On democracy, economy, and the rise and fall of the MOOC ...

For Undine, who taught me about MOOCs

I

I teach Latin American literature and culture in a public research university that, having lost 80% of its state funding over the past five years, has moved at near warp speed to an entrepreneurial model. So as to become more current on pedogogical and policy issues affecting us and other institutions in similar situations, this summer I joined a Coursera MOOC and a Facebook group where faculty from around the country discuss online teaching.

In 2008, the year the markets crashed, the Gates Foundation announced a new focus, on recasting postsecondary education as a credentialing program. The Gates and other private foundations dedicated to the educational ?reform? movement donated generously to news organizations covering higher education. The opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal advanced the foundation agenda, touting the advantages of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Backed by venture capital, these low-cost courses would soon solve the budget crises in higher education by supplanting traditional universities. Taught by the best faculty, in the most modern way, MOOCs would be a pedagogical improvement as well as a device to cut costs or perhaps, raise revenue.

The MOOC I took, however, was pedagogically weak. At my institution, online students can count on our library?s many databases, journals, e-books, and bibliographic guides, as well as online chat and telephone consultation with reference librarians. The lack of access to such resources was a serious difficulty for my MOOC classmates?especially since the professor was not in field, the core readings were thin, and the course had a research component.

It seems surprising that the question of library resources comes up so little in discussions of MOOCs, especially since these are essential to the top-tier education we have been told MOOCs will provide. But this apparent oversight may indicate a deeper problem in the MOOC ideology. The now familiar claim that learning is best done without teaching, that is, with a ?facilitator? who ?stands to the side? while students ?learn from each other? seems to assume that the material is either a set of static facts or a grab-bag of vaguely ?creative? activities; teaching and learning do not go together, and research is uonrelated to either.

My MOOC had tactive forum threads on design weaknesses of every type, from the poor quality of quiz questions to the chaotic architecture of the website. Is this situation an anomaly? Or is it what MOOCs may become once the current fervor wanes? Are star-led MOOCs the wave of the future? Or will these be a small vanguard of loss leaders, designed to legitimate the new convention, but soon to be diluted in cost-cutting mediocrity?

Meanwhile in our Facebook discussions on MOOCs and online teaching, it became evident that a well thought out MOOC costs and does not save money. It is clear to me that in order to move forward on the creation of well-tempered MOOCs, we should decouple the discussion of cost-cutting from that of extending access to education to people who have none. These are two issues, not one, and it is my distinct impression that they have been conflated to one by the language of neoliberalism, which offers both democracy and economy as it stakes out new resources to monetize. We should not allow this logic to direct our own.

II

The news just a few months ago was that MOOCs were the new paradigm for higher education. Costs would fall, quality would soar, and access would be greatly expanded. But soon, the discussion shifted. Now, MOOCS could provide education to the masses, greatly reducing the need for tenured and tenure-track lines and full-time faculty with benefits. Elite, or ?deserving? students would still enjoy the benefits of traditional institutions. The next thing we knew, MOOCs were no longer to replace traditional university education, but would provide opportunities for certificates and enrichment to students lacking other forms of access to class. Finally, some MOOC providers changed course, scaling down goals to become mere contenders for a market share as providers of platforms for online courses.

The advent of the MOOC, then, has brought few changes. But the discussion of them has moved a great part of our energy from the actually serious issues which confront us to defending ourselves against our description as outdated pedagogues, unengaged in research and lecturing from yellowed notes. This characterization is not only inaccurate, but is motivated by commercial concerns. As a wake-up call, this debacle may have its uses, since the MOOC discussion has thrown the contours of the neoliberal assault on our institutions into high relief.

Is higher education ?broken,? as we keep hearing? Defunding has had deleterious effects on programs. Students now graduate with a debt burden that severely limits their horizons. Many faculty are part-timers without access to a living wage, let alone resources for teaching or professional development. Administrators no longer consider the higher education community primary stakeholders in the university, and are tasked with repurposing our institutions to more commercial ends.

