Lughnasa                                                                  New (Harvest) Moon

Didn’t get to the candles yet.  Tomorrow morning.  Kate’s going to make wild grape jelly and I’ll do the candles.  A crafty morning.

Loki’s Children has not received much attention this week, but it will.  The Modern class is on review week and Monday sees the start of the Modern Poetry class.  I’m excited about that one.  I’m auditing both of these so I don’t feel pressure to perform.

MOOC’s will change the nature of education, I’m sure of it.  With patience and discipline it will soon be able to get a baccalaureate degree in the comfort of your own home and for a minimal amount of money.

I’m not sure how the mentoring side of teaching will adapt to thousands of students.  Perhaps there will be month long intensive sessions on campus, the opposite of J-terms or terms abroad.  The students will come to the campus for one-on-ones, group discussions, build friendships, then disperse back to their homes or wherever they connect with the online university.  Or, perhaps the students will come to a central location, geographically or content focused.

It’s not hard to imagine that advancing multi-person onscreen technology could facilitate small group discussions live.  Or, it might be that a student takes two years of classes at home, then comes for six-months of on-campus work, then back for another couple of years.  Or, it might work to do, say, two years of classes, a year on campus, then the remaining courses over a longer, but determined time while in a work setting.

Then, too, it might work like I understand Oxford and Cambridge do, where the focus is on reading and student papers with once a week or once every two week sessions one-to-one online.  The mix and match of these options are all possible and we’re at the very front end of this astounding change in what has been settled custom since the middle ages: students come to live at a central place, attend classes in physical structures and have access only to the teaching staff available there.  None of that will be necessary anymore.

Pretty exciting, I’d say.