College Professors Are About to Get Really Mad at President Obama

[Recursion]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/professors-are-about-to-get-really-mad-at-obama.html

Jonathan Rees’s polemic in Slate against MOOCs today is an important preview of the coming fight within the Democratic base. MOOC stands for "massive open online course," which is a super-cheap way to provide college instruction. It’s one of the tools Obama referenced as a solution to the tuition crisis. The concept is extremely new, and the trick is to develop it in such a way that you can weed out cheating, and ensure that students really learn. If you can do that, then prestigious universities can start providing degrees for their online courses, and you would have a powerful, extremely affordable new path for cash-strapped kids to obtain the benefits of a college degree.

Rees argues that this is a terrible idea that can’t possibly work, and urges his fellow academics to fight it with every fiber of their being. Why do we know it’s a terrible idea? Here is his entire explanation:

How do you teach tens of thousands of people anything at once? You don't. What you can do over the Internet this way is deliver information, but that's not education. Education, as any real teacher will tell you, involves more than just transmitting facts. It means teaching students what to do with those facts, as well as the skills they need to go out and learn new information themselves.

But, uh – are we sure the only way to teach people what to do with facts is face-to-face? This seems like something that could at least conceivably be taught to more than one person at once. I can remember lots of professors teaching me what to do with facts via lectures in extremely large auditoriums, which is not that different than a lecture you watch online. Nobody claims that the technical barrier has been solved, but it’s amazing that Rees is already declaring it unsolvable.

...

That is sad. College professors are good people, and nobody wants to hurt them. At the same time, designing a higher education system around maintaining living standards for college professors is an insane idea. The goal of the system ought to be making higher education effective and affordable for students. Rees waxes poetic about the joys of in-person liberal education, and I greatly enjoyed my classic college experience, with the gorgeous campus green and intramural basketball and watching campus protestors say interestingly crazy stuff at rallies. But insisting that’s the only way a student ought to be able to get a degree, in an economy where a college degree is necessary for a middle-class life, is to doom the children of non-affluent families to crushing college debt, or to lock them out of upward mobility altogether.

It's kind of similar to health care; we like prices to fall except that it means doctors and nurses make less.

I love MIT and Harvard's open courses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason in principle someone shouldn't be able to get a degree from them.

[reformist2]

1. Goodbye lecturers and adjunct professors.

As if the life of the struggling, non-tenure-track post-doc wasn't bad enough!

[Recursion]

2. Is college about the faculty or the students? (nt)

[Vattel]

5. both

The faculty do research as well as teaching. Research can't be done in a big online forum. Teaching can. How well it can be done depends on the nature of the course in question.

[Recursion]

10. It's only a historical accident that has research done at universities subsidized by students

There are other ways to organize and fund it, and looking at how the system is right now I think this way is pretty close to broken.

[Vattel]

14. so you say

[Recursion]

15. Well, I did tons of free labor in the lab in grad school

And paid $50K or so for the privilege. But, hell, I'll say it: universities should focus on teaching.

[Vattel]

32. A lot of excellent research is done at Universities.

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

[Recursion]

35. Because it is broke. Or, more to the point, it's making students and their families go broke.

Students and their families are paying through the nose to subsidize faculty members who never teach them. Find a different way to fund their research. Get rid of varsity athletics. Stop building swimming pools and alumni houses. Focus on teaching students what they came to learn.

[Vattel]

40. I am in favor of reducing the cost of education.

But I don't think that it should be done by eliminating research in Universities.

[nebenaube]

63. You know what, if you can't live a modest living on a PH.D. after teaching for eighteen years then

what is the fucking point?

[HiPointDem]

75. bull.

[HiPointDem]

90. it's not a historical 'accident' at all.

it's completely logical to have advanced students, at the height of their mental powers and energy, doing scientific research under the direction of more experienced researchers, as part of their learning process and training in scientific method.

please tell me about these 'other methods' and their advantages. i suspect you can't make a plausible case for them, because they don't make sense -- economically, socially, or educationally.

[Posteritatis]

9. These days? Neither. (nt)

[Gravitycollapse]

81. A university is primarily invested in research. It's secondary mission is education.

Although the two intermingle to the point where there is often little or no distinction. The researchers teach and the students research.

[HiPointDem]

91. *some* universities. others aren't research institutions, primarily. units of higher education

have different functions, and none can be replaced by crap like moocs. it's not just research that can't.

[HiPointDem]

74. goodbye about half of our colleges and universities, and their staff.

[Recursion]

137. Again, is it about the students or the faculty?

Decreasing a university's expenses is a good thing from a lot of perspectives.

[HiPointDem]

142. you don't know what you're talking about.

[Recursion]

145. What a substantive, cogent reply

Can you answer Chait's argument that providing jobs for faculty is not the purpose of higher education?

[HiPointDem]

146. to an equally substantive, cogent comment. chait has no 'argument'. he has only an opinion,

biased by his pecuniary interest.

anyone who understands what education & knowledge is understands that it requires a practitioner community to survive.

anyone who understands the reasons moocs are being promoted understands that it's all about finance shrinking, concentratiing, restricting and controling that practitioner community.

[Recursion]

152. It does require a practitioner community. It doesn't require being in the same room as them.

Take my time in grad school; I got more out of MIT's online differential equations course than the differential equations course I paid a tremendous amount of to BU for, for instance.

[HiPointDem]

201. you don't even understand what practitioner community means. students are part of that

community, for starters, and yeah, it means being in the same room & interacting, not watching tv online & having someone download a syllabus into your head so you can take a crappy online multiple choice test.

[Recursion]

213. You have a laughably naive view of MOOCs

Try looking past U of Phoenix.

[HiPointDem]

218. and you are deliberately spreading false information

[Shivering Jemmy]

189. Having been an adjunct

I'm glad to see that sector of labor die.

So many lies I told myself to keep believing I'd eventually transition to tenure track.

[leftstreet]

3. First they came for....well fuck, they're just gonna get everyone!

Welcome to massive wage-leveling austerity!

Your comparison with doctors and nurses is bullshit. They're part of the working class, just like college faculty

[Recursion]

4. And we should get rid of mechanical wheat-threshers, too. All those farmhands lost their jobs (nt)

[leftstreet]

7. The farmhands should share in the profits

...from the mechanical wheat-threshers

[Recursion]

11. They absolutely should. That's what the minimum income is

Call it a "national productivity dividend"

[joshcryer]

100. They should have but industrialism happened.

The emancipation of farmers meant that they got to be subservient to factory work.

Oh, and the institutional capitalist model of education is what enabled that.

[Recursion]

138. Bingo. We still have industrial age colleges

To produce the leaders of industrial society, but on the one hand we aren't an industrial society anymore, and on the other hand we are sending too many people to college for that anyways.

That's not really "on the other hand", for that matter: the two are very closely linked, really. Call the 20th century University another casualty of the economics of abundance.

[HiPointDem]

79. such a stupid comment. the professed point of freeing people from manual labor was so they

would have time, and higher wages, to develop their higher capabilities.

your & obama's 'cheap' solution is a step (several steps) backwards.

what are the 'jobs' people are supposedly preparing themselves for with your cheap little online certificate programs?

no jobs or mcjobs.

another scam from the 1%.

[Recursion]

147. I don't think the purpose of higher education is job training

Do you?

[HiPointDem]

149. yes, job training is indeed one of the purposes of higher education, and always has been.

[Recursion]

150. Certainly not "always"; the original purpose was religious

later on it was used as a social distinguisher; arguably it still is. It's been job training for most of the 20th century, but it's not the 20th century anymore.

[HiPointDem]

154. "the original purpose was religious" is a vague statement that obscures the reality; it was the

transmission of specialized knowledge to maintain the 'jobs' of the religious hierarchy & bureaucracy that ran, e.g. the catholic church, the buddhist temples, the moslem temples -- and through them, ran the larger society.

specialized knowledge that fitted people to do certain kinds of 'work'. the university and its antecedents have *always* had that purpose, among others, and always will.

[joshcryer]

168. "and always will"

Dark ages speak here. This is the capitalist method of education. It will die. Soon. Bye bye "specialized knowledge that fitted people to do certain kinds of work." Specialization will die as the rise of the robots destroys specialization and the division of labor.

Embrace it or die.

[tblue]

61. Exactly.

Students are getting the short end too.

[HiPointDem]

80. and they'll get an even shorter end with moocs.

[Recursion]

155. Have you ever tried MIT's Open Courseware?

If that's "the short end", why did I learn more from it than from the in-person classes I paid for in grad school?

[Ms. Toad]

172. You should try some MOOCs

I have one degree from an elite private college and two from state universities. I took Harvard's CS50x last fall, and I would rank it as one of the best courses I have taken at any of the three educational institutions. I am in the middle of a second HarvardX class which I likely won't finish because life intervened. The coursewas executed less well - but I wouldn't describe it as getting the short end.

Just like in person classes, the MOOCs will vary in quality and what students get out of them. They also need to figure out how to determine (and weed out) cheating. But for now, if I was hiring, I would put a MOOC certificate for CX50x + some reasonable interview questions to ensure it was earned rather than based on someone else's work, up against any equivalent face-to-face course.

[Major Hogwash]

6. They've only been talking about this for the past 30 years.

So, I don't know why they would get pissed off about it now.

