I would very much like to do my doctorate. I have several ideas and have spent  time scrounging around on the web for some place where my budget of time and cash and my schedule can all be accommodated in a blissful combination, and the fetters of my everyday responsibilities will fall away and I will be able to concentrate on learning and writing with a chorus of heavenly voices as BGM. Yup, it’s a fantasy. I know it. It just ain’t gonna happen. I’m too busy and too poor and too invested in my family to commit myself to an Ed.D. program at this time. So I just study and research by myself. I’m on my own, with my books and my copied articles, and my PDFs on my ipad, and my hop-scotching from topic to topic as I follow my inclinations without discussions or deadlines.

But now there is a new game in town. MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are crawling out of the academic woodwork and getting all sorts of attention. Game-changers, they’re being called by some enthusiastic folk (especially the people involved in the three most prominent at the moment: Coursera, Udacity, and Edx). Of course, there is dissent as well, this being the internet and all (this article sums up the pros and cons pretty well). They don’t really level the playing field and allow wider access–real access–to higher education. Well, they kind of do, but point taken. They are not real courses with interaction with classmates and the professor! Yup, with thousands of people enrolled,you can’t expect to actually get to talk to anyone. They are just advertising for big name unis! Probably true, at least partially. I don’t care that much. The fact is that they are a niche right now for people like me who want to learn, who are learning on their own anyway, to add a little structure and direction to their studies. And that’s a good thing. The world is like that anyway now. You can learn almost anything you want on your own; but you only get a degree if you pay and work at it long and hard enough. It is the way it is.

So, I’ve enrolled myself into two courses at Coursera. I want to give it a spin. I’m hoping that I learn something, something that I may have overlooked if if I tried to learn the subject on my own. Anything good that emerges from the experience will be welcome, and unexpected, and precious. I know, like everyone knows, that MOOCs are not the answer to the problems of higher education. But they are a nice gesture, from a lot of people who don’t really need to make such gestures. For the time being, I’m still thinking of it as a slightly less lonely version of learning alone.