Institute For The Future

The buzz about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in the media and education space is understandable but overrated. Through much of our research on the Future of Learning at the Institute for the Future, we are seeing that MOOCs are really just the tip of the iceberg—just one signal—among many drivers of change that are affecting the way we learn.  As I recently wrote in Fast Company, 

“MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools.”

To see the full article, go to Fast Company: www.fastcoexist.com/1681507/the-future-of-education-eliminates-the-classroom-because-the-world-is-your-class

More than just MOOCs, we are beginning to move away from traditional educational institutions to what I am calling learning flows, “where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.”