MOOCs schmoocs: the education is in the dialogues

articulation, the expression of information and ideas. Externalization exposes that information and those ideas to scrutiny by others and to potential challenge. The process of critique, defense, explanation, reflection, and consolidation can be a powerful mechanism for sensemaking and development of understanding. The critical, reflective dialogues help students form the links between resources and personal knowing, giving the knowledge relevance and meaning for the individual. MOOCs—as part of distance education— are an amazing opportunity to make resources available, and to engage distributed students in a community of learning. But we mustn’t get so excited about providing access to a massive digital library of canned lectures and interactive materials that we neglect the community and learning parts, the engagement with students. MOOCs and their potential for ‘reach’ cannot be allowed to distract us from what’s important about education: genuine learning. Much of the hype about MOOCs has put the focus on the resources. The perspective that presents MOOCs as ‘economizers’ or a ‘way out’ of expensive engagement with students is mistaken. MOOCs must not be seen as a way to eliminate teachers or replace them with resource providers—the true potential value of MOOCs lies in the opportunity to support teachers, making them more available for those critical dialogues with students. As Mary Shaw and I wrote in a previous column [1], the real challenge of distance education is not in the provision of materials, but in reaching the student, engaging students in effective dialogues that help transform and expand their understanding, engaging them in a community of learning that scaffolds their exposure to, interaction with, and assimilation of knowledge. There are arguably three pillars for successful learning: materials, pedagogy and dialogue. Again, we mustn’t be distracted by the technology; pedagogy means not just a My own research concerns representation and reasoning—or, more broadly, language and thought. I remember how enthralled I was when I first studied the development of language (around 500,000 years ago) and considered what a profound difference it made to human experience. Language allowed members of a group to go beyond immediate reference and to exchange thoughts, complex ideas, and abstractions. Language enabled dialogue, allowing groups to plan together, to teach skills, to give directions, to explain, to question, to tell stories. Dialogue allowed a group to pass on their knowledge and culture from one generation to the next: to teach, to facilitate learning, to accumulate knowledge. From the earliest stories around campfires, people have learned through dialogue. When I reflect on my own education, it didn’t happen in the library; it happened in the dialogues—in the modern equivalent of sitting around the campfire listening to the elders and mulling things over with peers. Dialogues with teachers, who assumed that we would study, that we would work harder, that we would learn. Teachers like