Via a Facebook friend, an analysis of the sound and fury surrounding MOOCs by Aaron Bady:
Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic] omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.
There’s a striking similarity between this kind of rhetoric and early globalization discourse. Indeed, one of the best ways to force change is to argue that the transformation is already happening.
I very much recommend reading the whole piece and not simply the excerpts I’ve culled from it. Bady does a much better — and more systematic — job than I did of linking together what Kohen calls “edutainment,” TED talks, and MOOCs. But among the many gems in the essay is this critical insight about MOOC discourse:
Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.
I’ve often wondered about my own hostility to MOOC-talk. I’ve generally been a fairly early adopter of various technologies in an educational environment. I was one of the first professors to podcast lectures at Georgetown. I put up (mediocre) youtube lectures in 2008. I’ve been an evangelist in my field for public engagement via social media. So why am I not among the enthusiasts?
It might be that, like many academics, I stand to lose a lot from disruptive innovation. My line of work is one of the last to experience the relentless drive of late capitalism at the hands of business-consultant rent-seekers. My employer is prestigious, but not terribly financially secure. So perhaps the anti-professor rants that often show up on these threads have a point: I don’t want my cushy lifestyle to end. I’ll grant that this is some of it.
But the fundamental reason is, I think, that I’ve been there and done that. As Bady notes, there’s absolutely nothing new about MOOCs. Sure, the technology is better. We can record and post high-definition video relatively easily. Developers have created applications that reduce the effort needed to splice together a lecture and that allow for the relatively easy synching of various video and textual online resources. Moreover, decent online conferencing used to require dedicated equipment. Now we can do it — for free or a relatively small fee — through services such as Skype and Google Hangout.*
Still… none of that amounts to a game changer.
What I’ve found is that recorded lectures work best as supplements to ongoing courses. Most of the “thank you” notes I receive for the material I’ve put online bear this out. They tend to involve students who were having trouble understanding a particular topic, and needed to hear (or see) someone explain it in a different way. Now, one can construct a MOOC environment that does this well: combines the sage-on-stage with virtual discussion sections, online resources, and so forth. And there’s value to that. But your mileage will vary; the elements that make a MOOC seem of high quality might even be detrimental to educational outcomes.
By all means, add MOOCs to the arsenal of higher education. But don’t let technofashionistas and op-ed columnists — let alone those who stand to earn a lot of money from expanded investment in MOOC infrastructure — convince you that a revolution is here. And, whatever else we do, we shouldn’t enable them to assist in dismantling a system that stands amongst the best in the world. Educational consultants, state legislators, and professional administrators are doing just fine with that on their own.
*Although my experience with Google Hangout is that each additional student online significantly increases the chance that connection failures, ambient noise, and other problems will disrupt the experience beyond repair.
Well said. Bob Meister does a great job of exposing the rent-seeking logic behind the push for MOOCs as well as the likely consequences: https://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php
Magnificent post. I really appreciate how you are working through the same thoughts I am. It had occurred to me that I might be being selfish as well, seeing this technology as potentially making me, or perhaps those that follow, jobless. But I didn’t have a strong sense that was the case, only that I was afraid I might be evaluating MOOCs on that basis. You’ve clarified my own thinking.
I share Dan’s critical perspective on the MOOC discourse but this analysis overlooks two fundamental possibilities this trend offers. Firstly, for students in second- and third-tier institutions MOOCs are a way to gain access to content and analytical insights that can transform their understanding and hence their own college education. Of course, this development puts core faculty at risk at those institutions, as can be seen from San Jose State’s Philosophy Department’s reluctance to embark on the MOOC path (https://chronicle.com/article/As-MOOC-Debate-Simmers-at-San/139147/)
Secondly, at elite, well-endowed institutions MOOCs (or merely posting online lectures) allows for a “flipping” of the classroom i.e. assigning lectures as preparatory material for collaborative/interactive classroom contact hours rather than top-down lecturing. The latter is where I think the Ivies are heading, using their phenomenal resources to nurture students via project work, enthusiastic TAs (still with reasonable stipends) etc.
Flipping can be terrific. PTJ has done it well, mainly by posting *short* lectures. Otherwise, there’s a real risk of overloading the students with work outside the classroom.
