I’m studying a number of other MOOCs at the same time as #edcmooc.

One of these is a Coursera course called ‘Think Again: How to Reason and Argue’ taught by the very entertaining Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University), with over 170,000 students.
I’m just starting to watch the video lectures  for week 4 and the course is in week 9.
This is quite frustrating as I am involved in two more MOOCs, #etmooc led by Alec Couros, (University of Regina, Canada)  and ‘Equine Nutrition’, taught by Dr Jo-Anne Murray (University of Edinburgh, UK). I’ve reluctantly decided to abandon ‘A History of the World since 1300′ taught by Jeremy Adelman from Princeton, as I just didn’t gel with the professor’s style. Sorry Jeremy.

As part of the Think Again course I recently took part in a Google hangout with a bunch of participants from Pakistan.
We had an interesting discussion about our motivations for studying the course and about MOOCs in general.
What was very humbling was our great appetite for knowledge and understanding –  Wanting to ‘become an intellectual’ was one of the reasons given for studying. Most of us were studying several MOOCs  simultaneously, with computer programming being a common choice.

A more general discussion ensued about our expectations – how these were different in ‘the west’ and ‘the east’ and how globalisation is impacting on employment opportunities for ordinary people.

During this conversation, it transpired that Google pay less (much, much less) than minimum wage to workers in countries where the cost of living and wage expectations are low.

There was a feeling among some that this was a good thing for countries where labour is cheap and that westerners should pay those in the east to work for them.

This reminded me of a friend who, some years ago, had a relationship with a woman  who was in the unfortunate position of being an illegal immigrant in the UK. She was working for 50p an hour in the UK cleaning at a well known high street store. Her ’employer’ had taken the job and sub-contracted it to her at a fraction of the hourly wage, pocketing the rest.
Then, earlier this week I read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/developer_oursources_job_china/

My conclusion:
You can learn as much from your fellow participants on a MOOC as you can  from the formal syllabus.
My hope is that the MOOC movement will, as well as meeting a desperate global need for education, also facilitate a deeper understanding between nations . Then this really will be a revolution…

“Big Breakthroughs Happen When What Is Suddenly Possible Meets What Is Desperately Necessary” – Thomas L. Friedman