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Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

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Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#31

Post by natecarroll »

betterunix wrote: post #23
khuey wrote: post #11

As long as employers continue to care about credentialing rather than actual knowledge academia will be fine.

Credentialism is destroying academia. Professors have been under pressure for decades to lower their standards, avoid making their courses difficult, and to teach things with obvious vocation relevance. Humanities departments are being slashed. General education requirements have been weakened. Eventually, employers will realize that two-year degrees are as good as four-year degrees when it comes to vocational traini…

Not sure why you are conflating credentialism and vocational training; a big part of the problem is that these two are very different things. That is, students invest 4 years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up with a piece of paper that can get them in the door, but no useful skills.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#32

Post by marknutter »

samsolomon wrote: post #29

Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions. However, I think MOOCs will start to replace textbooks. These Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?) serve as supplementary material to those already trying to learn something new. Signing up for one of these courses serves a similar function to pur…

> Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions.

You can have peers and mentors to go to and ask questions online just as well as you can in real life. Better, in fact, since your pool of mentors and peers is much larger. Take the programming industry. If you have questions about a particular programming concept, library, language, framework, etc. you can easily find a dedicated, knowledgeable group to bounce questions off. There's no reason why this couldn't work in other fields.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#33

Post by short_circut »

I feel like MOOCs are part of a Universities cost cutting measure aswell as an advertisement for it. Many universities are moving their introductory courses to online. By using MOOCs they don't have to have as many students in class, they can schedule alot more classes to cover more students who say have a day job, and they can get away with hiring less people. The publicity is excellent because it is a good way to get self motivated people interested in the school. Notice that very rarely are entire academic programs put online. This is nothing but good for the university who sees decreased cost and increased student quality (potentially) and increased interest in the school. Once it stops helping the school profit then the MOOCs will go away. I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#34

Post by _delirium »

ajross wrote: post #28
_delirium wrote: post #3

Many 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 only skimmed this article, but I don't see how this argument works. US "academia" (in the sense of the top handful of universities in any given field) isn't supported by student tuition in any meaningful way. It's supported mostly by government grants to the science departments and by alumni giving (typically buffered by a large endowment foundation) to make up the slack. Only schools with no graduate programs (i.e…

That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recent years (as those grants have fallen) tuition/fees. If we decide that we don't really need to educate people that way anymore, then the University of California system should be much smaller (if it still exists at all), and those researchers are going to have to find somewhere else to research, or leave research and do something else.

If that happened, California could take the money they aren't spending on the UC system anymore, and decide just to fund research directly, setting up a state research institution that isn't a university. Maybe they will; I have no idea.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#35

Post by Gormo »

samsolomon wrote: post #29

Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions. However, I think MOOCs will start to replace textbooks. These Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?) serve as supplementary material to those already trying to learn something new. Signing up for one of these courses serves a similar function to pur…

> Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?)

When was it ever not a service?

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#36

Post by jurassic »

betterunix wrote: post #23
khuey wrote: post #11

As long as employers continue to care about credentialing rather than actual knowledge academia will be fine.

Credentialism is destroying academia. Professors have been under pressure for decades to lower their standards, avoid making their courses difficult, and to teach things with obvious vocation relevance. Humanities departments are being slashed. General education requirements have been weakened. Eventually, employers will realize that two-year degrees are as good as four-year degrees when it comes to vocational traini…

> If a four-year degree represents nothing more than vocational training, why bother requiring one when a two-year degree generally suffices?

Because a debt-laden employee is a docile, loyal employee? If you need the job badly to meet your basic obligations, you'll probably make fewer demands on the employer.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#37

Post by marknutter »

ryanmolden wrote: post #5
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

Closing sentence: If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear, but I am afraid that we have let the genie out of the bottle. Don't bother reading it.

I'm confused, are you actually advocating only reading things you agree with? Or is this last line supposed to be indicative in some negative way of the overall quality of the article?

Well, it was rather bizarre way to close the article, which to me seemed like more of a summary about what MOOCs are and how Academia is threatened. He never really makes the case for why MOOCs are bad, which is why it was startling to me to hear his opinion against them at the end.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#38

Post by patrick_curl »

I think not, at least not until Completion rates rise, and they become more structured, that said I've become a pretty good dev using some Moocs and online courses like Codecademy, CodeSchool, RubyMonk, TeamTreeHouse -- so there is a lot of areas that can be disrupted, but the end-user must be very dedicated to learning, cause being online --there are distractions EVERYWHERE...case in point, I was just watching a video at EDx, then thought hmm...wonder what's going on @ hackernews lol... I still think classroom learning is hugely important though, as it's a great place to talk with other-like minded people, network, and grow... but I can definitely see things changing with moving from 4 yr degrees to programs like DevBootCamp.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#40

Post by ajross »

_delirium wrote: post #34
ajross wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only skimmed this article, but I don't see how this argument works. US "academia" (in the sense of the top handful of universities in any given field) isn't supported by student tuition in any meaningful way. It's supported mostly by government grants to the science departments and by alumni giving (typically buffered by a large endowment foundation) to make up the slack. Only schools with no graduate programs (i.e…

That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recen…

Makes sense. Though again, that's not exactly breaking the back of an existing monopoly. Frankly if you wanted to do direct research funding the obvious mechanism would be just to increase the direct grants paid right now, which are going to existing university faculty.

I think you and the grandparent both seem to be arguing that "removing the undergraduates and sending them to MOOCs" will somehow change the character of the way "academia" works, and that's what I just don't see. Undergraduates are a side project at these schools -- as mentioned, they don't provide meaningful funding (tuition breaks even at best). And at most, they provide a cheap labor pool for the research programs. Take them away and you'd never notice the difference.

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