[adirondacker]

8. As if critical thinking isn't low enough in this country. Lets lower the bar some more. nt

[Recursion]

12. Well, expensive face-to-face classes don't seem to be helping much

[adirondacker]

17. I went to a state liberal arts college where seminar/debate was a mandatory part of

the program. Low faculty to student ratio is vital to have a participatory learning environment and to "develop" critical thinking skills. Nothing like an open debate with your peers and a Prof as a moderator.

[Recursion]

19. I went to a tiny liberal arts college that was entirely discussion-based

But that has little to do with the country's broader needs for higher education. And I already knew how to administer computer networks when I went.

[adirondacker]

36. I actually think smaller colleges are part of the solution. There should be no reason

that students can't go to community or state colleges. The whole Ivy league, large institutional system could be the main culprit with meeting the broader needs. Big money goes to big schools, along with large grants from the government.

[Recursion]

37. I got a degree because I wanted to learn what I learned. People shouldn't need a degree to get a job

Or, if we're going to continue that, they should be able to get that degree freely or very cheaply online.

[adirondacker]

42. I think that diminshes what a degree actually is supposed to represent. I know plenty of good test

takers, with a sorrowful lack of of intellectual curiosity.

[Recursion]

43. If you don't want the name "degree" attached to it, call it something else

We need a way for people to prove they "deserve" a good job without paying tens of thousands of dollars to a college. As a fan of liberal education, I largely agree with you aesthetically, but if we're sticking with the word "degree", then I'll deal.

[adirondacker]

48. I agree with where you went with that, but what happened with vocational training? Don't they

still award certifications? Why should someone have to spend, what probably is not a trivial amount of money, to take online tests to "prove" they "deserve" a good paying job? I'm sure the "institution" will be quite happy in taking in money in order to operate their servers. If that's the case, maybe Skinner should start up a civics classroom on DU!

[HiPointDem]

77. oh, they'll still pay plenty. the only difference will be that they'll pay it to the gates-google-

pearson complex.

which they're already doing in many professions for certifications and continuing education units. most of which are just junk, absolute junk.

[Recursion]

139. No; MIT, Harvard, and CMU do it for free

That's the whole point: any course, offered at any institution, for free. It's the Napster of education.

[HiPointDem]

143. lol. not for credit, they won't. and for credit is where they're aiming.

[Recursion]

148. Yes, they will be free for credit once they get accrediting boards agree

That's the explicit purpose and goal here.

[HiPointDem]

151. it's a sin to lie, you know.

[Recursion]

153. So stop lying. Harvard and MIT have been very clear about this

They will never charge for online classes, and are going to offer online degrees for free once they get the programs accredited. Stomping your feet and denying that is dishonest.

[HiPointDem]

162. oh baloney.

The first five or so free classes are expected to be offered in the fall, and the number will expand in subsequent years from the Harvard-MIT partnership and other universities that may join it, officials said. The classes will not earn online students academic credits, although students may receive a certificate of completion, for which they might be charged a fee. In addition, other online education courses that already charge tuition may also become part of the effort and continue to require fees.

Stanford also has been a pioneer in free online education, offering 13 classes this school year. The Stanford courses are mainly offered through a company and website called Coursera, founded by two Stanford professors and also joined by Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Another Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun, founded Udacity, a website offering free online classes.

"We are all trying it out and see where it goes," said John Mitchell, a Stanford computer science professor who is heading that school's global online education efforts.

In contrast to paid online degree programs that Stanford and other schools offer, the university's free online courses do not carry credit. Still, tens of thousands of students have completed the courses, he said.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/03/local/la-me-0503-harvard-online-20120503


harvard will *never* offer their degree for 'free'. that would cheapen their brand. none of the high status unis will ever offer their degrees for free. and those degrees will become even more out of range for the majority of the population with moocs.

[Recursion]

164. "The first five"? MIT offers every course in its UG catalog for free right now. (nt)

[HiPointDem]

167. there is no degree, and no credit. if you want credit a/o a degree you will pay. it will never

be free, whatever you & the rest of the propagandists claim.

[Recursion]

169. There will be, and it will still be free

You are convinced this is false, but you offer no evidence that MIT has been lying this whole time.

You know you can download almost any MIT Press book for free, too?

[HiPointDem]

171. show me where mit is going to make their degrees free. show me where they are offering free

MIT credits.

show me where they are even planning to.

[Recursion]

176. That's the entire explicit point of open courseware

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Have you missed MIT's initiative on this, and the subsequent hand-wringing and apologeses throughout academia? You can read about MIT's push to get OCW accredited at that site. Here's Harvard's:

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative

[joshcryer]

180. If OCW becomes accredited, the whole artificial scarcity of credits goes out the window.

This is awesome. Let's hope it happens. Credits are a sham based upon ones willingness to sign an agreement to give over a huge chunk of their lifetime to pay back loans that are unnecessary.

[HiPointDem]

187. if it's so 'explicit,' where is the explicit statement, recursion? quit blowing smoke. your links

don't say anything like that.

show me the proof or quit lying.

[joshcryer]

173. +1, a edX credit is going to be more valuable than a college level credit.

One day. Just give it time.

[joshcryer]

170. More value placed on the degree and credit than the knowledge.

Typical capitalist institutionalized education propaganda.

Laughable.

[Ms. Toad]

177. I'd like a link to Harvard's statements

indicating that certificates or credit will always be free.

Having recently completed CS50x, it was pretty clear from the poll questions we were required to answer as part of the course that they do ultimately intend to charge for the certification end of it.

[Recursion]

178. EdX being free is the whole point

https://www.edx.org/

[Ms. Toad]

181. Not quite.

"Today, certificates of mastery are free. This may change in the future to help cover our costs."

https://www.edx.org/student-faq

While there is a difference between the courses being accessible free of charge and the certificates being free, the courses are also identified as "currently" free. (same link).

Based on my experience with CS50x I would expect that a charge will be implemented fairly soon for a certificate, but that the course will remain free.

[HiPointDem]

220. again, a link which doesn't address your claim. stop blowing smoke.

[muriel_volestrangler]

183. Where will the funding for them come from?

I know they have huge endowments, but at the moment they use those to provide the on-site courses. An accredited course has to have coursework that is marked, and some way of ensuring that the actual recipient of the degree is the one with the knowledge, not someone being paid to produce the coursework. If they divert funds from the on-site degrees, then they'll either have to charge even more for them, or completely reform them to cost less.

Any worthwhile degree involves far more than attendance at lectures, whether in person or online. Practical work in laboratories, seminars, discussions with professors, extended work produced by the student, with advice from the academics. If Obama is saying he wants the federal government to start funding this, then great. But I doubt that's going to happen while the Repubs have a majority in the House.

[Ms. Toad]

175. Actually - that is not entirely clear.

The HarvardX certificate I received was described as free for that semester, but there were enough questions as part of the coursework (with each problem set) that it was pretty clear that while the course may well remain free - the certificate likely won't. (Questions like the importance of the certificate to me, whether, and how much I might pay for it.)

[joshcryer]

179. Obviously they will want to charge for credits and degrees.

That is a given. But MOOC isn't limited to those that want to charge for credits and degrees.

And it is unclear that credits and degrees are even valuable to begin with.

[Ms. Toad]

182. I was responding to the person who is insisting

that certificates, credits, and degrees will always be free.

Having been through CS50x, I would place a high value on that particular certificate - and I think over time courses (and perhaps sponsoring institutions) will gain a reputation so that the certificates will be valuable, perhaps with some verification that the person tendering the certificate actually did the coursework.

[joshcryer]

185. I don't know if your certificate is accredited.

I wasn't aware that any of them were. I know that the various MOOC groups do give out "certificates" but I don't know that any of them are truly accredited and accepted by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation which basically governs all credits in the US.

Maybe when you got your certificate they were paying the fees to get your certificate accredited, I don't know.

In the end I agree that over time they will gain reputation so that those certificates will be valuable, but I think that will initially happen outside of the accreditation process. I think that Recursion was being tasked to "prove" that these certificates that the MOOC give out are as "valuable" as credits acknowledged by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. I'm not sure he has shown that or if that's ever going to be the case (primarily because it is not in institutionalized education's best interest to allow that to happen).

[Ms. Toad]

192. It isn't accredited.

And it wasn't clear that their plan to charge fees for the certificate (as opposed to the course) were tied to the certificate being accredited. It seemed to me more that they were testing the market to see what it would bear - and there were certainly students who were desperate to get the certificate, and believed it to be valuable (mostly foreign students), so in some locations the certificates may already be gaining value.

I agree that the value will grow outside of the accreditation process, as people who are in a position to hire become more familiar with the skills/knowledge students have gained via MOOCs, and will likely for a while be course specific or perhaps institution specific.

[joshcryer]

195. Saw your post #181. That sucks.

Now I'm wondering, are these MOOCs really going to try to make a second tier of certification that they hope to push through reputation?

That would be truly atrocious especially since edX is the leading non-profit in this area. If it happens I expect the market will demand a more open alternative. In that vein I'd still have to agree with Recusion on the inevitable nature of MOOC courses.