Part of the trick is also to use shorter, pithier reading assignments. There has to be a time trade-off someplace, and if students are spending some time getting a podcast before class that time has to be made up someplace. Of course, this ebbs and flows over the course of a semester, but it is important to keep one eye on overall balance and time-commitment.
Esp where the norm (as it is, iirc, at SIS and many other places) is 5 courses per semester for undergrads. This is — arguably — too many and the standard course load shd be cut back to 4, esp since a lot of students are working on top of that and/or doing extracurricular things.
p.s. the people at S-USIH.org have just set up a formal MOOC committee (fwiw/fyi)
PTJ: How do you find readings for class? (I know that’s a broad question, but I’m interested in your course prep strategies.)
I’ve been following Aaron Brady (and the discussion of MOOCs more generally) on twitter and would like to add that Aaron just was part of a conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom at UC Irvine this past week and the synergy of their analysis of MOOCs was wonderful. You can watch their panel here: https://vimeo.com/66105111 and read the written version of her talk here: https://tressiemc.com/2013/05/15/profit-highered-and-lessons-on-the-prestige-cartel/ (where you can also check out other critical work on MOOCs by Tressie).
Not specific to MOOCs, the sound and fury is a general feature of the Wired-TED-technofashionista echo-chamber. Their worldview was insightfully critiqued by Richard Barbrook as the ‘Californian Ideology’. In his Imaginary Futures (https://www.imaginaryfutures.net/book/) he links this to Cold War modernisation theory and the need to provide a progressive vision of a capitalist future. He notes the ideological role it plays through its insistence that a radical future is immanent, a future that never actually seems to arrive. The imagery of this radical future, widely dispersed through popular culture, has now (as you suggest) been yoked to the general neo-liberal project as well as the particular projects of ‘business-consultant rent-seekers’ (and/or quasi-rent monopolisers) mining the public sector and the commons for revenue streams.
It’s nice to see a piece that is resistant to MOOCs but that also acknowledges a potential role for them in higher education. We shouldn’t let anyone snowball universities into using MOOCs as 1-1 replacements for quality courses or even into using them at all.
I do have a few quibbles with the basis of your hostility, as you call it. First, it seems that, like other other people hostile to MOOCs, you conflate all the strange bedfellows on the other side. I don’t think the people who acknowledge the limitations of MOOCs are the same people who want to use them as an easy solution to funding and bottleneck problems. State legislators who already have a track record of de-investing in higher ed might promote MOOCs as a solution, but they probably don’t care either way if MOOCs can or will overcome their limitations. It sounds like a guilt-by-association argument to use the “easy answers” crowd to dismiss the large number of thoughtful people interested in exploring the potential of this educational model. If a legislator argued that taxpayers should replace my class with your iTunes and YouTube recordings, my response wouldn’t be that you are hyping the power of iTunes and YouTube.
Similarly, while I’m no mind-reader, out of the the dozens of MOOC teachers I’ve talked to, I’ve never sensed anything but a sincere interest in expanding opportunities for education. I suppose some careerists and profiteers must be among them, but I don’t think all MOOC teachers can be so easily dismissed. Incidentally, an unacknowledged fact about MOOCs is that the three providers most in the news make up less than half the total MOOC universe. Most MOOC instructors are from more humble institutions than the ones we’re seeing in the news. For example, take a look at what’s being done by the math department at the University of Wisconsin – LaCrosse, by a non-tenure-track instructor, by the way.
Third, you imply that MOOCs are not much more than recorded lectures. They are more complicated than that, and many of them don’t use recorded lectures at all.
Fourth, MOOCs may or may not be revolutionary. But I can’t understand an argument against them that doesn’t also acknowledge the large number of people enrolling in them and the energy and interaction among those MOOC students. Maybe they are just fashioinistas. Maybe they are trend followers. Maybe they are dupes. I’ve talked to a couple hundred of them, and I don’t think so. In fact, I think they are collectively working together to develop their own knowledge and skills in much the way we say college is supposed to work and rarely does. But even if we’re all mistaken about that — or even just acknowledging the limitations of that model — that activity has some significance of some kind. And I’ve yet to hear the criticism of someone hostile to MOOCs that acknowledges and explains that activity.
Robert McGuire
Editor, MOOC News and Reviews
MOOCs aren’t just for traditional higher-ed students. What about lifelong learners or others who don’t have the option to be on a campus?