Bill Gates By Katherine Mangan Analysis

In the article by Katherine Mangan "MOOCs Could Help 2- Year Colleges and their Students, Says Bill Gates", it talks about what MOOCs are, how they work, & who would benefit the most using it. Mangan reports that those students who use MOOCs, pass courses and that graduation rates increase, however, it 's assuming that students will pass which will therefore increase graduation rates. Also Mangan declines to produce statistics that contribute to the argument that schools and students would save money. Not only that but she also did not provide enough evidence to prove how minority and poor students will directly benefit from MOOCs if, it is known that they struggle with online courses.

Bill Gates is one of the main supporters of MOOCs, he

Mangan mentioned that students as well as schools would save money if more students signed up for MOOCs. "With more work done at home and online, students could spend less time on campuses, freeing up classroom space to accommodate more students, he said. That approach works well, he added, with remedial mathematics, where only about 10 percent of students who start courses end up getting two-year degrees within three years."(Mangan). She mentioned that students would spend more time at home working online which would cause students to spend less time on campus. The schools could then welcome more students to their schools since there would be more classroom space because of the students spending time at home. The tuition of incoming students would increase the schools revenue, the issue here is that the students who are at home might not fully understand the lecture videos provided for them which would cause students grades to downfall or even worse they could fail the course. The counterargument is that students are provided with infinitely many work sheets to help them understand topics better, however, there a different ways that students learn better and a computer lectures will not pick up any of these. This course will then be a waste of time for the students that can not grasps information provided to them outside of a classroom environment. Also there have been test that prove that students perform better during test or quizzes when they are in the same environment that they learned the information. With MOOCs being accessible at home and review at school rather than re-learning the same information students will score worse. Not to mention the dishonesty issue with students that might not fully understand or with those who simply do not care enough for