As long as employers continue to care about credentialing rather than actual knowledge academia will be fine.
Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#12The argument goes:
- we suck
- we have no money
- and yet we cost too much
- MOOCs suck
- MOOCs are cheap
- MOOCs are going to eat our lunch
- we preserve intellectual heritage
- if we go, it goes
- therefore kill MOOCs
And really, there are at least two important counter arguments:
- if you suck, how can you preserve heritage?
- do not MOOCs also preserve heritage at least as well?
Also, the despair and lack of alternative here to the "recession" (actually, it's not a recession any more, it's a hugely unequal wealth distribution) is striking.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#13Many in Europe are eyeing it as a possible opening. If U.S. academia implodes over its teaching-related parts (tuition/etc.), perhaps accelerated by MOOCs, will it take the research dominance of U.S. academia down with it, too? As least in Scandinavia, we don't feel MOOCs are a huge threat to us, because there is no tuition, so there is no real financial reason for students to prefer MOOCs. Maybe some will out of per…
I hope this doesn't come across as defensive, or as some form of national pride ... but I'm not sure I agree. If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more education to more people, then the lower cost of obtaining said education should produce more, not fewer, researchers. Of course, if this comes to pass, then the same would be true for every country with ubiquitous access to the internet. In such a case, the…
Even if they do succeed in that goal, I'm not sure the result of more researchers follows. Most of what they're targeting is replacing bachelor-level education, for one thing, not PhD-level. But more importantly, research is currently more constrained by funding and positions than availability of researchers. When either a university or Microsoft Research opens a position, they get hundreds of applicants. Even for postdoc jobs there are many more researchers than jobs. If several physics departments have to close, thousands of new students who've successfully taken physics MOOCs isn't going to make up for the closure of those research labs, from the perspective of progress in physics.
It's possible something else could replace those physics labs. Maybe Microsoft Research and similar non-academic labs will get larger, and expand out of computer science, more like the old Bell Labs? The U.S. could decide, alternately, that funding research is a priority, but doing it via hybrid educational/research institutions (the classic "research university") isn't going to work anymore, and choose to fund research-only institutions, e.g. bring the national labs back to the forefront. That's plausible, but I'm not sure there's political support for it.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope this doesn't come across as defensive, or as some form of national pride ... but I'm not sure I agree. If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more education to more people, then the lower cost of obtaining said education should produce more, not fewer, researchers. Of course, if this comes to pass, then the same would be true for every country with ubiquitous access to the internet. In such a case, the…
> If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more > education to more people It won't. It surely can make more education to be available to more people, but at the end there will be less people willing to use that oppurtunity.
Bold statement that has been proven wrong already. Khanacademy is a point against decreasing "willingness", as is Coursera. Most of their participants would not otherwise attend a formal course, either because of cost, living circumstances or some other factor. In fact, the "poaching" of students from traditional venues is limited.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#15In my experience MOOCs don't replace the academic experience of being in a classroom, and interacting live with students and teachers. It does not replace lively discussions and debate. It does have a place in continuing education and supplementing coursework especially in technical subjects. I finished a Coursera class last month. Here is my experience
http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-most-recent-mooc-exp...
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#16Many in Europe are eyeing it as a possible opening. If U.S. academia implodes over its teaching-related parts (tuition/etc.), perhaps accelerated by MOOCs, will it take the research dominance of U.S. academia down with it, too? As least in Scandinavia, we don't feel MOOCs are a huge threat to us, because there is no tuition, so there is no real financial reason for students to prefer MOOCs. Maybe some will out of per…
I hope this doesn't come across as defensive, or as some form of national pride ... but I'm not sure I agree. If MOOCs deliver on the promise of delivering more education to more people, then the lower cost of obtaining said education should produce more, not fewer, researchers. Of course, if this comes to pass, then the same would be true for every country with ubiquitous access to the internet. In such a case, the…
I think currently it really comes down to the type of person enrolled in a MOOC. MOOC's certainly lower the barrier to accessing top level educational material, however that helps the people enrolled in them minimally if they are not motivated to fully take advantage. The comment made about MOOC's not having the same effect on people because they have no tuition is partially valid because of this.
My point is that with our current culture surrounding education, I don't believe that MOOCS will be powerful enough to topple academia. People just simply don't care enough about their education in America. I think that MOOCs would probably be much more effective in other countries, where education is not taken for granted.
However as time passes, and the culture around education shifts in the US, perhaps people would be more inclined to use MOOCS to their fullest potential.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#17Well, they could destroy academia if the credentials start to mean something. There is no reason that a university is some special place to learn things. There are three things colleges seem to do fairly well - knowledge transfer, credentials that mean something, and research.
Knowledge transfer can happen online or anywhere if done right. Credentials that mean something is possible if there are reasonably good standards behind them that are provable. Say, some kind of standardized test/certification. Research could happen outside of the way Universities do it now.
For now those things are all tied together, but there is no intrinsic reason they have to be.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#18As long as employers continue to care about credentialing rather than actual knowledge academia will be fine.
As long as "HR" continues to care about credentialing rather than actual knowledge...
FTFY
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#19College debt is getting out of control. I could see MOOCs cannibalizing some lower tier options, like University of Phoenix, which IMO would be a good thing. But I don’t think Harvard’s going anywhere. To become more popular, MOOCs need to do a better job of marketing to employers that their credentials are just as good as some lower or mid-tier state university. Some MOOCs are already doing this, like Udacity with their plans for offline proctoring. For now, most MOOCs are basically TIVO for lectures.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#20Books accomplish pretty much the same thing as moocs, yet the academy survived the invention of the printing press. I'm sure moocs will have their place, but I think fears about the destruction of academia are a little exaggerated.
Moocs are in the majority better than corresponding books.
Generally books are more detailed (and expensive) than most students would need or benefit at a "first read". When I pick up a university-level text without the need to study for an exam, I usually don't follow through. Mostly because I get stuck somewhere. With Moocs that doesn't happen.
Moocs are currently only scraping the surface of what is possible with computerassisted instruction. They offer quizzes. But in the future I fully expect interactive Tutoring software that would for example be able to "nudge" you towards the solution of a problem, train you in a particular skill through repetition or even check a proof for a math problem.