But to delay it by building an artificial certification system that people must pay for, that's just BS. The other poster in this thread is already trying to discred MOOC courses because they're not accredited for free (you tend to have to pay between $100-250 to take a test to get your credit in all cases). Now they'll use that same pathetic argument about MOOC certifications. Nevermind that the cost is 10x less than actually attending the course in person.

Still, I reiterate that this is a temporary thing and in the end education (and "accreditation&quot will be 100% free.

[Ms. Toad]

223. I think they're still trying to figure out a good business model.

The bills do need to get paid somehow.

I don't know where a good balance is. I was delighted with the class, delighted at how relatively smoothly the ramp up went for a first attempt, and the certificate was a nice bonus. But they had a tons of TAs they added (or who had to do extra work) to make the transition from 700 bodies in class to over 100,000 registered for the online class. While the costs aren't the same - there are costs that have to be covered somehow. I guess, personally, I would prefer to see payment by those who want verification on the back side rather than by limiting access on the front end.

As a long time teacher in a variety of settings, I do see the challenges (and saw them in the MOOC) of people . attempting to get the certificate without doing the work. In order to make the grading automated, the grading routine only verified output. I could have done a simple print routine for about half of the problemsets if all I was after was a certificate and saved myself a lot of time (I put in ~15-20 hours per problemset). Three problemsets were individual enough that it wasn't possible to do more than verify their existence for that many people - and one person was identified as having grabbed a website in a can from elsewhere and dumped in very superficial customization. There are similar problems in real life classes - but they tend to be less extreme (or easier to catch) because at least some of the work is both individualized and graded by a person (rather than a computer). But that kind of verification takes person-power (i.e. money).

I will be very interested to see how these play out - but for now they provide a remarkable opportunityfor near-zero cost education.

[Gravitycollapse]

83. Are you joking? Face to face courses are the last bastion of proper education.

Online courses and degrees are utter bullshit. They're just diploma mills.

[Mojorabbit]

101. I have taken a few coursea classes the past year

They have been great, the testing challenging, but they in no way compare to any face to face classes I had in college.

[Recursion]

144. My undergrad faculty were just there to keep discussions on track

Though I went to a weird no-lecture school for my BA. My point is that what a class is has changed over time, and its current form is accidental, not essential. I certainly learn a lot from online courses, even to think critically about things.

[kickitup]

215. I learned a lot in my online courses as well.

I went back to school as a non-traditional student and had both face-to-face and online courses. It all depends on the professor and how adept he or she is at making the online format work. The best one I had utilised chat rooms, discussion boards, and e-mail. He made each of us interact, think critically and defend our positions. I sat in face-to-face classes where some students never said a word.

[leveymg]

13. The reason that college tuition has risen is NOT instructional costs. It is primarily three things:

1) declining State support for public higher education;
2) tuition increases have gone to expanding real estate investment by private universities;
3) declining federal grant monies and a shift toward borrowing to cover tuition and costs that have risen far faster than middle-class wages and inflation for most other services, except health care.

[Recursion]

16. I've seen several analyses, all of which make points

As public subsidies have fallen, per-student expenditures have risen. And, yes, payrolls have risen as part of that.

There's two problems there.

[reformist2]

18. It's actually a similar problem to housing - declining interest rates have inflated prices.

I'm not a pro-austerity person by any means, but there is a lot of waste in academia today.

[Recursion]

22. My grad school had a pool with a lazy river. A LAZY ****ING RIVER

And I went $50K into debt for that Masters degree.

[reformist2]

26. LOL! Did you at least get to use it? :)

[Recursion]

27. Hell yes. I brought my pool noodle every Saturday and floated while pondering stochastic processes

Boston University is probably a bad example, because it has a habit of boondoggles going back decades. But it's hardly alone in spending a lot of money on "student life" expenses that have little to do with academics.

Oh, eliminate most intercollegiate sports, too.

[reformist2]

34. Too funny. Maybe the colleges of the future will have waterslides and rollercoasters.

[BadgerKid]

44. .

I know one college that has an indoor waterslide, built inside a relatively new facility.

[adirondacker]

45. Nice! Glad you made use of it.

[joshcryer]

128. For some reason I thought you were talking of the Ramen variety.

And wondered wtf were you floating around eating Ramen noodles.

[leveymg]

59. Instructional and university salaries have not even kept up with inflation.

That has long been a complaint among graduate teaching and research staff, and even tenured positions typically have not kept pace with salaries in other professional fields. Please read this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2012/131432

[HiPointDem]

85. bullshit. what part of the payroll, recursion? high-paid useless administrators.

Many of the newly hired, it turns out, were doing little teaching. A Wall Street Journal analysis of University of Minnesota salary and employment records from 2001 through last spring shows that the system added more than 1,000 administrators over that period. Their ranks grew 37%, more than twice as fast as the teaching corps and nearly twice as fast as the student body.

Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It's part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814.html


This is a deliberate policy choice, & the reason for the policy is to neoliberalize and wreck universities. It's a feature, not a bug. as more & more of the teaching load was turned over to unbenefited adjuncts & grad students, that 'savings' & more went into the pockets of well-connected & deliberately positioned high-level bureaucrats, who were sent to the universities precisely to do things like install on-line 'education'. which is not education at all, it's deskilling of the workforce & privatization of the university.

[Recursion]

156. And they build waterslides and lazy rivers and alumni houses and football stadiums

Yes, I'd like to see all of those stopped, too. This isn't a single-issue problem.

[HiPointDem]

159. yes, the useless administrators do indeed build waterslides, and they do it *in order to*

increase the cost of education. shock doctrine.

when deliberate wrecking is going on in order to create a crisis & thereby channel the population into your desired 'solution,' enthusiastic cheering of the 'solution' is no solution.

[HiPointDem]

78. and big increases in administrative overhead.

[KansDem]

165. "...big increases in administrative overhead."

"Perks plentiful for retiring university leaders"

Robert Hemenway, who retired from the University of Kansas in 2009, also took a year’s sabbatical and in 2010 returned to the Lawrence campus for a year to write a book and teach an English class for two semesters. He was paid $340,352 for each of those two years, the same annual salary he’d gotten his final year as chancellor. Hemenway is now fully retired and hasn’t received a salary from the university since the summer of 2011.

The packages given to Wefald and Hemenway were a way to “recognize them and thank them for service to their respective campuses, for their longevity,” said Christine Downey-Schmidt, a member of the Board of Regents.

The payouts, however, don’t always sit well with faculty.

“At a time when faculty, for the last eight years, have not been able to keep up with the cost of living ... I find it unconscionable,” said Gary Ebersole, a history professor and the Faculty Senate chairman at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

[customerserviceguy]

20. I get the difference

between teaching and educating, but when I remember how many large lecture classes I had with 100+ students in them, can that really be called educating in the way that Rees advocates?

You could probably replace half of college with MOOC's, and not have education suffer one little bit.

[Recursion]

23. That's what I was thinking: do it for the 101 and 201 classes

Even if you just want to say students can get a free AA or AS from MOOCs, that's a huge improvement for people who can't afford anything.

[customerserviceguy]

31. Absolutely

Building large structures that require heating and cooling, and transportation of students to them is not energy-efficient.

[HiPointDem]

92. doubtful since most of those large lecture classes were taught by the grad students who also

ran the small labs attached to the lectures, & so the instructors actually knew the students as individuals. at least, that's the way it was in the sciences.

not to mention that the increasing use of large lectures is part of the same process that is producing moocs = neoliberalization.

[Logical]

21. Let the employer decide if they want a real graduate or a MOOC graduate. n-t

[Recursion]

24. I've rarely considered education when I've had input in hiring

Now, I've only hired sysadmins, and there really aren't any educational programs for us, so that may be an outlier.

Frankly I think part of the problem is that a ton of jobs require college degrees that have no business requiring college degrees.

[Logical]

30. I agree, I am a programmer......

I guess I am supposed to call myself a software engineer or some other fancy name but I still use "programmer".

I got a degree in computer science. But I think if I would of just programmed for a solid 4 years I would have done just as well.

Of course I started with Cobol. Doing IOS apps now. Programming is programming.

[Recursion]

38. Right. I've seen ads for web developers that ask for a BS in CS

Which is ridiculous. With a BS in CS you should be able to make an operating system from scratch. Web programming should be a 6-month internship somewhere, and some math and logic classes (and maybe design and writing for good measure, mostly because everybody should study a little of both of those -- but then again high school graduates should have that).

[Logical]

39. I also think some people, no matter how much school, just can't code a lick. Either because....

they do not enjoy it or they just don't "get it".

[Recursion]

190. Very true. My hiring "quiz" usually has two parts

1. Build a regex to match some condition I came up with in my office when I remembered the interview 5 minutes ago

2. In your language of choice, convert a calendar date to a Julian date (no points are deducted for asking what a Julian date is -- the number of days since January 1st of the year; extra points are granted for saying "there's probably a library function to do that...", even more for describing how to search the library documentation in one's language of choice).

[joshcryer]

198. Love that emphasis on pattern recognition and searching.

No fucking penalty for not knowing something but a reward for knowing how to fucking figure out what that something is! This is the exact opposite of the institutional model. The institutional model wants to train you to do rote, and to do things the same way, all the time, unquestioningly. Just look at how it approaches industry, with how individuals are each put at a "station" and trained to do one task, over and over again, throughout the day.

