Why MOOCs are Like the Music Industry. By Alex Sayf Cummings. History News Network, May 30, 2013.
Historians at MOOC Partner Schools Say Faculty Not Consulted. By David Austin Walsh. History News Network, May 30, 2013.
Cummings:
What
does all this have to do with MOOCs? Everything. Proponents of “massive open online courses” argue that by putting an entire course’s lectures online and
letting students anywhere in the world “enroll” for free tears down barriers
that keep students out of the college classroom. People who could never have
the money or cultural capital to attend MIT can acquire the same knowledge as a
coed in Cambridge. In one recent experiment, over 93,000 students participated
in Jeremy Adelman’s world history course at Princeton.
MOOCs,
then, appear to represent everything democratic, inclusive, and populist about
American culture at its best. Knowledge is freed from the halls of academe and
anyone can learn – they can even earn credit for taking certain courses, and
some traditional colleges, including my own institution, are increasingly
willing to accept it.
If
we’re being open and inclusive, though, what are we opening and what we
including people in? Is watching a series of videos the same thing as taking a
course? How can a professor evaluate the performance of 93,000 people? It seems
indisputable that tens of thousands of students cannot possibly receive
personal feedback and mentoring from one instructor.
As
philosophers at San Jose State University argued recently, in a widely circulated letter, the MOOC vision of democratic education raises some serious
ethical concerns. Is a lecture recorded in Princeton or Cambridge, for a highly
privileged group of students, going to be relevant to diverse, working- and
middle-class students at a large public university? Will there become two
tracks of education – one for the elite, who get the luxury of having their
own, real, live professor, and a system for the masses, where college means
watching videos and taking quizzes?
Indeed,
at its extreme the MOOC movement threatens the very existence of “professor” as
a job, as some scholars are no doubt beginning to realize. If a university can
license a MOOC for a few thousand dollars a year, why would they want to give a
middle class salary and health benefits to a tenured faculty member? A few
institutions might retain a handful of well-known faculty for prestige, but the
business of moving students through the system and depositing knowledge in
their brains will require far fewer instructors.
In a
less dystopian scenario, Coursera could still be a trojan horse for a corporate
takeover of higher education: swapping standardized, prepackaged learning for
the old model of professors drawing on their own distinctive expertise to teach
and guide students.
These
concerns have nothing to do with Luddism, and professors are not just worried
about their own jobs. MOOCs raise fundamental questions about what education is
and what the institutions we care about so deeply ought to do and ought to look
like. I don’t see education as merely a transmission of knowledge – a filling
of a pail, which can be done individually or en masse – but about the building
of skills and capacities, relationships and experiences. Who ever felt the same
way about a YouTube video as they did about the great teacher or professor who
changed their lives?
The
problem is not with the technology, but with scale. Indeed, professors ought to
be more open to tools that can enhance their teaching, from posting podcasts of
lectures online to piping in experts from around the world to speak with
students via videoconference. Where I teach, students of all ages enter the
classroom struggling with jobs, kids, and long commutes; hybrid courses that
mix in-class experiences with out-of-class projects and modules could make it
easier for them to succeed, undeterred by the challenges of making it to campus
or finding a sitter. Entirely online classes can achieve a great deal of good
too, as long as students are able to interact with each other and instructors
are able to provide extensive feedback on student work. Where MOOCs fall short
is by making that personal relationship between student and professor next to
impossible.
As the New Yorker recently said of MOOCs,
“their stated goal is democratic reach.” And many of the impulses behind this
movement are laudable. When MIT began posting lectures and course materials
online through its OpenCourseWare initiative several years ago, I applauded.
MOOCs, like blogs, wikis, and countless other innovations, can open up
knowledge to vast numbers of people in ways that were never before possible.
Like public libraries, they could be a peerless friend to the autodidact.
But as
with any promise of democracy and liberation, we should be cautious about what
lies behind the hype. What claims to be leveling and inclusive could be
exclusionary, shunting the less privileged into an inferior system; what is
meant to empower the masses could end up enriching a small few, like Coursera
and Udacity, at the expense of the many. Everyone wants to make college more
accessible and ensure all students achieve the greatest possible success. But
pretending that watching a bunch of videos is the same thing as a college
education seems like a massive betrayal of the technology’s democratic promise.
