Will MOOCs Destroy Academia? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#61

Post by barry-cotter » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 10:28 PM UTC

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?

MOOCs have serious problems, no doubt, but declaring them to be a negative after less than four years is a bit much. And he doesn't even have a proper critique of MOOCs, he just dislikes them on the grounds that they're a danger to traditional universities.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#62

Post by epsylon » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 12:24 PM UTC

They won't destroy academia, but I certainly hope that they will destroy the "grand lecture" format. There is no point in having an average professor lecture painfully for 2 hours when you can have the same content delivered to you by an energetic, world class expert on a video that you can watch at any time you want, wherever you want and speed up, slow down or replay at your convenience.

The time and money saved by having lectures prepared on video can be spent towards more office hours, labs and workshop where the teachers and TAs can directly interact with the students and help them dig beyond the lectures by completing assignments and projects.

The University's job is to provide guidance, supervision (including for exams that give credit) and interaction with other students.

Re: Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?

#63

Post by jurassic » Wed, Mar 06, 2013, 7:55 PM UTC

a3camero wrote: post #45

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…

"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... .

They just bought Caltech's president.