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Peter Leykam
I would be surprised if anyone was against MOOCs in and of themselves, I think they're great. But, lots of academics are wary of their integration into traditional universities. The California legislature is contemplating a bill that would mandate public universities and community colleges in California to accept MOOCs for credit in courses that are hard to get in to (due, of course, to the legislature's budget cuts).
This is a financially shortsighted decision that no business would ever make - teaching 300 students with 1 professor and 6 TAs is a lot more profitable than having 1 professor teach 50 students. If the UC system starts to outsource their more profitable classes in order to focus on their least profitable classes, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. (School administrators can make these decisions because they think more like socialist bureaucrats in a planned economy than businessmen, but that's another conversation entirely).
And its something that could fundamentally change higher education in the US. I and most academics I know think it will be a change for the worse. It starts with the state legislature creating a crisis by cutting their funding for higher education. This is exacerbated by the mismanagement of administrators, and departments start cutting class offerings because they have less money. MOOCs are sold as a fix to this problem, and once they're established in the university they can continue to grow and take over more class hours. Universities cut back on faculty positions, and TAs, because once MOOCs are established as just the same as traditional education, why not? So, in 20 years you have a university system where a significantly smaller number of professors only teach the least cost-efficient courses, and the system as a whole becomes a marketing wing for a private educational company.
What's wrong with that? Right now most scholarly and scientific research is funded by undergraduate education. The more you outsource that to private companies, the less research you're going to get, and overall you're going to see the number of PhDs in the US drop significantly. And, of course, the number of new innovations that come from research, and general knowledge about the world around you.
At the same time, students will be getting an inferior education. When I teach or TA a class, I don't just teach the content of the class (e.g. Chinese History), I teach critical thinking, writing and research methods. Due to earlier short sighted decisions in California education policy, (and I suspect test driven education like No Child Left Behind in general), many students come to my classroom not knowing how to write at a college level (e.g. not knowing what a paragraph is), not knowing how to think critically about information (e.g. What's the difference between finding an authoritative source and grabbing something off the internet that seems interesting?), and not knowing critical thinking (e.g. what's the difference between stating your opinion, and gathering evidence to make a convincing argument?). That isn't to say there aren't students who are aren't amazing at these skills - there are. And I'm not saying that the students I teach aren't intelligent - they are, they've just been utterly failed by a society that doesn't value education, and thus doesn't nurture that intelligence.
I'm incredibly skeptical that you can either teach or evaluate critical thinking or writing skills in a MOOC. And while multiple choice quizzes can tell you that you got a math problem wrong, it can't explain why you got it wrong. So, you'll get an education based on regurgitating information rather than critical thinking.
None of this is about MOOCs in and of themselves. But, MOOCs fit really well into a general trend of declining support for education in America. And they could easily be used to destroy public universities in the US. I do think that there needs to be effective reform of higher education in the US, but it needs to be based on long term planning, not making a series of short term decisions based on expediency with no overall sense of where things are heading. My experience with university administrators, and every social science study of bureaucracy I've come across, doesn't leave me optimistic.
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I would be surprised if anyone was against MOOCs in and of themselves, I think they're great. But, lots of academics are wary of their integration into traditional universities. The California legislature is contemplating a bill that would mandate public universities and community colleges in California to accept MOOCs for credit in courses that are hard to get in to (due, of course, to the legislature's budget cuts).
This is a financially shortsighted decision that no business would ever make - teaching 300 students with 1 professor and 6 TAs is a lot more profitable than having 1 professor teach 50 students. If the UC system starts to outsource their more profitable classes in order to focus on their least profitable classes, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. (School administrators can make these decisions because they think more like socialist bureaucrats in a planned economy than businessmen, but that's another conversation entirely).
And its something that could fundamentally change higher education in the US. I and most academics I know think it will be a change for the worse. It starts with the state legislature creating a crisis by cutting their funding for higher education. This is exacerbated by the mismanagement of administrators, and departments start cutting class offerings because they have less money. MOOCs are sold as a fix to this problem, and once they're established in the university they can continue to grow and take over more class hours. Universities cut back on faculty positions, and TAs, because once MOOCs are established as just the same as traditional education, why not? So, in 20 years you have a university system where a significantly smaller number of professors only teach the least cost-efficient courses, and the system as a whole becomes a marketing wing for a private educational company.
What's wrong with that? Right now most scholarly and scientific research is funded by undergraduate education. The more you outsource that to private companies, the less research you're going to get, and overall you're going to see the number of PhDs in the US drop significantly. And, of course, the number of new innovations that come from research, and general knowledge about the world around you.
At the same time, students will be getting an inferior education. When I teach or TA a class, I don't just teach the content of the class (e.g. Chinese History), I teach critical thinking, writing and research methods. Due to earlier short sighted decisions in California education policy, (and I suspect test driven education like No Child Left Behind in general), many students come to my classroom not knowing how to write at a college level (e.g. not knowing what a paragraph is), not knowing how to think critically about information (e.g. What's the difference between finding an authoritative source and grabbing something off the internet that seems interesting?), and not knowing critical thinking (e.g. what's the difference between stating your opinion, and gathering evidence to make a convincing argument?). That isn't to say there aren't students who are aren't amazing at these skills - there are. And I'm not saying that the students I teach aren't intelligent - they are, they've just been utterly failed by a society that doesn't value education, and thus doesn't nurture that intelligence.
I'm incredibly skeptical that you can either teach or evaluate critical thinking or writing skills in a MOOC. And while multiple choice quizzes can tell you that you got a math problem wrong, it can't explain why you got it wrong. So, you'll get an education based on regurgitating information rather than critical thinking.
None of this is about MOOCs in and of themselves. But, MOOCs fit really well into a general trend of declining support for education in America. And they could easily be used to destroy public universities in the US. I do think that there needs to be effective reform of higher education in the US, but it needs to be based on long term planning, not making a series of short term decisions based on expediency with no overall sense of where things are heading. My experience with university administrators, and every social science study of bureaucracy I've come across, doesn't leave me optimistic.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
