Websites that distribute video tutorials won't displace universities, sites that displace credentialing will.
Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#52No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach. Simple, fine. But society wants teachers with research-frontier-level knowledge, so it unified the two functions in research universities. Unfortunately, society wants to pay at the level of free-to-cheap, both for tuition and for public investment. So we get ever-rising tuition driven by state cu…
I'm also struck by academics willing to give away their content for free, rather than hoard it for the students who might be going into lifelong debt to hear it in person. this makes me think the lecture model of learning is more of a status raising ego-trip for the professor, rather than the most efficient way to transfer information to students.
governments should be funding universities because R&D has social and economic benefits. However, the paying customers of universities (students) are primarily interested in the job market, so universities will have a role as long as companies continue to use them as hiring filters. since direct aptitude testing by corporations is a legally tricky area, i predict the current credentialing system is unlikely to change for a while.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#53In 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...
"... the academic experience of being in a classroom, and interacting live with students and teachers ... "
What does it do the the argument that traditional hybrid schools started granting credentials to online students who don't do any of the above about a decade ago? I graduated from a regional college in a program like that almost a decade ago. You can't even tell from transcript, much less the diploma, that I took systems analysis online vs in person.
Also I suppose it depends on the level of your fellow students, but before I switched to mostly online, I took plenty of classroom classes, and I found that most lively discussions and debate were either students who didn't bother doing the reading and didn't mind displaying their ignorance very inconveniently and publicly, didn't have the horsepower to figure it out, or were trying to get into heaven by stubbornly insisting on some religious interpretation.
If merely making kids talk to each other resulted in brilliance, then discussions at bars, parties, and on facebook would be worthwhile... but they just aren't, not even close. I mean, realistically, what fraction of 19 year olds have anything to say worth hearing, especially about esoteric advanced topics, and then whats the odds of having one of those people in your class (pretty low, indeed). Frankly even after completing the class and doing pretty well, more than a decade later I still don't have anything intelligible to say about diffeqs or bode stability plots.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#54Earlier 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…
"If you want a top-tier university go and buy one" You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci... $10 billion endowment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204482... .
Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#55No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach. Simple, fine. But society wants teachers with research-frontier-level knowledge, so it unified the two functions in research universities. Unfortunately, society wants to pay at the level of free-to-cheap, both for tuition and for public investment. So we get ever-rising tuition driven by state cu…
> No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach.
I disagree. Some academics want to do research. Some want to teach. However, the way for a university to gain prestige is to have active research programs, so prestigious universities emphasize research over teaching, and the prestige attracts students better than quality teaching does. If there's a contradiction, it's that students say they want to be taught, but when given the choice, choose prestige over teaching.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#56No, but they are exposing an internal contradiction of academia. Academics want to research, students want them to teach. Simple, fine. But society wants teachers with research-frontier-level knowledge, so it unified the two functions in research universities. Unfortunately, society wants to pay at the level of free-to-cheap, both for tuition and for public investment. So we get ever-rising tuition driven by state cu…
I'm also struck by academics willing to give away their content for free, rather than hoard it for the students who might be going into lifelong debt to hear it in person. this makes me think the lecture model of learning is more of a status raising ego-trip for the professor, rather than the most efficient way to transfer information to students. governments should be funding universities because R&D has social and…
The academics in question might have little choice but to give away some/most of the content for free, as it is often mandated by university- or department-level policy. At least as far as internal use of the courses is concerned, the incentive here is clear for the university: reduce your dependency on a given superstar prof leaving (very slightly, admittedly).
As for the ego trip, I doubt it (in most cases): research gives you the recognition of your peers. There is a clear trade-off in allocating your time towards stellar teaching or stellar research. Few professors manage both. And stellar teaching tends to get much lower recognition from the peers.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If you want a top-tier university go and buy one" You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci... $10 billion endowment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204482... .
Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.
Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.
Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.
But there are other data points. Stanford's rise to prominence in the 1960's (people forget that for quite some time it was a tiny college with no notoriety at all) was driven by almost exactly this kind of thing: they came into a huge endowment and embarked on an affirmative program to recruit top-tier talent in a big list of fields. And it worked.
Obviously details matter. A university in Riyadh is going to be disadvantaged vs. one in Palo Alto, but the idea that professors can be encouraged to move by big paychecks shouldn't be controversial.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.
Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.
NYU has been been buying its way up the reputation ladder for the past 15 years.
Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
#60Many 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…
"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."
At least the best Stanford MOOCs, Machine Learning and Databases, were taught much better, and the material and exercises were much more carefully planned, than most of what I'd expect at least in any university in Finland.
Now, I hear Coursera has also some bad quality MOOCs, but as long as the very best courses by the very best lecturers can be offered to the whole world as MOOCs, their better quality should be a strong reason the prefer them over some mediocre course in a local uni.