Social media is a notoriously effective form of procrastination. Whether you are checking if that photo from last night has got its first like, or if you’ve got any new followers on Twitter, there is always something to take you away from that essay that is due in two hours.

But it’s not as if procrastination is anything new. For the Cambridge students of yester-year, toasting muffins over an open fire and wondering what women were like would have been considerable time-killers. Social media provides a solution to the urge to put things off, not the urge itself.

What social media has changed is the way we do this. But are we conversing with real people through social media, or just interacting with online profiles? We have people as Facebook friends who we wouldn’t even give an acknowledging nod on passing them in the street.

We have access to their photos, their histories and what they posted as a status aged fifteen – and they have the same on you. Social media allows people to construct an online persona of experiences and attitudes that is, at best, an indirect representation of who they really are.

This online world of indirectness and self-presentation is looking to expand into education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are growing in the US, and are being explored by the Open University’s FutureLearn initiative.

MOOCs have some obvious advantages. Unlike a lecturer, a recording can be paused and rewound, and won’t be obscured by the clacking of keyboards or the sniffles and fidgets of the person sitting next to you.All reading materials are available online rather than in stack 902, sixth floor, North Wing, University Library – if your lecturer doesn’t have it out on a two month loan. And it would be considerably cheaper, demanding less of academics’ time and saving on the costs of living away from home.

But what kind of education can a MOOC provide? I don’t see how it could go far beyond the swallowing of some unquestioned knowledge and a signal to potential employers that you are of the hard-working, employable type. If education is aimed at developing individuals and cultivating a critical style of thought, then MOOCs cannot educate.

Some argue that interactive seminars and even supervisions could be replaced by online forums and video calls. But there is only one way to be sure that you are getting behind people’s constructed online personas and hearing what they really think, and that is to see the whites of their eyes. 

This applies to lecturers and supervisors, but also all the other people we interact with and bounce ideas off at university, from fellow students to prominent guest speakers. Development of critical thinking requires real people to critique and question.