Via New Republic:
In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”
MOOCs: Will Online Education Ruin the University Experience? | New Republic
Points:
- “MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television.”
- “Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities.”
- “True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before.”
- “The dark side of this bright dream [reducing the cost of education] is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble.”
- “We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question.”
- “But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life.”
- “One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value.”
- “MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars.”
- “In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?”