Why do professors spend their precious time in teaching MOOCs when they are not getting...

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Igor Markov

Good question.
Some universities count Coursera teaching toward regular teaching obligations. In other words, the university pays the teacher to teach on coursera. Why do this? To officially be a part of Coursera.

One of my colleagues taught a course on Coursera out of interest and is not doing it again. But his course is now fully-automated and can be offered w/o his active participation (and has been).

An example mentioned by Daphne Koller (one of Coursera founders) on her recent visit to Michigan: a professor from a small college was normally getting 12 students in his/her course, but on Coursera, tens of thousands students signed up, and many completed the course - great for personal fulfillment.

Keep in mind that some people like to teach and don't worry about money.
For example, at Stanford you may find local professionals teaching for free - it's a privilege Coursera is essentially the same way, but less selective and with the bonus that your course will live forever.

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Joseph Wang

One big reason is that academia isn't a cash economy. It's a reputation economy. If you do something that improves your reputation (i.e. teach a MOOC, write a textbook, write a paper), you'll find a way of converting that to cash.

One other way of thinking about it is that professors in a university (particularly senior professors) aren't paid like factory workers. You get a salary and job security in exchange for getting that the professor is allowed to do "what every they need to do" in order to improve education. It's not as if you get $X each time you write a paper or $Y each time you teach a class (note we are talking about senior professors here and not adjuncts and we are talking about cash money and not teaching credits). You do whatever you do to advance education, and once you get tenure, it's hard for you to get fired because people trust you will will do useful things with your job security.

If you are a senior tenured professor and you think that teaching a MOOC is the most effective way of doing education then that's what you do.

It's things like MOOC's that make be very nervous when people complain that professors and academia are "inefficient." It's the fact that professors aren't expected to be efficient that they have time to do things like teach for MOOC and do other things that they are not directly being paid to do.

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