Let me begin by stating that online education has a place and a set of roles to play in higher education. I don't think many would say otherwise; but if they did, I'd be inclined to disagree with them. I'm not absolutely opposed to the technologies online education avails itself of; in fact, I use some of them in teaching my own courses.
Nevertheless, every time something to do with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) comes up, the media jump on it and proclaim it the most earth-shatteringly revolutionary 'disruptive' mind-blowingly novel and innovative innovation since the invention of Jesus Christ. A MOOC can never just be what those of us who actually work in higher education usually talk about it as: an experiment, a data-collection method, a thing foisted upon us by the university administration, or a useful component of a course that also involves a taught, face-to-face component. Never. A MOOC must be the news equivalent of an extinction level event. This silly article at Slate is titled 'The MOOC that Roared," and implies that, somehow unlike every other MOOC news that roars until it's hoarse and we're all smothered in hot air, this one that costs money is going to be a cheaper equivalent to the highly-rated but much more expensive classroom-based master's in computer science at Georgia Tech. This is almost comical in light of the fact that the last such 'this one actually counts toward a degree' experiment, San Jose State's partnership with Udacity, has resulted in epic failure.
Despite all this blustering about 'disruption' and 'revolution,' the MOOC and its ilk are not pedagogically revolutionary or 'game-changing' in any way. They don't change anything about the fundamentals of how people teach or learn, apart from providing limitations to these, as we saw in the SJSU case. We tend to talk about MOOCs as things that add possibilities for what teachers can accomplish; but in fact the MOOC adds nothing that a 200-person lecture hall and a platoon of TAs haven't been accomplishing for decades. The MOOC only scales this up from the hundreds to the thousands, which again offers nothing new in the way of pedagogy; only scope. For those inclined to think that such magnification of scope is itself a revolutionary and democratizing thing, let me remind you of the massive elephant in the room.
To make this elephant appear more real to you, let's give him a name. His name is Prestige. Prestige the Elephant.
As I've been arguing for a long time, the fact that US higher education, even at some of the most technical and vocational 4-year institutions, is based on a liberal arts educational model, what matters to employers is not what you majored in, but where you majored in it. Apart from those hiring for a minority of very technical or specialized jobs whose markets would be detrimentally flooded if everyone listened to the grandstanding politicians and suddenly majored in [speech-language pathology or biomedical engineering], it's not about the major.
Despite the corny articles that come up every month in business trade newsletters and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about '10 Majors That Aren't Worth the Tuition,' filled with cartoonish assessments of job prospects for typical scapegoat majors like 'theater arts' ('so you wanna be a thesbian? Good luck performing street tricks for quarters!') or 'religious studies' ('There are only 3 jobs in the world at Religious Studies Museums, where you could hunch over your old dusty Bibles and do whatever little thing a 'religious studies' major does!), employers don't look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person MAJORED IN BUSINESS! HIRED!' They look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person GRADUATED FROM HARVARD! They have a chance.'
The reason for this is that quality of education--not just general topic of education--matters to US employers. What matters even more, however, is prestige. Prestige the Elephant, remember? If you're misguided enough to go to college simply because you think college owes you a job, and you want a leg up in the job market upon graduation, my advice is: go to the best college you can and major in whatever the hell you want.
The prestige factor flies directly in the face of arguments that MOOCs will revolutionize higher education. The point of getting a degree from Harvard isn't necessarily that Harvard provides a better education than Brown, UVA, or Vassar. You go to Harvard because of the absurd number of people who apply to Harvard each year, only 6% are told by Harvard they're ALLOWED to go to Harvard. Getting into Harvard, then, is a signal to employers that you've made it past a significant competitive hurdle; that you're validated as elite, even if you never actually end up graduating.
When Harvard offers free MOOCs that anyone can take just by signing up, and that don't lead to a Harvard degree, it's a nice public service, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything about higher education. Just watch what happens when universities like San Jose State and Georgia Tech start charging for online degrees. First, the degrees will be worth nothing if anyone can enroll. Second, those paying for the degrees will begin to wonder whether they're getting as good an education as those paying more for face-to-face instruction (and we'll be able to measure this to some extent; the early results don't look good for MOOCs). Third, employers will begin to wonder the same thing.
Thus, though MOOCs don't exactly revolutionize teaching and learning, they do have the potential to revolutionize one thing in particular: labor costs. MOOCs offer the illusion of quality for the reality of cheap. While brick-and-mortar college tuition is way too high right now, a product of corporate people running universities into the ground and building stadiums and gyms instead of academic reputations, there's a reason why higher education costs must necessarily be above free. The reason is you have to pay experts and provide expert-ready facilities for students to learn with. These are the fundamentals of higher education, which the existence of MOOCs will not alter. You will never get the same experience answering a multiple-choice chemistry quiz online that you do being guided through an experiment in a state-of-the-art chemistry lab by a PhD student working under a PhD-trained professional chemist. It really is that simple.
But what you will get for cheap through a MOOC is a cut-rate education. And if you are the person receiving this cut-rate education (which doubles as a market experiment for for-profit companies like Udacity), chances are you're not a well-positioned student like the kind who goes to Harvard or Swarthmore, but a first-generation college student, likely working-class, likely speaking English as a second language. In other words, the MOOC enterprise experiments on our most vulnerable and underprepared students, creating an even more pronounced multi-tier system of privilege in US higher education.
At the same time, the MOOC will undermine faculty pay and resources, and, if implemented full-scale the way many of its proponents envision, will turn the university experience into a consumer experience akin to shopping at Walmart. There's a reason that plastic toy costs less than $2: it was made by someone in rural China for a fraction of a penny. It may be good enough for your 4 year old, but is it a good enough model to base higher education on? The MOOC offers a similar mechanism. It employs a combination of technology and part-time, non-professinal, unskilled technical labor to replace the quality of classroom instruction under a trained and credentialed professional.
As a consequence, one thing academia an the technology sector have in common is that both are increasingly run not by trained experts, but by business types and MBA-holders. This is why the tech sector and stories about it are now flush with absurd, blindly optimistic jargon like 'disruption' and 'innovation' and 'synergy.' This is the kind of shit only corporate culture can come up with. For some these may appear big and exciting words, but in reality they're just the language of inflation and destruction.
