Stefano Mirti: MOOCs are like a Marathon

Design 101 was a MOOC where our goal was not to teach design, was to create a community around design.

McLuhen told us that the medium is the message. We felt that we live in a world where the community is the message. Apparently very nice, actually terrifiying. Still it is the world where we live today. So all of our acivities, all of our intention, all of our things to do, they have a s a metagoal how to set up a community. This is why apart from the platform we make an extensive use of social media, so we have groups on facebook, we have twitter tweeting, instagram and alike. So basially the traditional teaching is a star, that is myself at the centre of the diagramme and then each student ... What we do as much as we can is to generate a cloud system where the interaction goes through the student. This is what we are doing. Then to make it it's basically, it's like for a factory. There is someone who does the mediums, someone who does the PDF, someone who thinks who the work is to be done, someone interacts on facebook, someone interacts on twitter. It's a cottage production. Great fun, great effort.

If you look at 20th century technological advancement, everytime there was a new invention, radio, CD, television, internet, someone said: Ah, this is great because university will change. Now there is radio, now people don't have anymore to go to class because we broadcast lessons. Now we have CD-ROM, fantastic, because ... Okay, and all of these failed. So, university, education did never change. Statistically speaking, the chances that MOOCs will revolutionary transform university is very low. This won't happen. Or in a different way, when Gutenberg invented the mobile types, we have books very cheap. But then a library does not become a university. A library remains a library. What happens is that if a university can have a library where books are very cheap then you change university. MOOC is the same. So MOOC is the medium, not the content. I can imagine that in the future there will be a university that will have a very relevant MOOC department like now some universities have a new media department or library very good. Some other won't have any MOOC department, that will be fine, and some will be the middle way. So I think that the transformation by the mobile types from Gutenberg does not make the teacher obsolete.

I think that our goal is to actually have less and less involvement inside the community and inside the teaching part, so our goal is more to produce the teaching material, and then if everything goes well ideally students become teachers. So we teach them in a certain way to become teachers themselves.

Again in the general discourse there is quite a tricky bit that MOOCs come out in the start-up age. So I have nothing against start-up venture capital etc. All this relies on a very short term. You have an idea, you call your friend, you get venture capital, and in six months, one year the thing has to work. Education is a field that needs extremely long stretches of time. So in order to understand the value of Bauhaus it took us 50 years. So I have the feeling that all this hype about start-up venture capital, let's get rich, let's sell very quick, is really difficult to apply on. So people believe that this MOOC is 100 metres. No, it's a marathon. The value of what we are doing today we will see in 20 years, not in the next six months.

Let's imagine that the business changes and is not anymore about having a superperformer we pay a ticket we go to see but it is to organize a party where people come, the music is good, the food is nice and there are multiple DJs and people from the audience become DJ. And people like this more. So there is this shift. I would say that the teacher has to become a producer. So like MOOC education starts to become pretty much other creative activities such as cinema or things alike. In our experience if I was to organize a MOOC system it's not the teacher who has the name on top the relevant bit. The relevant bit is the people interacting with the students.

Actually right now in Architecture 101, the second MOOC, the MOOC is practically run by the students, by the community. We only produce the content, and we devided the MOOC into different categories, so the way this MOOC functions there is the social media part, so there is this facebook part, the twitter part, instagram, the iversity platform, so all of these different parts of the MOOC we call them cells. So students got together and are sort of managing these cells from all these branches of the MOOC. And from doing this they are empowered, and they feel much more involved. And so for this reason they also propose a lof of things how to change. They contact me personally, and we should do this and that. And I say, okay, let's go, and they do everything by themselves. And this is very interesting.

Can we run a class with a facebook group? Yes of course, it's quite trivial and very easy. But the point is not to run a class with facebook. The point is to run a class for students who have facebook as the mindset, there has been a cognitive shift. If my students are all set up on facebook-cognitive pattern I have to change what I teach. There is a revolution. There is a technological revolution, and because of that we must change. If we simply take the old class, and you fill me ... We are missing the opportunity. So the big challenge is how to reorganize content. It's not just the medium. The medium per se is nothing, a blackboard.

If you want to learn how to swim you can go to the swimming-pool all the winter and you start with the thing and then that ... or we can go to the seaside and we drop you into the water. I think the second one is much faster and much better. You drink a lot of water in this second system but you learn much faster. So you shouldn't fear fear. But it is extremely stressful because the traditions classroom is like this room, it's a pack, what happens in this classroom no one knows. What happens in a MOOC everyone knows. And people start to get upset on you, and you say: Fuck you, I'm the teacher! So it's a matter of an attitude, not a matter of avoiding mistakes. It takes some nerves and if you are easily stressed the MOOCis not for you.