SEMINAR VERSUS MOOC

Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning. David Bromwich has recently shown how the current educational nostrum of 'massive open online courses�...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New Left review 2015-11 (96), p.1
Main Author: Spoerhase, Carlos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Colleges & universities
Commercialization
Discovery
Distance learning
Enlightenment
Higher education
Humanities
Internet
Online instruction
Seminars
Teaching
Truth
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Summary:Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning. David Bromwich has recently shown how the current educational nostrum of 'massive open online courses', or MOOC, implies a very specific idea of intellectual community: 'At the heart of the MOOC model is the idea that education is a mediated but unsocial activity. This is as strange as the idea -- shared by ecstatic communities of faith -- that the discovery of truth is a social but unmediated activity.' Bromwich's apt analysis does not tell us if there is an alternative model of higher education as a mediated and social activity. In fact there is, and it has been available at least since the late Enlightenment. At the heart of humanities teaching in most Western universities is the academic seminar. It is to this interactive, discursive form of teaching that MOOCs wish to become heir apparent.
ISSN:0028-6060
2044-0480