioned and less useful. According to his view, individuals no longer get nearly as much as they invest in a traditional college education experience.
Besides, the employers today know that good grades are not the indicator of high-quality skills. Therefore, from all sides, the market is calling for a new educational system.
With regard to the issue of radically individualized learning, Friedman (n.d.) claims that schools will not become obsolete and that qualified teachers will be extremely important in this new form of education as mediators between the best teachers in the world and ordinary children in elementary schools and beyond. His belief is that, through the application of MOOCs, we can get the most of both systems.
Finally, Friedman (n.d) envisions the world in which there will be no limits on what a person can achieve in education and in personal career, but there will also be no protective mechanisms that could shelter an individual from market forces.
Thomas Friedman has a powerful point of view and he definitely has made some good points discussing the positive influence of the technologies on the process of education. At the same time, his views seem very naive and unrealistic because they lack the practical approach towards the future of our education if the intervention of the technologies continues developing at the same pace.
The influence created by the popularity of online courses and distant learning has a tendency to reduce the requirement of the students’ physical presence in the buildings of the Universities and at the campus. Friedman forgets to elaborate on the issues of empty classrooms when all the students will be given opportunities to study at home.
Besides, it is a well known fact that many students that start taking online courses tend to drop them over time because not everyone has the level of discipline high enough for the distance learning, where the students form their own schedules.
Moreover, Friedman omits the discussion of social effects that distance learning tends to create. The most powerful one is social isolation, which already is a serious problem in the contemporary society.
In conclusion, Postman’s opinion seems much more practical. While most of the scholars are very fond of the changes inflicted by the technological progress, Neil Postman approaches the issue critically, trying to forecast the future by means of analyzing the current tendencies.
The technologies offer a great help to the modern educational system, yet the overuse of them may disrupt the basics of learning and change what education currently stands for.
Reference List
Friedman, T. (n.d.). A Conversation with Thomas Friedman, Part 2: Missing the Point on MOOCs, Cost vs. Value in Higher Ed and the ‘401(k) World‘. Vimeo. Web.
Friedman, T. (2013). Revolution Hits the Universities. The New York Times. Web.
Postman, N. (1995). The end of education: redefining the value of school. New York: Knopf.