Reddit, the
“front page of the internet”, as tagged by them, is an open education forum
where the visitors can gather knowledge about diverse subjects. The users, who
are known as the redditors, write about different topics and also create
sub-reddits. They have formed UReddit as well, which is basically known as the
University of Reddits.
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| Image via CrunchBase |
In the UReddit
section of this particular social networking site, the students can learn about
various issues of their interests but there are no trained professors to teach
them. This is an open forum and therefore anyone is eligible to teach a subject
to anybody who is interested in learning that. This feature of Reddit makes it
totally different from the MOOCs, i.e. the Massive Open Online Courses, where
the subjects are taught by conventional professors.
Blooming
Popularity of Reddit
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| Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian with the Reddit Alien (Photo credit: Anirudh Koul) |
The founders of
Reddit, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, tried to go against the standards of
higher education. Reddit is a platform where the students are eligible to learn
and know about anything which grabs their attention and makes them excited.
However, this is seldom possible in the schools or colleges where we need to
learn things we do not like. This idea behind the site excelled in grabbing the
attention of almost 75,000 people who have already registered to this site for
over 100 different courses.
Although Reddit
has nothing to do with the traditional professors, still due to so much of hype
about the website, Dr. Philip Bishop, one of the professors of University of
South Florida, could see something relevant out of this. He, therefore, have
started his web-only classes on UReddit for his freshmen students. With the
help of this website, he shares videos and various discussion forums with the
students.
Due to the
budding popularity of the site, two of the pioneers of Reddit, Anastas
Stoyanovsky and Elliot Volkman, have already launched a kick starter campaign
in order to raise funds for the development of the website. This way they
intend to help the students by providing them with searchable transcripts, and
have also termed their project as an ‘open compass’ which is absolutely
different from edX and Coursera.
Professor Bishop, along with his
colleague Mr. K. Edward Renner, believes that this open forum of learning and
teaching is nonetheless a great step towards education. However, the only
drawback, according to them, is the fact that it is quite impossible to track
the number of students visiting the site and also because the site includes
discussions and topics about video games, like StarCraft, it is lacking in credibility.
