Contrast Karen Head and Thomas Freidman on MOOCs

Compare/ Contrast Karen Head and Thomas Freidman on MOOCs
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Introduction
In the contemporary world, revolution resulting from advancement in technology has hit the Universities learning systems. Several institutions have advocated for Massive Open Online Courses as a great new educational revolution. The program has a big potential to lift several people out of poverty through offering affordable education that in turn helps them secure jobs or get promotion in their jobs. Massive Open Online Courses have also been viewed as an avenue for unlocking billions of brains empowering them to solve the world’s challenges. However, the project requires accurate assessment of the available resources as well as qualified personnel for its success. This paper is aimed at discussing the differences and similarities between Dr. Karen Head’s and Thomas Friedman’s perception on the effectiveness of massive open online courses.
Dr. Karen Head has agreed to be involved in teaching on massive open online courses program. He has been involved in the development of a MOOC in freshman composition at Georgia Institute Technology. However she faces challenges when considering the possibilities of making this project become a reality. She reports to have felt naive or even misled about the essential resources and procedures. According to Dr. Karen Head, there is not even a single institution that is, or could be in a position to undertake this endeavor. This is because there are several unknowns and there is no existing track (Head, July 2013).
Dr. Karen Head argues that unlike the traditional courses, the preparation of a MOOC requires working with professional from different fields. MOOC program requires the educators to work with instructional designers, videographers, Information Technology specialists as well as platform specialists. For many MOOCs, the instructors and the teaching assistants multitask through performing the roles of the supporting professionals (Head, July 2013).
There are challenges when it comes to the issue of accreditation. Dr. Karen and her team feel that there is no adequate means of evaluating the writing of so many students and this is a critical way of certifying their work (Head, July 2013). It is important that students are given the opportunity to review the short writing samples that they would come up with in quizzes given during different sessions of the course. This was not possible because there was no means of making student’s answers available to them after they had completed their quiz. Another challenge would be on how the instructors would be able to handle big numbers of students’ writing work and giving feedback for each (Head, April, 2013). Another dilemma comes when considering the option of applying signature track validation. Such a move would contradict the grant that the co...