It's a whole racket. Especially since the teachers, the purveyors of knowledge, are the ones standing around "educating" using the same bland methodology of "welp, this is how this is and blah blah blah." No interaction, pure lecturing, pure repetition, pure ... rote.

[joshcryer]

207. A BS in CS should mean that.

But in reality a BS in CS is fucking BS and most who get one wouldn't know how to write an OS if their life depended on it. I just looked at the electives for a given course and it's a damn joke if you went the easiest route. I think that the easy path you wouldn't be able to make an OS much less do web development.

And the reality is most people choose the easiest path.

[petronius]

25. I think the overlooked question here is what does a degree mean, and what

is the value of a degree anymore? You mention that you love the MIT and Harvard open courses, and I take it that you value them as a venue to learn as an independent scholar. That is a major strength of MOOCs and online instruction, and it adds to the venues for independent learning that have always existed (e.g. libraries).

However, a degree ought to mean something more than passing through a series of instructional activities - there needs to be assessment, feedback, interaction. These things take place through the mediation of faculty, and work best when those faculty are responsible for relatively small numbers of students (certainly not 1000s).

My main complaint about the general trend of online education - towards cost effective delivery - is that it cheapens the meaning of a degree by automating the assessment and reducing or eliminating the critical feedback. A degree (or even a course grade) becomes more like those ridiculous online training activities that are common in the corporate and academic world - read a bunch of slides, pass a multiple choice quiz, be careful not to go too fast or too slow, print out your certificate...

Sadly, I think universities have been too complicit in this cheapening, and in a way we're reaping what we've sewn. Too much on-campus undergraduate education has shifted toward super-large classrooms, scantron exams, and a reduced emphasis on writing and discussion. When we do that in the classrooms, it's no surprise when people start thinking that the same thing can be done even cheaper online - but the question shouldn't be whether it's cheaper, the question ought to be whether this is a true university education at all.

So I really don't believe that MOOCs or similar online structures are the proper way forward. They provide opportunities for motivated individuals, and probably can produce some sort of basic employment-level competence in a lot of fields, but I'm not convinced they will provide what a university degree ought to represent. At most, they might reasonably fill in for some entry-level foundational courses, where lower-level learning objectives can be met and assessed in a more automated fashion.

That said, I do think some of the online pedagogies have value. The flipped classroom model, for example, strikes me as interesting, and many of the interactive tools such as Elluminate for online sessions are useful...

[Recursion]

33. I agree with Chait that a MOOC isn't particularly different from a large lecture session

For that matter, you could have TA-equivalents available in shifts to do questions and office hours, etc.

The subject matters. MOOCs would have been horrible for my General Studies BA. But except for my Special Problems classes and lab research, I wouldn't have noticed much of a difference using them for my Electrical Engineering MS.

[eppur_se_muova]

62. You've said a lot of things I wish I could have said as well.

If I defend traditional higher education, I'm likely to be accused of being a reactionary who's only defending his own turf. But there is a big difference between attending a college and learning. I just can't put it all into words so nimbly.

I particularly agree with your third para -- one aspect of learning, cost effectiveness, has been optimized while pretty much ignoring all others. This is the same kind of blinkered planning that is much more evident in other aspects of education "reform" -- choose one item you can measure and quantify, and work to improve that score without regard for other concerns.

[nebenaube]

65. Agreed, 'training' is not 'education'... n/t

[HiPointDem]

87. "those ridiculous online training activities that are common in the corporate and academic world"

are exactly the model we're moving toward. they're already used extensively for various certificate programs, professional testing and for continuing ed in lots of fields, my own included. when they came in & i took one i thought 'what the hell, this doesn't test any depth of knowledge, it's all surface & completely random". and it just got worse.

it's post-modern in the worst sense; all about appearances, not about real knowledge. it's a simulcrum of education and knowledge. There's no 'there' there.

[aikoaiko]

28. The door has been opened for competency based degrees vs credit hours

Credit hours ended up requiring documented amounts of instructor student interaction (at least in the form of lecture).

Competency based doesn't require any instruction or faculty student interaction -- only some measure of learning.

I'm not worried about moocs. Students actually like coming to class.

When students at large universities have the option of taking on-campus, blended, or fully online classes they take a blend because they like interacting with their faculty and peers.

[Egnever]

29. Some college professors are...

Some are totally on board and even pioneering the field.

I dont have a lot of patience for the ones who are going to be mad.

It is about getting education to more people. These guys can be mad all they want but i have a very difficult time seeing it as a bad thing.

I think a large part of the problem here is many of these professors are technology challenged. I do computer repair for a living and i am constantly amazed by the amount of people that can barely do email. Forget about a google search.

The internet is a huge knowledge base and we should be educating everyone on how to tap into it.

[Egalitarian Thug]

41. While I question his motivation, he is absolutely correct. The author of this piece fails to

mention, or possibly remember, the essential details of those auditorium classes with 400+ students in them. There was no education going on in them at all and that is fine for basic gen-ed or 100 level courses where mere presentation of the basics is (or should be) sufficient, but post secondary education by definition goes beyond that into what we used to recognize as real education, the getting of knowledge and using that to expand it further.

MOOC is fine if all you have to convey is which button to push at what time, but actual education is a very personal and time consuming process. The failure to acknowledge this is one of the primary reasons our higher education system has largely devolved to vocational training.

[Recursion]

46. So let people get an all- or mostly-MOOC AA or AS

And let that fill in for the needless "degree" requirements most non-manual-labor jobs have nowadays, in addition to at least conceivably teaching a marketable skill of some sort (you may say, plenty of unmotivated students will slip through the cracks and coast by, but that's obviously also true with in-person college education today).

[HiPointDem]

93. if it's needless, then we don't need moocs either. if qualification inflation is the real problem,

then eliminating the need for a college degree for jobs which don't require one is the cheapest & best solution.

at least with a real college degree you learn from & enjoy the college environment in and of itself -- which you don't with moocs, which is probably why most people don't complete them.

[Recursion]

157. You're conflating two issues

Issue 1: Jobs that demand college degrees don't actually require college degrees, and we need to stop that. College should not be a box you check in order to be able to get a good job.

Issue 2: Unlike at my undergrad school, most colleges use lectures for a significant part of instruction. These can be delivered online at no marginal cost.

[HiPointDem]

161. i'm not the one who brought up 'needless' degrees, you did. so in fact it's you doing any

conflating that might be going on.

[BadgerKid]

47. There have been inroads into computerized testing.

Think of computer-graded essays and difficulty-adjustable multiple choice questions.

But there's definitely things students learn in real classrooms vs. virtual classrooms. I suppose there's a possibility employers might have a preference in terms of "real" vs. "virtual" degrees.

[msongs]

49. we can outsource obama's job and save millions as well. or any president for that matter nt

[Pholus]

50. A good paper about Physics MOOCs from Georgia Tech

Physics. The bane of so many people based on the groans I typically get when asked what I do for a living. And like many good professors, we're playing the game and trying MOOCs. And learning a few interesting things at the same time.

Found an arxiv.org paper from just three weeks ago...kind of a mid-semester progress report of a new class from Georgia Tech.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2533v1.pdf

They designed the calculus based class to occupy the students from 11-14 hours per week. I actually think that is a bit light, given that intro physics is typically a 5 credit class which means by the classic standards you should expect at least 18 hours of work per week (four hours lecture, two hours lab, 2 hours of outside work for every one hour in class).

They also show the biggest problem with MOOC's. Unrealistic student expectation about just what it will take to excel. 83% of students in their pre-course survey said that they planned to spend less than 9 hours per week on the course. As good as an admission that they had no clue what it was going to take them here.

They found out I guess.

The paper's Figure 2 is a hoot. So 18829 students signed up. Only 27% of the students even watched the first week lecture videos, only 16% actually worked on the homeworks. Each component of the lab (Homework, Lectures, Labs) experience an attrition of 50% for each week after that. By the time labs were introduced into the course on week 3, only 2% of the students actually worked the first one and only half of them did the second after that.

By week five, only 4% of registered students were still continuing at some level (watching the video). Homework and lab participation were at 1% of registered students.

Perhaps MOOCs work for softer subjects, but this paper shows that something is distinctly lacking when a rigorous, mathematical science class is presented online. I would posit that it is the missing ability to ask clarifying questions in real time which of course is the most labor intensive part of teaching.

From the concluding remarks..

"Your World is Your Lab is an experiment into what is
possible with the MOOC environment. While it remains
to be seen how many students will complete the course,
what they will have learned, and what factors contributed
to their success, we believe that YWYL demonstrates
an upper limit on what MOOC students will engage in.
YWYL represents a course that is as closely related to an
on-campus introductory mechanics course as the tech-
nology will allow presently. Few students are continuing
to participate fully in the course, which brings into ques-
tion the nature of the MOOC revolution. Similar to the
on-campus offering, we estimated students should spend
roughly 11–14 hours per week on the course. However,
less than one-fifth of students (17%) initially expected to
spend more than nine hours working with course mate-
rial. It is also likely that the heavy emphasis on laboratory
activities in YWYL has driven many students from the
course, so that a re-balancing of laboratories in future of-
ferings might lead to lower attenuation and broader par-
ticipatio"

[exboyfil]

56. Unless you have someone willing to tutor/support you

You will see results like you describe. It is funny that you brought up Physics. My daughter is doing both of her Physics courses online. She took Physics I in Spring, 2013 and Statics in Summer, 2013 (both courses online with the Statics being out of the flagship engineering university in my state). She got an A in both of them. In the Statics course she took the same proctored tests as the on campus students and was part of the same "curve". She would never be able to pull this off without me tutoring her (B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering). I watch the lectures with her and work on the homeworks with her (we each independently do the problems and then discuss our answers before she submits them). I guide her when she gets stuck on a problem by explaining the concept or doing additional sample problems. She probably did an additional 15-25 sample problems before each test.

Not sure how you would do it by yourself though. I have many Masters level engineering classes online (probably fifty hours worth) but I don't think I would be able to pull it off straight out of High School.

[Pholus]

134. It is the personal contact that makes the difference.

Math/Engineering classes should never be taught to an auditorium. Online to me is a step in the wrong direction, not that increased classroom sizes weren't already making things worse.

That being said, you guys are doing it right. Keep up that interest in your daughter's education -- it is worth it!

[HiPointDem]

95. no more likely to watch something less rigorous. college is not a video game.

[Pholus]

135. You remove the necessary intellectual challenge of true education with this technique.

In online education, the buy-in is so low that most people will accept the cost of bailing rather than paying that extra effort to see it through the moment it gets real. A nice way to have your education in an echo-chamber. You'll probably stick real close to your comfort level and self-censor any concepts which make you uncomfortable.

But education is about facing things that make you uncomfortable and mastering them.

That is the lesson from that paper: 99% of the students in the course are not doing the homework (the CORE learning mechanism and the uncomfortable part) after less than half their course is done.

[joshcryer]

102. I think participation rates are a cost-benefit thing.

Some people attend classes because they're interested in the field, others attend classes because they have been told that field will benefit them in some way financially in the future.

When you have nothing in particular to gain (no credit for the effort expended) and when you're talking about a general course such as an intro to physics, people are going to bail as soon as they are challenged. They have nothing to lose. It is effectively a waste of time.

Indeed, looking at the demographics of those who joined this class, many of them already have a high level physics background, and it seems as if those people signed up to see what the course was going to be like, found it boring and moved on.

I don't think it's necessarily connected to labs because this sort of "drop out rate" for MOOCs is pretty much seen across the board.

So don't make them mandatory, and just make them available, everyone wins.

[Pholus]

141. I can see some use for MOOC's.

Certainly anything that resembles training where no substantive back-and-forth of concepts is required.

- A programmer adding new languages. Course, back in the dark ages you just RTFM and wrote test programs till you got it but YMMV.

- Introductory courses like general psychology where most students haven't actually figured out what it means to be a self-learner yet.

- HR check-the-box-cause-we-are-required-to-tell-you stuff. Course even there we have these online training modules at work. Idiot things -- a way to expand five minutes of material into 45 minutes of talking.

Those work.

[joshcryer]

204. I think back in forth in college level classes is misstated.

It's not as "back and forthy" as is being argued in this thread. In my experience half the questions were students asking questions that they had problems with and the other half were students who asked questions to troll the teacher because they knew the answer and just wanted the teacher to broach the subject (in particular was a question in a programming class asking about raising 0 to 0 in which the teacher stumbled because they forgot how that worked).

In the case of ignorant students or those behind a bit, those questions can be broached with TAs and other students (in fact most are, again in my experience, most people don't want to bother the professor with simple questions like that).

In the case of the troll questions it just delays the closing of class and perturbs the professor being caught in their own display of ignorance. It does result in an interesting discussion about various aspects of things, but isn't particularly insightful.

[Pholus]

214. Glad I don't have your experience...

then again, physics is conceptual and not trivia based so it is harder to "troll." And it might also relate to the attitude of the professor -- as I am unconcerned about being "caught in my own display of ignorance" perhaps the payoff in trolling me is small enough to explain why it so rarely happens. Frankly when a student catches me out I tend to praise them heavily as they've saved me and their classmates quite a bit of hassle later on -- and they've demonstrated to me that they're engaged enough to be following my argument.

But what concerns me most about your response is that you have such a limited classification for the questions you've witnessed. If all questions fall into just those two categories you've missed the most critical one: the questions YOU should be asking. If you can't engage the material enough to ask questions that are worth your professors' answering insightfully (while remaining below the level of a "troll&quot then you've wasted your educational dollars and their time.

[joshcryer]

225. "then you've wasted your educational dollars"

Indeed. I had questions in economics, which, btw, is why I dropped out of class. I took economics from a logical standpoint and the entire course was subjective to hell and back and highly illogical and contradictory. The professor was highly derisive of my questions (which came from a sort of socialist inspired POV). This was highly off putting.

Perhaps my classification of potential question is too simplified, because, I mean, someone asking a question that I might know the answer to may sound like a troll question to me, but they may actually be really interested in the answer. It seems though that the questions were designed to trip up the professor, which people may have felt my questions were to my economics professor. In my case I really was interested in the answer and just couldn't reconcile the contradiction I was witnessing in the textbook.

So my original classification could definitely use some work. It just seemed from my perspective that questions being asked were not really worth the professors time and the professors always seemed bothered by all but the most obvious and easily answered questions.

[Recursion]

158. Huh. In my experience they're better for STEM than humanities

I've tried both of them, and got more out of my EE courses than any others. Then again I had done "real" STEM courses more recently.

[reformist2]

196. It's basically DIY education. If that's what they're offering, tuition ought to be $300 a year.

[David__77]

51. Any objection is rubbish.

The issue is not to abolish anything but rather supplement it and more smartly direct it. The entire adult population should be engaged in lifelong learning. There is no other way to ensure continuous economic and cultural growth.

[HiPointDem]

94. the object is to eliminate real college for a large part of the population. any claim that moocs

are being offered as 'supplement' is like the claim that charter schools are offered to add 'choice'. it's just propaganda.

[exboyfil]

52. This is a special case

but my daughter will have approximately her first two years of engineering done at home with the exception of Chemistry (taken at local university) and Freshman Computer Aided Design (taken at the High School as part of Project Lead the Way). She would not be able to do it if I had not effectively tutored and done the recitation portion of the courses. Some kids would be smart enough to do that without additional assistance. She takes her proctored exams at a local public library. She will have completed all this while in High School plus the summer before physical entrance into the university.

The flagship engineering college in our state offers all the sophomore engineering classes for Mechanical Engineering except two online (the remaining math, science, and humanities courses are also all available online). They also offer five of the junior level classes, and courses that would satisfy all of the "technical electives." You could get a degree by taking only 30 hours on campus and one of those hours would only require attending class physically twice.

The above mentioned Chemistry could also be done at home (I would not recommend it though - you don't have adequate lab facilities at home).

So in a sense MOOC is already here (at least for three years of the degree). My daughter actually plans to be on campus for two semesters (her freshman actual year/junior academic year), two semesters in England doing technical electives as part of an exchange, and possibly just one more semester back at college finishing her design and controls classes along with additional electives. She could actually pull it off with just the two physical semesters on campus and the remaining done online (her technical electives).

At least in her case I am confident about her education. I am a Mechanical Engineer as well, and she will be as prepared as any other engineering student for her on campus classes. The proctored tests ensures that she performs at the same level academically as the on campus students.

[on point]

53. I'm OK if Drs make less, not OK about nurses making less

[exboyfil]

58. From $80 to $100K for an undergraduate degree

An additional $220K for four years in medical school were you cannot have a job. This is instate with little in the way of financial aid except loans. Doctors do need to be making over $100K when they get out to service this debt. Without that only the sons and daughters of the wealthy will become doctors.

My younger daughter the aspiring surgeon is thinking about this (she will be a high school sophomore next year).

[on point]

103. Going forward we should subsidize the education so this expense is not there - like other countries

In the meanwhile I am all for the need to pay back expesnive education, which explains the front side expense, but doesn't explain the backside excessive expense.

[enlightenment]

54. If you can't think of a reason in principle

why MOOC's aren't ready for prime time, it's because you haven't bothered to learn enough about them.

Try learning something about the process and the problems; you might find they're not as great as you think they are.

[HiPointDem]

96. i doubt that one has thought of them at all. the point is to support the administration.

[wickerwoman]

55. A college education isn't about the presentation of information,

it's about the projects and assignments students undertake and the feedback they get from other students and from their lecturers.

Even in those 400 student 101 classes, you still had assignments and TAs grading those assignments and giving at least some feedback. And most classes above the 100 level require essays or presentations or lab work or studio participation, etc.

Who is going to assess and comment on those assignments in 10,000 student MOOCs? Or will the assessment be dumbed down to something a computer can grade (i.e. multiple choice exams)? If so, that college degree is not a college degree. It's a high school degree at best.

Can you learn *something* from reading on your own and watching instructional videos or documentaries? Of course you can. But until you are asked to apply and demonstrate that knowledge and your application is challenged and you are give examples of how it could be applied better, then you are not really achieving at a university level.

The constraints have never been on the number of people you can lecture in front of. They have always been on the number of essays you can effectively grade and give feedback on. And technology isn't even remotely close to being able to stand in for an expert in their field assessing student work. And any compromise on the difficulty of the assignment to accomodate the constraints of technology inevitably compomises the quality of the degree.

[Starry Messenger]

57. Well, enjoy.

Students have an incredibly high failure rate from them.

[kiva]

60. Given MOOC track records,

I think you are being optimistic.

[liberal_at_heart]

64. The federal government needs to man up and spend the freakin money to fund education.

Any democatic politician supporting this will not get my vote.

[DeSwiss]

66. Great idea!

* Now we can have more unemployed people with Master's Degrees working at McDonalds!
* They won't owe as much they can't possibly pay back if they'd gone the conventional route!
* You can take mid-terms AND finals in your jammies!!!
* Download lessons and pron At. The. Same. Time.
* Just YAY!!!!

- We have nothing but fucking idiots running things in this country.

[a la izquierda]

129. Thank you.

From a professor.

[emsimon33]

67. What is truly sad is that this is an out moded means of leaning: Lecture

Students should interact and make knowledge for themselves, not be fed information which they could probably get on the Internet anyway.

[liberal_at_heart]

68. Thank you. This is one of the biggest problems with our education system right now.

Defunding has created a void in our school system. Our people are not taught to think for themselves, to research, to critcially think, to problem solve. Just shoving information in front of their face doesn't really do much.

[madrchsod]

69. i guess i`m old fashioned

i always thought the whole idea of education was the entire experience from the first day in grade school to the last day of graduate school.

i do agree with the last sentence because we do live in a country that places war above educating our citizens.

[liberal_at_heart]

71. you are not the only one who is old fashioned. There are many of us who want the government to

fund education so that our people can get the quality education they used to get. First the corporations took quality out of the products they sold us. Now they are taking quality out of all of our public services. I for one demand the government put the money back. I will not vote for any politician who is not willing to fully fund our public education system the way they used to before Reagon introduced his cursed trickle down economics.

[WCGreen]

70. There are a bunch of free on line courses out there....

I think if the chance between going to class or learning on line, I would choose the former.

But right now, I am taking a couple of courses that are offered free on some sites...

https://www.coursera.org/courses

https://www.khanacademy.org/

http://freevideolectures.com/free-college-courses-online/#


Just three sites offer almost 3000 free courses for those who want to learn.

[liberal_at_heart]

72. I took a couple of online courses. I read some and took a few multiple choice tests. That was the

extent of it. I took a couple of hybrid classes that were better than the completely online class, but the classes where I spent the whole time in class were always the classes I got the most out of. I never did get my degree. If I ever go back to finish I think I will stick to classroom instruction classes. The federal government needs to fund universities and k-12 like they used to before Reagon. That is what needs to happen.

[WCGreen]

73. It's great for guys like me who are forced to stay close to home

due to illness...

[liberal_at_heart]

76. Online classes should definitely be an option and they are. I'm glad you have the option and

are benefiting from it. However, to try and replace the education model we used to have where the federal government actually spent the money to fund universities is just wrong. It degrades our public institutions. It hurts our teachers and our students.

[Recursion]

160. Then you didn't engage with the course. Don't feel bad; plenty of students don't engage in person

either.

[kickitup]

216. Thank you.

I've taken plenty of online and face-to-face courses. The engagement offered in some of my online courses put the face-to-face courses to shame. In many online courses each student has to participate in the discussion and, indeed, research has shown that certain individuals participate more freely online because of shyness or whatever.

[HiPointDem]

221. the research also shows that the overwhelming majority of people who start moocs never go

proceed past the first lesson & never do any of the homework. something like 99%.

[Gravitycollapse]

84. Tuition has increased because universities have seen massive cuts in public funding.

[liberal_at_heart]

86. exactly.

[Gravitycollapse]

88. The idea that academics live cushy, lavish lives is a right-wing meme.

I attend the largest public university in the country. The only rich folks work high up in athletics or administration. I'd gladly tell that small group to fuck off. Especially our President who is a real business-minded piece of shit.

But as far as teaching and research staff is concerned, they are not wealthy individuals. They do what they do because they are academics. One of the best professors I know, a personal friend, drives a 15 year old car and has to pay to park on campus.

[alp227]

97. Online education should offer students the same opportunities as personal education.

That is, discussions, projects, and beyond-rote type of stuff. One of my friends is getting his master's in CS from Georgia Tech via distance learning. I'm sure he will have an enriching experience with it. Programs like his are good representations of MOOCs. However, I doubt it's the case for most MOOCs as they devolve into video-watching and rote memorization.

[highprincipleswork]

98. Let's just computerize everything and get rid of those pesky people.

Let's just computerize everything and get rid of those pesky people.

[joshcryer]

99. Yikes. Nerve. Hit.

edX is where it's at. I think ultimately a passing certificate from edX is going to be worth a credit in that field eventually. It'll be all good. People won't like it because they will have effectively subsidized the online students ("I paid $10k for that course, but those online students got it for free watching a 5 year old lecture series! And they didn't even have to sit in the lecture hall!&quot .

Good businesses don't really judge you based on your credits earned (that's how the industrial capitalist model works, of course). They judge you on your ability to achieve a given task. The institutionalized model is designed to first make students be worker drones and then, and only then, educate them as cogs for the overarching machine.

Nor should society decide or judge ones agency based on how many phD's they have or their educational level.

[Gravitycollapse]

105. There are many ways to gauge agency and level of education is one of them.

This is some sort of weird false dichotomy on your part. That we can only have education as the measure of agency or education means nothing. The idea that we cannot say that someone with a high level of education is qualified for some standard, whatever that standard may be, is ridiculous.

Would I trust someone with a PhD in quantum physics and/or engineering over someone who's dabbled in Feynman to discern effective shielding from electromagnetic radiation in space vehicles? Absolutely. To think otherwise is to be a fool.

[joshcryer]

106. Under the current model education is the primary gauge, imo.

I am not saying that education is the only measure, as my own post suggests that is not the case, since good businesses don't necessarily hire people based on how many credits they've earned. A good job interview goes beyond simply the arbitrary, potentially faked numbers on your resume and your college grades!

Let us hope that you don't get that one student who managed to pay another smart student to take his SAT, who then went to college and paid other students the entire way through, to sign off on your effective shielding in space vehicles.

I'd hope you'd at least quiz said person on the various shielding methods available and what he felt was the best approach before hiring him. Having someone else in the room who has established that their knowledge on this subject is legit would be a plus.

I know my level of trust goes beyond simply what someones resume says.

[Gravitycollapse]

108. Obtaining a PhD in physics is a legitimation of your knowledge of physics.

The only way that wouldn't be the case was if the PhD program was poorly designed or easily passed.

Depopulating college campuses in exchange for impersonal, watered down e-courses is the surest way of fostering bullshit degree programs. And that seems to be exactly what you're peddling.

I couldn't give less of a shit how favorable these programs are to businesses.

[joshcryer]

110. Oh, fair enough, for PhDs, which is beyond MOOC purpose.

There's another poster in this thread railing on about grad students and such and of course, obviously, completely and utterly, MOOCs don't reach that level, at least not without a learning center attached to the MOOC so that people can go in and get that hands on experience. But that is pipe dreaming because, I mean, who can imagine big ass buildings dedicated solely to learning that people can attend freely like they can MOOCs?

Depopulating college campuses which are based on the institutional educational model is absolutely what I am advocating and I make no apologies for that.

[Gravitycollapse]

112. So it seems your goal is simply to reduce the overall level of education...

To push up the graduate programs to a point where they are essentially unattainable and bring down the discourse required for lesser degree completion so that anyone with an internet connection can sit on their ass, watch a few lectures, write a couple terrible papers (graded by dispassionate and equally unknowledgeable TAs) and get a degree in X so they can make hiring firms happy.

If what you want is a higher level of education among the population, and I really doubt that is your goal, what you are suggesting is exactly the opposite of what needs to happen.

[joshcryer]

113. If student learning subsidizes degree programs, there's something wrong with that.

You're effectively arguing for a class based hierarchy where 90% of students who go to university will never attain higher level status and whose tuition is going to pay for the R&D PhD / grad students. This is far more reprehensible than thinking that everyone should have equal, and guaranteed, and free access to information and lecture material.

But correct me if I'm wrong, because that's all I'm arguing for. Everyone having free access to open course ware and lecture material (and textbooks). No cost.

[Gravitycollapse]

114. Higher education should be free to anyone who wants to do the work required to get the degree.

Obtaining a degree should not be reduced to a formality of pass-fail ideology. You should have to work for your degree. These e-course offerings are, upon even the most cursory inspection, flimsy and designed only to churn out diplomas.

There are forms of essential non-monetary commitment that simply do not exist in these "open" classrooms and they never will.

[joshcryer]

117. I agree. Higher education should be free.

Now, MOOCs already are free. And you have a problem with them, why? Oh, because they pose a threat to graduate programs? Which, if your argument is coherent, use subsidized tuition from non-post-grads to pay for the R&D for the post-graduates? Correct me if I'm wrong because that's the only coherent way your response makes sense.

[Gravitycollapse]

120. I have a problem with MOOCs because they fail utterly at educating.

To even consider them as competitive to any legitimate degree program or classroom is ridiculous.

They are so diffuse, so removed from the actual purpose of learning that, even in their infancy, they are irrelevant to anyone not concerned with resume building. Do you not see the terrible irony in your argument?

[joshcryer]

123. Then what is there to be worried about?

I think that MOOCs represent a technological transformation more than a political or social transformation. They aren't currently accepted as accredited organizations because the institutional model hates them. The institutional model is based on lecturing. Lectures can be copied indefinitely after a lecture is done. Hell one poster here is arguing that post-grads are the ones who run classrooms and not the professors. I totally dig that. Let the post-grads run the TA stuff and let them decide who is qualified to continue or pass a class!

I once did a Berkley programming class 3 years straight because I loved the professor in the class. I recorded every single class (this was in the early 2000s when this was a novel idea, letting non-students watch web streams). All 3 years the same professor taught the same damn thing, nothing changed significantly from once class to the next. He basically repeated the same stuff. Literally. You can take a recording from year 1 and post it in year 3 and no one would know except the teacher got a beer belly between those times.

edit: was feeling nostalgic about Brian, here's one of his early lectures:

Now jump forward to where he started posting on Itunes U: https://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/computer-science-61a-001-fall/id354818254?mt=10

Same lecture! 100%! I love this guy but he's doing the same lecture. I don't blame him since he's done the same lecture, with incremental modifications, since 1987, but that's just a fact.

MOOCs actually fail in that regard because the lecture model is outdated and the community model is what is the best way to go about it. Which is why edX is going to dominate. They take the lecture model and hand it over to the community so that the community can digest it and do everything itself. It stops becoming a lecture-student-TA model and one where individuals communicate with one another and help each other figure things out. This is a truly diabolical proposition to the institutional model because it renders the institution irrelevant. Instead of having the revered professor who everyone effectively is subordinate to everyone is on an equal playing ground.

I argue MOOCs are going to evolve to render the institutional model irrelevant. And Marx's critique of the model will finally be realized.

Capital:

The commercial worker, in the strict sense of the term, belongs to the better-paid class of wage workers: to these whose labour is classed as skilled and stands above average labour. Yet the wage tends to fall, even in relation to average labour, with the advance of the capitalist mode of production. This is due partly to the division of labour in the office, implying a one-sided development of the labour capacity, the cost of which does not fall entirely on the capitalist, since the labourer's skill develops by itself through the exercise of his function, and all the more rapidly as division of labour makes it more one-sided. Secondly, because the necessary training, knowledge of commercial practices, languages, etc., is more and more rapidly, easily, universally and cheaply reproduced with the progress of science and public education the more the capitalist mode of productions directs teaching methods, etc., towards practical purposes. The universality of public education enables capitalists to recruit such labourers from classes that formerly had no access to such trades and were accustomed to a lower standard of living. Moreover, this increases supply, and hence competition. With few exceptions, the labour-power of these people is therefore devaluated with the progress of capitalist production.

The end result is going to be the end of specialists and the end of the division of labor because everyone will be able to acclimate to every aspect of learning and technological development and industry that no one will have a monopoly on practices.

Sorry if this irks you but it's how things are going to pan out in the long run. It sucks for the elites and those in positions of power over knowledge, but they are rendered irrelevant day by day as the information age pushes forward.

[Recursion]

166. No, they don't; I've learned a ton from them

As I mentioned, back in grad school I got more out of MIT's online diff eq course than the in-person course I was paying an insane amount to BU to take.

[Ms. Toad]

224. Have you actually taken any?

I'll stack CS50X against any course I've taken (undergrad at a school which competes with Harvard, and two state university graduate degrees) for anyone who is really interested in being educated. I took the course because my computer science courses were 30 years out of date and I needed to be familiar enough object oriented development to read and understand patents and prior art from the mid 90s to invalidate a patent. I got what I needed from the course early on, but stayed because I found the course enjoyable and worth the effort (15-20 hours per problem set) to update my skills.

That doesn't mean they are all fantastic - but describing MOOCs as failing utterly at educating is not in touch with the reality experienced by many people who have taken them. Some of whom are (or have been ) in the business of educating. (I have taught both at the high school and graduate school, as well as a variety of other settings for about 15 years total.)

[Recursion]

163. ^^^ That. So that.

Exactly.

[intaglio]

104. So no one here has heard of the hugely successful "Open University"?

From the Wikipedia article

The Open University (OU) is a distance learning and research[5] university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom. The university is funded by a combination of student fees, contract income, and allocations for teaching and research by the higher education funding bodies throughout the UK. It is notable for having an open entry policy, i.e. students' previous academic achievements are not taken into account for entry to most undergraduate courses. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off-campus, but many of its courses (both undergraduate and postgraduate) can be studied off-campus anywhere in the world.[6] There are a number of full-time postgraduate research students based on the 48 hectare university campus[7][8] where they use the OU facilities for research, as well as more than 1000 members of academic and research staff and over 2500 administrative, operational and support staff.[9]

The Open University website

About the OU

[joshcryer]

107. Wow, OU offers accrediation. Impressive.

The TMAs (tutor marked assignments) seem to be a distinguishing feature between current MOOCs and OU though. Basically tutors check peoples' assignments and help them out. As I said in the other thread this sort of decentralized nature is missing in current MOOCs (though edX appears to be trying to fill that gap with its course-based discussion forums).

[Fumesucker]

109. Well, there you go, more useless parasites will be losing their worthless positions

In order that the true innovators, investors and corporate executives, be properly rewarded.

To be completely clear, I'm by no means opposed to the idea of increasing educational opportunities for the average person, however in my view the likelihood that this technology will be used for that rather than heaping largesse on investors and executives approaches zero.

[joshcryer]

111. I argue that for profit MOOCs cannot compete with non-profit MOOCs.

Therefore there's nothing to really be bothered about by MOOCs except, and this is the big one, that they will be used to justify firing teachers if, and only if, they can outcompete those teachers. Which wouldn't be a bad thing in the end.

However, we see in this very thread people touting the drop out rate of MOOCs. If they are so bad, then what do teachers have to be afraid of?

[Fumesucker]

115. At this juncture you think actual facts have anything to do with political decisions?

That's touching but hardly the way our society rolls any more. The reality based community has been left in the dust along with Nineveh and Tyre.

We went to war based on a manufactured fantasy, you think they won't fire a few professors with the same sort of rationale?

[joshcryer]

118. They might but I don't see the people putting up with it.

The results would be pretty dire if MOOCs are as bad as they're made out to be in this thread!

[Fumesucker]

121. Dire for whom?

It's only dire for the politicians if it's dire for the 1%.

By which I mean the .001% actually but 1% is shorthand.

Charles de Gaulle once remarked that the graveyards are full of indispensable men, professors are no less disposable than any of the rest of us peons.

As I just pointed out, people "put up" with a war being started over purest fantasy, no heads rolled and Smirk got a bigger percentage of the vote than the first time.

The time to stop the long slide to the lowest common global denominator was when it started, not somewhere in mid slide when a good deal of downward momentum has been accumulated.

[joshcryer]

122. The MOOCs?

If MOOCs are somehow magically made mandatory without actually proving themselves then you'd have a 90% fail rate. This wouldn't be acceptable by society and they'd demand better.

Unless you really do have such a low opinion of the people that they'd allow a 90% fail rate.

[Fumesucker]

124. The people pay attention to what the media point at as the next shiny object du jour

Even here on DU our conversation is largely guided by the media, it's particularly evident to those of us who don't watch much or at all.

People will dismiss their own personal experience if the media give them a just barely good enough story to do so with.

[joshcryer]

125. I don't think the media can hide or justify a 90% fail rate.

That's insane.

[Fumesucker]

126. Next thing you know Obama will be looking under the Oval Office rug for the 90% failures

[joshcryer]

127. You see the irony here, no?

The entire MOOC debacle is about the media reporting on failure rates.

I suppose it's possible that 90% of students could wind up being idiots and we'd turn a blind eye to it. But I am amused that the same people that are pissed off about testing culture (where 20+ days of a students learning year are dedicated to testing) are now going to complain about "failure rates" (in a category that is totally and completely voluntary and people can come and go as they please).

[Fumesucker]

131. I'm not really complaining about anything at all

Just pointing out the way things are and what's likely to happen because of that.

Anyone who thinks we're not a long slide to the very lowest common global denominator is living in a fantasy, it's what the investor and corporate honcho classes desire and they have rented more than enough of our politicians to see that it happens.

It's not that 90% of people are idiots, it's that 90% of people don't have the drive to do it all on their own with so many distractions and obligations around them and no exterior force to make them do something with such a long term payoff.

Being intelligent and having the drive to do something with it are two very different things, intelligence can be as much a distraction as a an agent of focus.

[joshcryer]

132. I'm of a different persuasion.

I think that ultimately the best kind of education is teaching people how to search for information and intuit answers. Not, necessarily, rote memorization of a given thing.

So for me I think technologically speaking we want to educate a shitload of people on how to discern pasterns in information. Drive be damned.

We can look at capitalist education and how it has, ultimately, over time, forced people to enter in a specific field of understanding / knowledge / specialization. I think that's wrong. If people aren't driven to a given field, fuck it, that's their prerogative. They should be allowed to decide where they want to go. It shouldn't be about cost-benefit, it should be about what they actually and truly care about.

[Fumesucker]

133. I don't disagree with that, I think a lot of people just aren't interested though

I know smart people who hate to learn anything new, I don't really understand them but I know they exist because I interact with them in real life.

