This is a thing of beauty. It's the first time that I have seen a truly balanced write-up of the issues surrounding MOOC implementation.
New Yorker: Is College Education Moving Online?This is really fascinating reading-- and as you spend the time, consider what "college education" actually means, particularly in the latter 2/3rd of this (IMO, well-written) article.
Peter Burgard is quoted in the article:
“To me, college education in general is sitting in a classroom with students, and preferably with few enough students that you can have real interaction, and really digging into and exploring a knotty topic—a difficult image, a fascinating text, whatever. That’s what’s exciting. There’s a chemistry to it that simply cannot be replicated online.” Burgard also worries that MOOCs may slowly smother higher education as a system.
“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”
This
is the concern. Or part of it. One criticism that I have as a
physical scientist is the disquieting observation that ALL sciences are now being interpreted as being
computer science, or at least amenable to the same pedagogy and goals. That is NOT true. Science is
not engineering, and computer science is quite binary in outcomes which makes it far more like engineering than any of the other physical sciences. This is something that most of the people spearheading these MOOC efforts (and even the humanities faculty who are critical of them) simply do not seem to fully appreciate. Science education is just as inherently Socratic as the humanities are. An undergraduate course in synthetic organic chemistry or advanced optics has far more in common with a course in the fine arts than either does one in computer science. Similarly, mathematics. Those are
process-driven learning experiences, not outcome-driven ones. They
cannot be reduced to multiple-choice right/wrong assessment. No more than the nuanced understanding expressed in a stellar research paper for a philosophy course can be considered in that light. Who in their right mind would possibly make the claim that YouTube is a "performance art" lab class?
And yet, this IS what is being claimed by those driving the MOOC movement relentlessly. Frankly, this is about untapped MONEY, not education. It may benefit a segment of the population, all right-- and key among them are younger PG students, but I worry even there about the fact that those autodidacts are missing out on all that an authentic experiential, interactive learning experience can provide. Is Khan Academy
really a substitute for all mathematics instruction? Really? If it doesn't work,
why not? This is a pretty pressing question at the moment-- and I think, personally, that when you SCRIPT learning to this degree, you've constrained the students mentally to such a degree that all you
can really do is rote learning, or solopsism in one's own echo chamber. I don't think that ultimately serves GT students well either. They are often the very students who MOST need higher-level unscripted, unexpected interactions. Removing those messy, unexpected things cheapens education and turns it into operant conditioning.
Also addressed in this write-up: data mining, inefficiency driving costs, and a developing two-tiered system.
It's a great read.
