Everyone’s talking about MOOCs. The Chronicle Of Higher Education can’t go five minutes without using the acronym. We’ve discussed them at length ourselves. But while it’s always been obvious that MOOCs will change higher education, few people realized just how quickly they would insinuate themselves into academic business:
“Supporters of newly proposed legislation in California hope to reduce the number of students shut out of key courses by forging an unprecedented partnership between traditional public colleges and online-education upstarts…. If the bill is passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bringing the controversial courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted.”
The plan is to offer credit for MOOCs at all three tiers of the California higher education system – the University of California, the California State University, and California’s community colleges. Combined, they are the largest system in the United States. Once they begin using online courses matter-of-factly, the rest of the academic world will not be far behind.
More MOOCs mean more students in more classes. What’s wrong with that? For one thing, MOOCs have dismal retention rates; most students drop them. For another, MOOCs are more successful in some formats and fields than others, and tend to advance technical courses at the expense of the humanities. Their rigor is dubious; even professors who teach MOOCs believe they should not count for course credit at established institutions. And MOOCs risk exploiting the instructors themselves, who thus far are not compensated in pay or time.
Sara Goldrick-Rab makes the cynical case against MOOCs: that they are a way of further stratifying higher education and appearing to address inequities while in fact reinforcing them. They don’t broaden education so much as heighten it; higher learning becomes less a bigger field than a taller staircase.
None of this is new, though. Instructors have been exploited for several decades. Budget cuts have led to falling graduation rates for years.
And stratification has long been characteristic of higher education – especially at the top end – despite the fact that addressing this concern might not be that hard.
MOOCs are not the problem. They are a consequence. They might well make things worse, but what they would worsen is a system that is already knee-deep in the issues that critics think MOOCs will raise. MOOCs are business as usual, only much more so.
