WHAT'S A MOOC?

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 235  05/02/2014

Fans of Scorsese's movie "Mean Streets" must certainly remember the pool-hall scene where Jimmy is called a "mook" and responds by asking what that means (we never quite find out). I was irresistibly reminded of this scene as I read an excellent recent column by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n22/john-lanchester/short-cuts) in which he discusses the  MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), a type of distance learning increasingly being offered by US universities. In Lanchester's case what attracted him to a MOOC was a Harvard course on Food Science given by Ferran Adrià, famous chef of the now defunct Spanish super-restaurant El Bulli. Not many years ago gaining admission to Harvard lectures would  have cost even more than dinner at El Bulli, but he was able to sign up for SPU27 and take the course on his iPad for free .

SPU27 forms part of a joint project for online learning between Stanford, Harvard and MIT called EdX. (Stanford pioneered the MOOC several years ago via iTunes, though of course our own Open University a far earlier pioneer using the ancient medium of analog terrestrial television). The idea of such courses is that they can "flip the classroom", so that instead of attending lectures students view them online and do their coursework work at home, visiting the campus only very occasionally to be tested and discuss difficulties. Advantages for the university are substantial: it can save on the cost of maintaining physical lecture halls and presumably stretch lecturers' salaries over far more students than can be fitted into a theatre. Lanchester forsees MOOCs becoming ever more important as university admission fees escalate while prospective students' earning-power falls, but he also forsees them putting some universities out of business altogether. For a MOOC, as for any other online content provider, attracting custom will depend upon effective viral marketing and hiring star performers like Ferran Adrià or Bruce Sterling.

As for the quality of MOOC tuition, Lanchester found SPU27 harder and more rigorous than he'd expected, though he does acknowledge a loss of personal interaction among students and lecturers. But the fact that MOOCs are tolerable at all is testament, as if any more were needed, to a computer/telecoms revolution that's now entered the post-PC phase. Many MOOC students will  probably prefer to watch their lectures on a large-screen smart TV at home, on a tablet in the park or on the bus to their day-job. Last year in a column about Alan Kay and his Dynabook (Idealog 223) I felt obliged to point out that increasing monopolisation of copyrighted media content by big corporations was becoming an obstacle to its fullest implementation. Well, MOOCs offer one more source of free high-quality educational content, presumably subsidised by those high fees paid by physically-attending students. Free tuition could even revive that old idea of education for its own sake, rather than just for a job.

Market competition is working pretty well to reduce the cost and increase capabilities of the hardware you need. My first-generation LCD TV died the other day and I found the cheapest replacement was a 29" LED model from LG. Its picture quality is a revelation, in both sharpness and colour fidelity, but I was a bit sceptical about its smartness. I needn't have worried because it immediately found my home Wi-Fi and I was watching YouTube and reading Gmail within minutes. It finds my laptop too and plays content from its hard disk. Like Mr Honeyball I find the on-screen keyboard deeply depressing, but I've found some solace through an LG TV Remote Android app that lets me enter text into most forms and search-boxes via gesture typing, Bluetooth keyboard or even speech. It doesn't work with Google Docs though, as TV and tablet keyboards get hopelessly tangled. I've added my own 500 gig external hard drive to the LG's USB port for rewind and programme recording, and paired TV and Nexus to stream YouTube content directly without need for a Chromecast. And it came with built-in Netflix, Lovefilm and iPlayer, but irritatingly not 4oD.

Despite its weaknesses I can still easily imagine watching lectures on smart TV and answering multiple-choice test questions via the tablet. Data formats are no longer really a problem as I can shovel PDFs, JPEGs, MP3 and MP4s with ease between Windows, Android and TV. Google's new free Quickoffice handles the Microsoft Office formats pretty well (and I keep DocsToGo as backup for anything they can't). It feels as though a chilling wind of change is blowing right through the Stanford campus all the way to Redmond, and I seriously wonder whether I'll ever buy another Windows PC. I hope that doesn't make me a mook (whatever that means).