There are times I think that learning new information is physically painful for a lot of us and actually thinking about that information is akin to being roasted alive.

[mattclearing]

116. University of Maryland has a great online program.

I graduated from it in 2005. You get a week's worth of assignments, you turn them in by midnight at the end of the week, at the end of the semester, you show up and take your exams.

If anything, it was harder than when I went to college in person, because there was no lecture, and you had to figure things out for yourself based only on the material.

Edit to add: We had to show up for midterms also.

[mick063]

119. We have already witnessed technology killing newspapers and postal delivery

It seems that academic institutions are beginning to face the same reality.

Adapt or die.

[HiPointDem]

136. what we're actually witnessing is the death of journalism & scholarship, and their replacement

by simulcra.

'adapt or die' said the parasite to its host. (i don't mean you)

[Recursion]

174. Do you have more or less access to good reporting now than you did 15 years ago?

I say more. There's also more music being made now than before Napster.

[HiPointDem]

184. that depends on what you label as 'reporting' & as 'access'. every capitalist restructuring

brings with it what looks initially like an efflorescence, a wealth of product. which is rather quickly narrowed to coke and pepsi, because the smaller labels don't have the capital to sustain their efforts. there used to be lots of auto companies too. in the us alone. now there are only a handful globally, and they are controlled by a handful of people, and most of their profit is channeled into a smaller set of hands.

internet access does not mean there is more reporting or more reporters. it means only that the scope of the market has enlarged, turning what were once local and national markets into national and global ones. when it shakes out, it means less reporting and fewer reporters. there may still be 'citizen journalists' but few will have much readership or influence, & they won't be able to support themselves doing it. journalism as a profession will be restricted to a small global cadre, even smaller than is the case today, just as paid journalists became fewer as the US market became more nationalized.

similarly, there is not more music being made. it only looks that way because of the internet, because you can now hear what some kid in timbuktu is doing.

bigger markets & better technology = fewer paid workers, = fewer professionals who can take the time to develop their skills & become expert at whatever it is.

[Recursion]

188. I drink Rock Creek soda. Your city probably has one too.

Internet access does not mean there is more reporting or more reporters. it means only that the scope of the market has enlarged, turning what were once local and national markets into national and global ones. when it shakes out, it means less reporting and fewer reporters.

So prove it. How much reportage was done in 1997 per capita, vs. today?

[joshcryer]

191. FYI poster believes Publishers > authors.

They have this grand idea about literary culture and how publishers keep the crap from infesting the environment. They have done dozens of OPs against the ebook publishing industry.

It seems their archaic thinking also applies when it comes to professors and teachers that they think that the entire education system will fall apart if it wasn't for those grand purveyors of knowledge trickling down information to the ignorant and idiotic plebs with a paternalistic attitude.

[HiPointDem]

193. oh you individual you. and that's all that really matters, isn't it? that individuals like you

with distinctive individual tastes can distinguish themselves from the global herd drinking coca cola or pepsi, wearing jeans & t-shirts & taking moocs for credit?

for a premium of course.

rock creek, so very individual that they don't have their own website.

[Recursion]

194. Again: how much reportage? How much music? How many books?

Not that many people liked my novel, but a few thousand have bought it for $2. Not many people like my music, but a few thousand have downloaded it on Jamendo. This is an option that didn't exist without the Internet's disruption of old gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers won't survive the economics of abundance, and colleges as they are currently set up are gatekeepers of the first order. I like colleges so I hope they adapt.

[HiPointDem]

197. for the old gatekeepers, new ones, and fewer of them. except that they're pretty much the

old gatekeepers with new masks.

a few thousand bought your novel at $2, and after you paid amazon what did you make on it?

if you'd mimeographed it & flogged it out of the back of your car to local newstands in 1950, would you have made any less?

an 'option' doesn't mean much if people can't make a living with the 'option'. it's always been an 'option' to work for free in front of a small audience.

and now even more people can do that, for somewhat bigger audiences. yippee!

there is no 'economics of abundance' with increased economic insecurity. all there is is more people trying to sell their cheapened wares in the global marketplace, to a smaller group of ultimate buyers holding the majority of the global cards.

you're just full of it.

[Recursion]

199. I didn't pay Amazon anything

They took a cut of sales. And I wouldn't have sold it to people in Bulgaria if I mimeod it

[HiPointDem]

200. yes, they took a cut of sales, in other words you paid amazon. so how big was their cut,

brilliant one?

you paid a big global gatekeeper to sell your $2 book.

and the great victory in selling a $2 book to someone in bulgaria is -- what, exactly?

[joshcryer]

202. See what I mean?

Archaic thought process. This is coming, btw, from a purported "teacher." It reminds me of nursing friends I had who just couldn't deal with nursing informatics (basically digitizing the paper trail in a nursing environment). Fortunately most nurses have since embraced the change and it has saved them a lot of time in their daily lives and made the environment safer for the patient and saved health care billions.

Same person will not address the cut of sales that a publisher takes (Amazon 70% max, typically 30%. Publisher 85% minimum, typically 95%).

[a la izquierda]

130. Professors aren't making the money from rising tuition.

Yet we are supposed to sit down and shut up about the farce that the US education system has become. Okay.
You want a country of idiots, we're well on our way.

[melm00se]

140. An interesting read

on the changes in higher learning

http://books.google.com/books?id=TDfrzER0obYC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=shock+wave+ii+an+introduction+to+the+twenty+first+century&source=bl&ots=1edPSA86_F&sig=CGsVP6tIajOS2hu_8_AbuJJ77Ws&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w__0UY6wHfT54AOMmIEI&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=shock%20wave%20ii%20an%20introduction%20to%20the%20twenty%20first%20century&f=false

[BeyondGeography]

186. Unsustainable is how interventions happen

Obama's quote from the article:

"Families and taxpayers can't just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We'll never have enough loan money, we'll never have enough grant money to keep up with costs that are going up five, six, seven percent a year. We've got to get more out of what we pay for."

[Bragi]

203. A bad idea whose time has come

Good to see a growing left-right consensus on the importance of eliminating financial security and independence for any and all intellectual jobs. It's a perfect fit with building a stupider more malleable society.

[AllINeedIsCoffee]

205. I love online classes. I've taken dozens of classes since 2006.

And only a handful of them have required a physical presence.

It is simply ridiculous, and kind of conservative to preserve an old way of doing things.

[sufrommich]

206. Higher learning is about to open up for

everybody who wants it through technology. Is this a surprise to anybody? The promise of personal computers was equal access to information for everyone,this is it's logical path. I imagine most learning will be done online in our future and your educational choices will be international and not based on where you live or your income,the personal computer was designed to be an equalizer.

[joshcryer]

209. How dare you suggest everyone have equal access to information!

What a damn travesty. Don't you know what you're suggesting? Why it's the guaranteed end of education as we know it! We'll all being ignorant, idiocratic morons and not know even how to read! It's horrible, I tells ya!

[Deuce]

208. MOOCs and/or MOOA...

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html

[joshcryer]

210. Johns Hopkins frowning on MOOCs.

Color me surprised.

[mike_c]

211. don't get me started....

I teach university life sciences for a living. I've seen some of these experiments with MOOCs first hand. You know what their most appealing feature is? They are way cheaper than faculty who are experts in their field, and corporations can pocket the difference as profit. Wanna take a course from a call center employee instead? Want your future doctor to?

The failure rate in online courses is astronomic, often on the order of 90%+. Google San Jose State and Udacity to see some real stats from a real attempt to award college credit from a call center. San Jose State has suspended the experiment because it was failing so utterly. But even when MOOCs fail to educate, students still pay full tuition-- but it goes to support a private corporation, not the public good. The rise of MOOCs as a serious alternative to real teaching directly parallels the movement to wring as much money form students as possible for private profit. THAT is what MOOCs really offer. Higher profits for wealthy corporations instead of support for public education.

[Recursion]

212. LOL. Who do you imagine is profiting from EdX or OCW?

Really, I'd love to hear.

[mike_c]

217. who do you suppose is using those sorts of MOOCs for credit?

Few, if any. Look, I'm deeply involved with the online ed movement in California, and the reason the real emphasis is on for-profit online course development is that a lot of money passes through higher ed and corporate America has set its sights on a piece of that pie, just like it invaded the prison industry fifteen or so years ago. Who profits? I can only speak for the corporations that are trying VERY hard to break into the California State University's curricula, but they're companies like Pearson E-College, Udacity, and Coursera. Western Governor's University is non-profit, but it's call center work is at least partly farmed out to commercial venders, maybe wholly by now. There is presently a bill in the California legislature to REQUIRE the CSU and UC universities to contract with commercial venders, at market rates, to offer lower division courses for credit through those online venders-- that one is dead in the water, I think, but you know how that goes. They always come back and try over and over. And we're talking about non-subsidized online courses-- students are charged the full freight for taking those courses, twice to four times as much as they pay for classroom instruction from experienced professors.

Make no mistake-- this is not about access to higher ed. It's about tapping the pockets of students, parents, and taxpayers for corporate profit.

[HiPointDem]

222. +1. The hype about 'free' courses is a loss leader strategy.

[HiPointDem]

219. +1.