This has not been a good month for MOOCs. A couple of weeks ago Amherst College faculty members voted down an invitation to join edX, the nonprofit MOOC platform. A few days later, Duke University withdrew from a contract it had signed with 2U, a not-quite-MOOC operation (2U offers online courses that are smaller than MOOCs and that are conducted in real-time, but that still risk displacing instructors and promoting some universities at the expense of others).
Then San Jose State University’s Department of Philosophy decided not to use a MOOC created by Harvard University’s Michael Sandel, despite a request by San Jose State administrators to do so. Instead the Philosophy faculty wrote an open letter to Sandel:
“It is in a spirit of respect and collegiality that we are urging you, and all professors involved with the sale and promotion of edX-style courses, not to take away from students in public universities the opportunity for an education beyond mere job training. Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”
The letter is worth reading; it outlines many of the chief objections to Massive Open Online Courses. (Also worth reading is Sandel’s not entirely satisfactory response).
These are all good signs. But whether or not this backlash sustains itself, it’s only a sideshow. As we’ve discussed here already, MOOCs are symptomatic of greater tensions within higher education and not a core problem in themselves. Preventing their use, while good, doesn’t get at any of the reasons that administrations like San Jose State’s are eager to adopt them. That’s why Daniel Porterfield’s insistence that this become the “Year of the Seminar” is admirable in its spirit but questionable in its reasoning. Porterfield wants to “challenge the notion that MOOCs are the future of American higher education.” But seminars were becoming an endangered species on university campuses years and decades before the first MOOC popped up. Getting rid of MOOCs has little to do with providing seminars. That’s a matter of public education budgets, university spending, an overemphasis on economic utility, and an underemphasis on teaching.
Even light and breezy treatments of MOOCs tend to get it wrong:
“On the other hand, how can I really complain? I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free.”
“Ivy League wisdom” has always been free. There are institutions dedicated to making that wisdom available, and they’re called libraries. That sort of conception of education – as a static “knowledge” or “wisdom” that is transferred from one person to another, rather than a process that produces a much greater wisdom called “critical thinking” – is a pretty good summary of the problem of which MOOCs are just one variety.
