> provide a diminished education for students in public universities
That sentence makes no sense.
UC Berkeley produces edX content, and it's a public university.
Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#72> The letter is part of a brewing debate about how MOOCs might deepen the divide between wealthy universities, which produce MOOCs, and less wealthy ones, which buy licenses to use those MOOCs from providers like edX. Why are only top universities producing MOOCs anyway? Do San Jose lack any renowned classes, or just the will to MOOCify them?
I would have much enjoyed a calculus class out of SJSU, but I think their renowned professor has retired:
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Questions and answers aren't uniformly distributed. The bulk of questions will be from the same small set over time. Humans are only necessary for the exceptions. While this may never go to zero, it may not justify having an expensive human around answering what are mostly predictable questions over and over for the occasional bizarre one. (And I'd bet the bizarre ones often come from further weaknesses in the previo…
Yeah, maybe they'll invent a book full of text that answers all the most commonly asked questions. ...like a textbook, which obsoleted teachers over a century ago.
Text books do not have the feedback loop that online courses can have. In the worst case, they hardly have any feedback loop at all, even across decades. The tightness of the feedback loop changes everything, just like everything else that gets computerized. Like, say, this message board here we're having our conversation on, which is exactly the same as writing letters to the editor a hundred years ago, right...? Except for all the profound ways in which it is different.
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly that's the new value prop, but wasn't a lot of that previously handled by teaching assistants? Personally, I think the Udacity "continuous Socratic method" approach is better than traditional lectures because it forces constant thought and engagement.
It's still on a computer. I don't think it's a replacement. Not even close.
It sounds like you're begging the question (in the "correct" sense, not the modern vernacular sense). Computer education can't be as good as non-computer education, so therefore computer education isn't as good.
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a limitation: questions and answers. The place professors will have value is in direct student communication.
A bunch of eager students waiting to get a chance to discuss something with the educator can be handled on-line just as well as off-line, assuming both students and teachers have decent social media communicating skills.
But that's a different topic: "Are classrooms a necessary component of education in the future?" is a very different question than "Are professors...?"
I think the answer to both is probably "yes" but certainly not in the quantity they are today. I wouldn't want to be an employee at a teaching college over the next 10 years, much less a professor. The higher ed bubble is about to pop (between new technology, skyrocketing costs, and reduced perceived value, it's going to get hit on every side) and its going to be ugly when it does.
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#76My first thought was this was another case of the "old guard" being afraid of change, but I read their letter and I actually agree with some of their points. The obvious downside is the lack of interaction with the lecturing professor. This was another point I hadn't thought of: "The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary -…
> "The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary" Which is why every professor writes their own books, right? It's be scary if lots of people across the country were learning from the same textbooks.
Almost every child is taught algebra. The methods may very but the end result is the same. We are forcing children as young as 9 to learn a doctrine originating from Islam! What dystopian world are we living in?!?!?!
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#77Some professors are taking the availability of MOOC material to invert their time. Rather than everyone spending time listening to a lecture, they assign the online lecture as homework, and then use class time to answer questions, work problem-sets, and address items that weren't included in the MOOC.
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly, the world's economy would have collapsed when cars came and the horse and buggy creators lost their jobs, the printing press forced manual copiers out of business, automatic telephone switches made operators lose their job, etc. (Funny story: I have a professor that was in the Center of Mass group for NASA, where they painstakingly calculated the center of mass of each object and part of the shuttle, then…
I think the deeper question that is being ignored is that of how we decide what is valuable: how we measure value. The market approach that is being espoused, and favoured by some here, reduces everything to a dollar amount. This is convenient, especially from an algorithmic standpoint, since then your algorithms can process any kind of input. But this is a pretty big assumption. I'm not saying that you can't put a p…
> The market approach that is being espoused, and favoured by some here, reduces everything to a dollar amount.
Enter the subjective theory of value [1]. Market theories do not necessarily try to reduce everything to a dollar amount. Human choice and action are the only true deciders of value, and those decisions are expressed through marginal utility evaluations.
> So, when you say "standards of living have increased", what measures are being used? Past the essentials (food/water/housing/clothing/security), we get into very grey areas. Knowledge and ways of life are changing, and maybe the loss is more costly than people are willing to admit in the rush for material prosperity.
I understand your sentiment; we are using certain indicators as proxies for measuring standards of living, but maybe those indicators are the wrong ones. To that I reply: it is up to the individual to decide on how to become happy. The fact is, the amount of capital in the world has increased enough so that the common man can much more easily decide what makes himself happy. You are projecting your opinions of what is necessary and what is superfluous in your assessment of how people use their capital when you say a "rush for material prosperity" is a bad thing.
It is easy to criticize wealth creation systems (capitalism) and measures of value, but if you can't express alternative explanations or systems then there is nothing to really talk about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#79I read the original open letter and think that there's quite a bit of misleading and FUDding, of course, masterfully done coming from a philosophy prof. I approach this from a different angle: "We believe the purchasing of online and blended courses is not driven by concerns about pedagogy, but by an effort to restructure the U.S. university system in general ..." I agree with him completely here, a large part of thi…
Better argument: Isn't having free, high-quality lectures preferable, _for many people and in many contexts_, to the alternative, very expensive option? Even if it's not the exact level of quality, there's utility in not going broke.
Re: Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technology has been replacing workers for a long time, but unemployment hasn't been steadily increasing over time. The inventor of the steam shovel was accused of causing permanent unemployment with the argument "each steam shovel will replace 100 men with shovels." He replied "or 1000 men with teaspoons." These "mass unemployment events" aren't anything new, and they historically haven't caused long-lasting unemploy…
> These "mass unemployment events" aren't anything new, and they historically haven't caused long-lasting unemployment. No, what they cause is long-lasting shifts in the distribution of the rewards of production to more heavily favor capital than labor, rather than causing long-lasting unemployment. As long as people have some use in productivity, and need to work to eat (limiting price elasticity of labor supply on…
As long as people have some use in productivity, and need to work to eat (limiting price elasticity of labor supply on the low end), technology won't produce long-lasting unemployment, just, under ceteris paribus assumptions, long-lasting reductions in the ratio between the market-clearing price for the average unit of labor and the value of the total output of the economy.
Technological change can be classified as labor-augmenting, capital-augmenting and labor-neutral change. You seem to be claiming that all technological change is capital-augmenting.
There's been quite a bit of research in this area, and your claim is overwhelmingly refuted... in fact, Daron Acemoglu has multiple research projects purporting to show that most technological change is labor-augmenting.
A summary is available at http://economics.mit.edu/files/967