Coming Home from a MOOC

In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been a matter of public discussion in Europe, much as they are in the US. It´s evident that lecturing (in MOOCs or in the classroom) is only one part of our teaching activity, which encompasses lab sessions, practicals, and small research projects. Teaching also extends to tutoring - the essential one-to-one relation between a professor and a student - that MOOCs will never supply. In evaluating MOOCs´ possible impact, we must take into account that learning is a complicated, multifaceted process that consists of the student´s violent confrontation with the outside world. Even decades after our student days, we all retain vivid, indelible memories of only a handful of very special courses spread out over our years of study. Those courses were the ones that shaped us into what we have become. Time will tell whether the new medium of MOOCs is strong enough to leave this kind of imprint on students, and whether tomorrow´s professionals will have received formative influence from courses delivered over the Internet. The answer to this question isn´t clear, but the author´s first attempt to find out was sufficiently encouraging to try again, with the second edition of Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations.