The New MOOC Strategy: Rise of the Higher Ed Empires

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


The New MOOC Strategy: Rise of the Higher Ed Empires
By Geoff Shullenberger - August 7, 2013

In the New Yorker’s May “innovation issue,” we were treated to a mostly celebratory take on the dissemination of video-based, auto-graded college courses known as MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses). Following in the footsteps of David Brooks (Chicago ’83), Nathan Harden (Yale ’09), and a legion of other educational one-percenters, Nathan Heller (Harvard ’06) marvels over the innovations underway at his alma mater and their alleged benefit to the educational ninety-nine-percenters previously excluded from the Ivy League experience. Heller’s article reveals how administrators, professors, and some students within the “top-tier” university bubble are currently thinking about the MOOC trend. In particular, it sheds light on the plans by universities like Harvard to develop MOOCs and market them to less prestigious institutions.

Legislators in my own state, California, spent a good part of the spring considering a bill requiring all state universities and colleges to give credit for approved MOOCs. After passing the state senate unanimously, the bill was ultimately shelved at the end of July. Its sponsor in the senate, Darrell Steinberg, says it will be taken up again after the California state system has had time to develop its own new repository of online courses. This is a temporary setback for the MOOC lobby, but MOOC skeptics should not celebrate yet: the effort will surely continue in California and elsewhere, given the widespread enthusiasm for for-profit online education among the policy and corporate elites.

A major beneficiary of any legislation that mandates credit in state systems for MOOCs would be the powerful “top-tier” universities whose course offerings would be set to replace the courses offered by professors at regional, non-élite colleges. If all goes according to plan, according to some MOOC enthusiasts themselves (see Thomas Friedman on community colleges), automated MOOCs will replace much of the course content currently offered by human instructors at underfunded colleges. Presumably, whatever instructors remained after the austerity-mandated pink slips go out would perform the deskilled, low-wage task of being long-distance TAs for well-paid “star professors.” Perhaps within the Harvard or Stanford orbit, allowing the educationally underprivileged to watch videos of people like you seems like a great gift. But outside of that orbit, there is growing fear that monetized, creditized MOOCs will convert state and community colleges into a homogenized, intellectually impoverished simulacrum of the élite university world, in which courses consist of streaming online videos of celebrity professors combined with an a robotic regime of instantly-graded multiple choice tests and software-evaluated essays (essay-grading software has been developed by edX, the MOOC wing of Harvard and MIT). .............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-new-mooc-strategy-rise-of-the-higher-ed-empires

[HiPointDem]

1. kr. moocs are designed to kill small colleges, community colleges, poorly funded state colleges.

and to provide 'taylorized' 'education' to the lower classes. i.e. the middle down, unless they win the education lottery.