Supercool School: Why Can’t Class Be More Like Facebook?

March 25, 2010 by Joel Milani

Supercoolschool.com, a user-generated online education platform, was founded just this past January. As young as it is, its creation means something significant for the future of education; it’s just not clear what yet.

Supercool Online School

The site presents itself as a game-changer, a radical shift in the world of academia. Most colleges that presently offer classes online do so according to the traditional college course paradigm (a student signs up for x class which is worth x credits, completes x number of assignments and is assigned a grade), with very few venturing far from that model. Supercoolschool.com, for better or worse, ventures.

The Supercool Model

Based on principles that made online communities like Facebook such a huge success, Supercool School aims to create a forum where anyone can give instruction or take classes. They provide a meeting place where users can create classes they feel qualified to teach, sign up for classes other users have created or request classes to be taught in their areas of interest. The interface is pretty impressive, combining elements of an online social network with the functionality of a webinar. File sharing, screen sharing, video conferencing and live chat are all features of the Supercool classroom.

The Supercool Mission

The website’s blog makes the claim that “the same that blogging has done to publishing will happen to education on a global scale.” This is great news to people without readily available access to education, but calls into question the validity of the website’s content. Blogs and user-generated websites like Wikipedia, although invaluable sources of information, have still not quite achieved the status of ‘credible source.’ If you hand in a college paper that cites a wiki article, you can expect it right back along with a disdainful look from your professor.

The Supercool Future

Despite the website’s invitation to “Imagine a world without factory workers and farmers. But instead a society of happy & educated people with 10+ lifelong professions,” which smells a little too Brave New Worldy to me, Supercool School has a few things to teach traditional colleges about online education. The utilization of online tools can potentially increase the scope of students who have access to inexpensive education. Maybe modeling online education after a social networking site like Facebook, where students spend most of their time anyway, isn’t such a bad idea.

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For more related information, read another take on sister developments in the growing world of alternative online education.

And a few of our related blog posts:

Online Education vs. the Classroom

On Web-based Education, Technology and Teaching Naked

Go to School in Your Underthings: The Future of Education