2 unrelated figures: edX Moocs and 1/3 of students who didn't have any cognitive cain

Right now, we are probably living some of the most interesting moments in education since years, maybe even since all my life. At least it feels like it, after having worked with technology enhanced learning since 2000.

I was just reading the TIME magazine and these two figures popped up. One is related to MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, a single phenomena that since 2008 seems to be raddling the entire model of Higher Education institutions. MOOCs are providing access to higher education: without entry requirements, without cost and at a massive scale. This figure is from MIT

the edX platform we launched with Harvard 17 months ago has enrolled 1.25 million unique learners—10 times the number of living MIT graduates. Read more

Ain't that just insane? I really love how well the figure, "10 times the number of...." represents the scale and what kind of potential is there to enable access to good quality content through MOOCs.

And here is the other figure that  caught my eye, this is related to the cost of Higher Education in the US, nothing to do with MOOCs.

36% of college graduates had not shown any significant cognitive gains over four years. Read more

Just imagine, these are people who pay for their education. And those are the prices that people pay in the US, not in Finland! ...it's amazing how little ownership people take of their learning... This is the dark side of the moon - really. The bright side, it's the MOOCs and how they demonstrate that there are takers for good learning opportunities!

The unfortunate thing is, what studies will probably find out later, is that most ppl who take a MIT MOOC are already well educated and do it just out of curiosity or as a hobby. They never probably were the ones who were deprived from good educational opportunities in the first place.