“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.”
Simone Weil – 20th Century Educator and Philosopher
Today I began the next phase of my education. I thought I would try out a new school and I thought I should try to keep up the standards that we had at the University of Minnesota. So, I found this little school in Connecticut called Yale – sorry Hohenstein no Harvard. So how did an old guy like me with a questionable track record get into this prestigious university? Well I didn’t exactly “get in”, I sort of just sneaked in via a MOOC – a massive open online course. A MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web, according to Wikipedia. All I know is that I found it on iTunes U and started by attending a lecture from a world-renowned scholar on the American Revolution. Apparently, a lot of us freshmen at Yale take this class.
Traditional educators are not so sure what to make of MOOC’s. A few years ago, I was on an advisory panel for the University of Minnesota School of Civil and Geotechnical Engineering – an extremely enlightening opportunity. At one of our meetings the head of the department noted that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had just made EVERY lecture needed for a civil engineering degree on line and available to the public. He posed the question – what does this mean to US? Lively discussion followed. I am not sure what this means for traditional education either. I think dramatic changes must and will eventually come.
This whole MOOC experience reminded me about my junior year at Minnesota. One of the world’s most respected economists, a guy by the name of Dr. Walter Heller, returned to the university after a stint as the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He taught a course in macroeconomics for one lecture session each week. I heard about it and I crashed the lectures for about six weeks. The problem was that word spread and pretty soon it was standing room only in a lecture hall of about five hundred and they put the kibosh on it – you had to show a registration card at the door. This ended my career with Dr. Heller but he made those lectures absolutely enthralling – which is a hard thing to do for the “Dismal Science”. Of course, I was getting no credit but I went just for the joy of learning.
I had the same feeling today. What a joy it is to be able to learn just for the sake of learning. And what a great opportunity to be able to learn from the best for free!!!!! Let me tell you I had a blast today and I am already wading into one of our first assigned readings – “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine. What a great book – what a great title. I am mostly through it already – I got it online from the library. I feel another post coming on.