College Professors Are About to Get Really Mad at President Obama

[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MOOCs actually fail in that regard because the lecture model is outdated and the community model is what is the best way to go about it.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.