Yet, we are still teaching and conducting research. Indeed, one of the most distressing features of the MOOC craze is its enthusiasts? ignorance of the relevance of research?collaborative learning?to university teaching. What can we do, if defunding and corporatization, and not ?poor teaching,? are our real problems? What if these problems are more difficult to solve than it is to retrain and reinspire a tired teacher or reframe a weak course?

We should articulate the relationship between learning and teaching in our terms, rather than react defensively to the mischaracterizations of our endeavor that appear daily in the NYT and the WSJ. American academics do not have the custom of writing opinion or other journalistic pieces that is common for faculty in other countries; we would do well to adopt it. We, and not the Gates or the Lumina Foundation, should be framing the public discussion of pedagogy and research.

We should also take active roles in restoration and expansion of our eroded infrastructure. Many of those who have focused on their own careers, sometimes out of necessity, as the erosion of the past three decades has proceeded, now say ?I am retiring, let the next generation discover a new educational paradigm.? We have been failing, not by lecturing from yellowed notes but by ignoring the contexts in which we work.

At the very least, we should make an inventory of our needs for teaching and research?for learning?and make these clear in every departmental, college, and university meeting. Against endless discussion of ways to ?flip? classrooms, we should emphasize critical needs, for example, the continued need for current reference works.

We should point out that there is good discussion of pedagogy in many displinary journals, that are more up to date and more relevant than anything a commercial educational consultant can offer. We should remind administrators, legislatures, and the public that research is not just industry-funded R&D or abstruse theorizing, but rather is the learning that goes into every course. This learning is updated daily and brought to class new. Teaching is not the delivery of content but a collaborative practice.

III

The focus on MOOCs as a way of extending the resources of our most privileged institutions to those living far from any institution helps to justify the work put into the creation of these courses, but also to drive out of sight the hundreds of thousands of students who have enrolled in college only to find that their institutions are being defuned and dismantled at a furious pace.

Serious as this situation is, to take it as a fait accompli to be remedied by MOOCs is still premature. Especially in view of the expense involved in creating a good MOOC, my strong recommendation is to push back against the defunding and dismantling of our institutions rather than invent strategies for accommodation to this new reality, or accept corporatization as the only viable solution.

The discussion about the need to extend high quality education to people ?shut out? of traditional universities that emanates from some very privileged institutions also contains elements of liberal guilt and na?v?t?. The students at my institution are already underserved. In almost every discussion of pedagogy I have with colleagues elsewhere, I discover that they assume an easy availability of equipment, materials and programs faculty at my institution cannot count upon. My institution is underfunded institution, even if it is in a rich country. Students come to us from underfunded rural schools. We have robust distance learning programs for those who cannot travel to our campus. We need, not in any particular order:

a. For the library: acquisitions, as there are fields in which we own no materials from the present century, and continued maintenance of all current subscriptions.

b. For study abroad: expanded programs, office support for these, and also locally based financial aid supplements since we are utterly dependent upon Federal scholarships, which are inadequate.

c. Smart classrooms: so we can access the Internet and use other a/v materials in all courses, without having to apply ahead of time for use of a special room on a special day.

d. FTEs, so students are not taught by a patchwork of adjuncts. Tenure-track lines, and so that they can be taught by experts currently engaged in research.

e. Salaries and benefits adequate to recruit and retain quality faculty. At present we only contribute 1.5% of salary to retirement funds of new hires. With the lack of raises since 2008, instructors are now teaching up to 7 courses per term so as to make ends meet.

f. Restoration of regular sabbaticals, summer salary support, research and travel funding, and funds for the acquisition of books and other research and teaching materials. These, it should be noted, are not luxuries, but essentials if we are to maintain and enhance quality teaching and learning, or research.

One reason it is important to articulate needs clearly is that this exercise reminds us of what we lack. Could I serve unserved students worldwide by offering a MOOC? Yes, and it would be far better than the MOOC I took this summer. It would be ?technological? and ?innovative.? It might get me into the faculty spotlight section of our college newsletter at last. But I will better serve the community I was hired to serve if I focus on the list above.

Ax?.

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Source: http://profacero.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/on-democracy-economy-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-mooc/

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