The Socratic value of MOOCs

IE Focus | By Rolf Strom-Olsen. Academic Director of Humanities Studies at IE Humanities Center

The rise of MOOCs and the fact that they are open to all and free of charge has caused great consternation in the academic world. Socrates, however, would have approved.

In the brief introductory video of my MOOC (Critical Perspectives on Management) that we put together to walk through the class syllabus, I make the point that, as a Humanities course masquerading as a strategy class, the methodological inspiration derives from those two fundamental tenets of the Socratic imperative: that true wisdom consists in knowing you do not know and that the unexamined life is not worth living.

But while these two sentiments of the Socratic imperative are certainly the best known and serve as the fons et origo of humanist enquiry, there is a third, equally critical, part of the Socratic imperative that I had to leave out (since the video was testing weary viewers’ patience already).

It’s this bit, from the Apology.