SPS Community Blog

“Preparing for the Future” by Wendy Williams was originally published on Getting Smart.

The future of education will be on display next week in Arizona, at the Education Innovation Summit.  There will be a wide range of speakers and panel discussions, which I am really looking forward to hearing.  Because the focus is on innovation, and many educational technology companies and entrepreneurs will be there, it is a chance for me as an educator to hear about what tools will be available to my university and K-12 schools in the near future.  I am especially interested to hear what new models are being proposed that can make sense of the MOOC phenomenon for me, since the online instruction that I do at the City University of New York (CUNY) takes place in small classes and does not discard the traditional framework of credit hours and degree programs within a university structure.

Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed for the New York Times made many CUNY instructors bristle by extolling the “MOOCs revolution” as if massively open online courses alone could fix difficult issues of social inequality and access to education, in the U.S. and globally.  Friedman does note in another article, however, that so far it is mostly middle and upper class students who are able... Read More

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