Online university, pandemics and the long history of globalization

Abstract

ABSTRACT Online classes have so rapidly expanded in Japanese universities as a result of the Covid-19 shock in 2020. Although this shift opens many possibilities in the university education including the participation of students who have small kids, disabilities, and reasons they cannot come to the university campus, we still need to think about the difference between the small scale interactive style class and the large scale on-demand delivery style class. The most important part of the online class is the sharing of time. However, in the online class of delivery type, the learning time itself is not shared, and the students can access the lectures at any time. In online lectures where space and time are not shared, there should be artificial mechanisms to share the context that establishes the questions in a different way than physically given. In this paper, I discuss MOOC (massive online open courseware) and Minerva University as the two prominent challenges of online education today. And I also discuss the historical positionality of university as a crossroad of different intellectuals and students of different cultural backgrounds in the long waves of globalization and pandemics.