Online and offline

A MOOC Classroom

Two studies in contrast between higher education offered online versus that taught in traditional offline classes: MOOC's or Massive Online Open Courses, taught by professors who are leaders in their field (a.k.a those who teach mostly in Ivy League colleges and universities), and the regular classes taught by the brigade of the less-hallowed professors inside brick and mortar classrooms, where real-time and real-space contact between learners and teachers is an intrinsic part of the experience of learning.

A.J. Jacobs, editor at large at Esquire Magazine, shares his experience with MOOC learning, while novelist Philip Roth remembers his Homeroom teacher as a superb mentor who not only taught content, but also shared with his students an inspiring presence.

Both Jacobs and Roth concur, implicitly, that the process of learning is dynamic and will stall if there is no real dialogue or intellectual interaction between students and professors. The MOOC's, says Jacobs, give students from "South Dakota to Senegal" access to Ivy League wisdom, but the Ivy League wisdom is dispensed pretty impersonally. Professors are as inaccessible as the Pope or Thomas Pynchon.

Roth's Homeroom teacher, on the other hand, was highly accessible, much like the figure of Socrates and Roth says that one of the things that stood out about this extraordinary teacher of his was the fact that his talk was always permeated by the "tang of the real."

MOOC professors deliver content remotely, whereas offline professors, at least a few of them, might just end up shaping the learners' outlook on life at large, in ways big and small.