Yesterday I was blindsided by an email. It was from the Provost of our university (where I am both a graduate student and a teaching assistant). The email began with this ominous line: “the rampant emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) are creating the perception of a game-changing, disruptive educational approach that has the potential to transform both access to education as well as the methods we use to teach our own students and the world.” It went on to say other things, but let’s stick with this troubling sentence for a moment.
First of all, the Provost has done an excellent job scaring students and faculty. MOOCs are “rampantly” “emerging,” he says. This makes it sound like MOOCs possess an agency all their own, as if they are rising up out of the shadows to take control of our universities. In other words, the sentence does not identity the true agents behind the “rampant emergence” of MOOCs: on the one hand, wealthy, private, and prestigious universities like Stanford and MIT; and, on the other hand, for-profit corporations like Coursera, and get this, even a for-profit company founded by a Stanford University professor, Udacity. The university-industrial complex in all its glory.
The point is: it’s not just that MOOCs appeared out of nowhere. They are the product of certain people with certain ideas (and entrepreneurial ambitions), and we must take a critical look at their motivations. Continue reading →
