It’s not just universities experimenting with running MOOCS – Massive Online Open Courses – museums are getting in on the act too. Julia Friedman delves into a new way of engaging audiences and generating income.
MOOCs (massive open online courses) have been both hailed as a possible solution to providing low-cost, high-quality education and derided as a destructive reallocation of resources from public education to private corporations. Much of the existing debate is centered on the possibility of replacing a physical experience of education with a virtual one; the dispute is also necessarily entangled with the crisis of rising educational costs in the United States.
Institutions of higher learning are not, however, the only organizations experimenting with online education. On February 10, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) released its first MOOC for a general audience on the popular platform Coursera. “Seeing Through Photographs” draws on MoMA’s collection, as well as an impressive array of original content, to provide participants with an introduction to the art of photography. The course includes 16 audio slideshows of interviews with such artists as Martha Rosler, Susan Meiselas, Walid Raad, and Carrie Mae Weems; six short films featuring artists... Keep reading on Hyperallergic
MOOCs (massive open online courses) have been both hailed as a possible solution to providing low-cost, high-quality education and derided as a destructive reallocation of resources from public education to private corporations. Much of the existing debate is centered on the possibility of replacing a physical experience of education with a virtual one; the dispute is also necessarily entangled with the crisis of rising educational costs in the United States.
Institutions of higher learning are not, however, the only organizations experimenting with online education. On February 10, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) released its first MOOC for a general audience on the popular platform Coursera. “Seeing Through Photographs” draws on MoMA’s collection, as well as an impressive array of original content, to provide participants with an introduction to the art of photography. The course includes 16 audio slideshows of interviews with such artists as Martha Rosler, Susan Meiselas, Walid Raad, and Carrie Mae Weems; six short films featuring artists... Keep reading on Hyperallergic