MOOCs, like many educational innovations that have come before them, are a flashpoint for certain kinds of rather tired arguments about the supposed eternal verities about what schooling should be. It’s a feeble flap, particularly since we are in not just early days but minute 1 or 2 of the whole change that online education will foment. The anti-MOOC case is also full of the weird mash up of empirical and conceptual carping that fights over education seem prone to. Two of the strands:
1. The philosophical opposition seems to go something like: MOOCs do not provide sufficient texture of experience to count as education, and are, further, an effort to outsource teaching via a technological approach, something which, for ineffable reasons, has to be, or is at least optimally, delivered in person as part of a (preferably, super-exclusionary) community.
2. The empirical complaint seems to be: look, they don’t work anyway, as most people don’t “complete” them, so therefore they can’t have any merit.
Both of these I think are refutable on their own, but they are basically self-refuting when mashed together. Good things those completion rates are low, even though that is arguably a meaningless metric, because, we shouldn’t be doing these things anyway.
I’m sanguine to optimistic about MOOCs and what they may lead to, and certainly feel deserve their chance to weave their thread in the Internet tapestry. My guess is that some of the growing pains result not from any problem in online delivery per se, but the sort of sad effort to replicate the format of a “course,” and the attendant forced march through the curriculum. (Curricula, whatever else they do, instantiate ideology and culture, something I’ll blather on about another time.)
The other thing I think is not just promising about MOOCs, but here now and heartening, is how much humanities content they offer. In a time when there’s much stewing about the ailing state of the arts & humanities, there are crowds joining MOOCs on humanities topics and participating with enthusiasm. (Once upon a time you could get this subject on public broadcasting, even sometimes on commercial TV, but priorities have shifted.) Two, of many, examples: a course on the Beethoven Piano Sonatas with Jonathan Biss, and on Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, which is the closest I’ve found to busting open the idea of a course, it is really more of a community event, and the better for it.
Still, to give the opposition their say, here’s a delightful animation taking up the contra side (including an argument that it’s all about money that I’ll hang fire on until another day). Daphne, Sebastian, and Anant make such adorable video game characters, I think they should consider that as an add on career.
A Few Reasonable Words 