Dolly Mixture courses

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This week I had a great chat with @nancyrubin and @CliveBuckley after I re-tweeted Nancy:

Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

My thoughts on courses and training, as I mentioned above, as just this: courses tend to fit the organisational structure of the issuing body and don’t always fit the ‘need’ of the learner. You join (example) a specific school or faculty to start and complete your degree in Business Management or Economics or Sociology. But what if the specific subjects you really want to study are only loosely based around the course structure that the institution wants to teach? What if you want to do 80% of the course, but there are some other, better related but not officially available, modules that would make your learning and / or degree certificate relevant to the career direction you want to go? What if the institution hasn’t kept up with changes to the industry sector, is still a good course and subject specialist, but the final qualification isn’t ‘quite’ what is needed to get the jobs that are available?

This is beyond the modular degree schemes or pathways, this is giving the option to be more flexible with the modules they take, even taking modules that aren’t obvious to the academics but are relevant and interesting to the students? Obviously this can be taken too far, you can offer too much flexibility, and students could take vastly different (and possibly even unrelated) learning journeys that actually make the overall qualification void.

Then came a great conversation with Clive and Nancy around the ‘dolly mixture’ course, as Clive called it. Why this? Well, the article starts by highlighting the changes in now we consume media:

“People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?”

With degrees fees in the region of £9000 a year in the UK, not to mention living costs and all sorts of other costs to take into account making sure your study meets not only your own expectations but also that of your career aspirations is essential. Businesses are changing, as are students and their experiences and expectation.

I highlighted the similarity between MP3s and MOOCs, about the disruptive influence each had on their respective industries. I’m not saying here that MOOCs are the way forward, others are already arguing that (and good luck to them), but I am saying that the attitude to learning is changing. The attitude to finding the courses is changing.

People buy more MP3 tracks than full MP3 albums, people real more individual articles than a full newspaper, why not make it easier for students able to choose and study individual modules instead of a full degree. If institutions are struggling, for example, to get students on to a 3 or 4 year (sometimes 5 years) part-time online course, then why not split it up into smaller, cheaper, shorter, easier-to-digest (and finance, and find time for) modules where students can come and choose what they want, from a broad range of modules, to study when they want, to study when they can afford, etc.

Yes, there are many many holes in this approach, but why? Is it the approach that is at fault or are the restrictions we put on the course structure?

Image source: Josh Roulston (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)