Essay says faculty involved in MOOCs may be making rope for professional hangings | Inside Higher Ed

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-15

Summary:

"The rush toward the creation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is catching on in higher education like wildfire. All it takes, it seems, is to wave a bit of money around, talk up the brave new world of technological innovation, bash the “failed” world of higher education as we know it, and the privatization troops have administrators in a fit of unexamined, swooning technophilia. These 'courses,' however, in addition to offering false promises, also undermine shared governance, run roughshod over established curriculum development procedures and move colleges toward the era of 'teacherless classrooms,' which destroy the academic integrity of our institutions and demean the value of the education our students receive.  MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering. Public institutions of higher education then become shells for private interests who will offer small grants on the front end and reap larger profits on the back end. At present, MOOCs are being proposed as solutions to enrollment shortages, among other things, in open-access institutions such as community colleges. The MOOC crowd promises cost savings, efficiency, improved access and the answer to our 'completion' woes. The concern as voiced by Arne Duncan himself is that in our quest to increase completion, maintain quality and save money: 'The last thing we want to do is hand out paper that doesn’t mean anything.' Wethinks he doth protest too much.  And that’s the big lie behind this allegedly noble quest to provide much broader access to higher education and improve student learning. There is not a bit of proof that MOOCs will do so in any meaningful way. The notion is to turn community colleges into Petri dishes for MOOC experiments, principled objections be damned. There are costs to cut in the public sector and dollars to be made in the private sector. The much-hyped arrival of MOOCs has been made possible by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a host of the usual corporate education reform suspects, who have long been involved in a full-court press propaganda campaign for their venture/vulture philanthropy..."

Link:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/01/14/essay-says-faculty-involved-moocs-may-be-making-rope-professional-hangings

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.comment oa.universities oa.oer oa.costs oa.quality oa.students oa.prices oa.education oa.funders oa.gates_foundation oa.profits oa.debates oa.colleges oa.moocs oa.hei oa.courseware

Date tagged:

01/15/2013, 14:21

Date published:

01/15/2013, 09:21