Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist, teacher, slacker. This week, we're getting learned the old-fashioned way: we’re doing it ourselves.
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Back in the long-forgotten, halcyon days of 2013, writer and teacher Andrew Wille put together a blog post where he outlined a syllabus for an ad-hoc, do-it-yourself creative writing master's degree. A few years before that, another writer and teacher, Jim Groom had coined the word "edupunk" in an effort to recenter classrooms on community-driven and do-it-yourself learning. Both these ideas have stuck around, in various incarnations, and, as global, online education proliferates and expands, seem to be poised for a new (old) style of learning.
I did my first online course in 2014. I signed up for an HTML and CSS course through the O'Reilly school (if you've ever wandered through the computers section of a bookstore, O'Reilly's books are the ones that have animal drawings on the covers) and got to work following the courses and eventually earned a couple of nicely printed certificates of completion. Then I tried to level myself up into a Javascript course and promptly failed. In the years since, I've done a lot of different online courses, both teacher and learner driven, good and bad. And I think I finally know what I want from a DIY education: consistency.
See, most of the course I took were built one at a time, with no real sense of level up or follow through. Even now, most of the big name online courses are still just that - courses. When you look at the course listings for Udemy or Coursera, you see listing after listing for a course that teaches a single skill or introduces a single core topic. And while these courses can be both educational and fun, they do not build towards a greater whole. Sometimes, that's okay. Sometimes, you just want to learn how to program in Javascript or operate a DSLR camera. But if you don't want to stop there, at Javascript or using a DSLR, what's the next step? It's not always clear. What's worse, it's not always the same quality.
A lot of the courses on the different online education platforms are built and run by different entities, whether that's a company, an institution like a university, or a single individual. As such, there is no one overseeing the full pathway of courses that might lead to something like a DIY MA. When I tried to jump from HTML to Javascript, the course lessons and exercises were very different from the ones I had done previously. And, there was no one around who had a bird's eye view of the whole program who could point out intermediary steps that might have made the jump less jarring.
But I think that's beginning to change and it's all down to market segmentation. The early 2000s saw online learning platforms specialize in coding, which makes a certain amount of sense. People who are interested in coding tend to be very computer literate and familiar with the tools needed to study the different languages and technologies. However, major institutions and other technologies (TED Talks anyone?) soon came along and began to broaden the spectrum of available materials. Over the past two decades, more and more platforms have come online bringing with them a variety of courses and ideas.
In recent months, the market has become saturated enough that specialist platforms have begun to appear. I, myself, am considering taking some classes on Domestika, an online learning platform that purports to be for creatives by creatives. And this is all well and good, but it is the same problem as before: If I sign up for three different drawing classes, each created by and taught by a different person, how much oversight is there? Can anyone on the platform tell me if I should take those classes in any particular order? Will the skills taught there build on each other? I'm not sure.
But, as I said, things are changing. The other courses I am interested in at the moment are provided (for free!) by the University of Texas. Through their Knight Center, the university has created several courses to teach journalistic skills in both self-directed and instructor-led classes. And while there is no formal degree attached to these courses, there is a clear interconnectedness at work and the program is overseen by a group of educators who work to keep it consistent and up to date. Which is more or less exactly what I want from a DIY MA.
At the end of the day, traditional MA programs still have some huge advantages over DIY online courses. Namely, oversight, consistency, a clear pathway through the material, and an accredited degree at the end. But the rise of self-empowered education through the many online platforms available is only just beginning. What are occasional and simple interest-driven courses now may soon be a way to cobble together exactly the teaching you need to achieve your goals. Maybe soon, we'll be able to trade in those certificates of completion for an actual degree. Here's hoping.
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Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel