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[Higher Education] Practical Problems and Philosophical Foundations
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But then, I know myself well enough to realize that when and if I'm left to my own devices, I will fuck it up. I guess that makes me immature... but that's also why I have a convenient ADD diagnosis to fall back on. >_>
Yeah, stuff like that is what these things are good for.
A replacement for a degree they are not.
I feel bad for being such a gigantic nay-sayer on MOOCs, but I'm a gigantic nay-sayer on MOOCs. Here's the thing: the benefit of going to Harvard or Yale to study history or political science is not that your professors teach their subjects 100% better than a professor in a similar field at a respectable and accredited public school in Virginia or Pennsylvania or California or what have you. Because truthfully, they're not better teachers. The guy teaching 20th Century Political Development at UVA got his degree at Harvard, too. Rather, the benefit is that you get to attend classes with all of those other kids who, through some confluence of high intelligence or extraordinary familial connections and influence, were also able to get into Harvard or Yale. This benefits you in two important ways:
1. Going to class with a lot of intelligent people makes it more likely that you are going to hear a lot of intelligent conversation about a topic.
2. Having hyper-intelligent and well-connect peers means that you'll have a stronger social and professional network to find opportunities to leverage all of that knowledge you've just gained when you get out of school.
You reap neither of these benefits taking an online-only class taught to 40,000 other students each semester by a Harvard professor.
Something interesting and related to the topic at hand.
Don't think it will go anywhere, but strange to see someone in the Republican heartland talking about salaries without foaming at the mouth over unions.
But what about the student at a respectable and accredited public school in Virginia? Does he benefit more from having his class designed and taught by his local professor, or from having his class designed and taught by the Harvard professor while his local professor grades his papers? That's the bigger question and what most of the discussion surrounding the use of MOOCs in higher ed is really about.
One thing that keeps being brought - correctly - in discussions about this at the Chronicle of Higher Ed is that fact that being a faculty member at Harvard does not automatically make you either a great teacher or a leading scholar in the field. As someone who studied at a graduate level, it is a broad and under-appreciated truth that the world expert in any particular field may be the guy at Utah State as easily as his counterpart at Yale.
In fact, a MOOC world could lead to the world-leading expert at Colorado State losing his job in favor of an online course taught by a mediocrity from the Ivies.
Why even have a professor then? Just get a GA to grade the papers and we won't have instructors outside of Harvard.
That paper brings up a very good point: diversity isn't just a buzzword that admissions offices and affirmative action proponents use. Like, it's a tangible good that ought to be actively cultivated, imho. I am much richer for the wide range of people with whom I've had contact. Shifting to a mothership broadcast model of learning eliminates the classroom interaction with people who are sitting 3 feet away from you but who couldn't be further away from you in terms of worldview.
I had a class this spring called Development of International Thought. There was a dude in there who was an on-campus student from Kentucky. I would call him a friend, and he happens to be one of the whitest dudes I know; ROTC, graduating then becoming an officer in the U.S. Army... heavily empiricist worldview. Like he would raise his hand during lectures and literally say, "Why are we studying these philosophers who've been dead for hundreds of years? Where is the empirical basis for any of this stuff? Where's the data to back up this philosophy?" This happened a lot during the course of the semester; like by the end, people would groan audibly when he raised his hand.
But the professor was smart enough to work his skepticism into her lectures. After the first such exchange, she made it a point whenever she introduced a new philosopher/framework to say, "And what is the value of this person's contribution to international politics? Why do we care what he has to say, as Gregory would ask ...?"
On net, I would say that I benefited from my (friendly) after-class discussions with him about exactly why the stuff we were covering that day was relevant enough that we should be learning it. Some of it, frankly, was pretty irrelevant; we covered the Stoics early on, and I never really saw a use for learning about them aside from learning about an interesting artifact from intellectual history. We spent waaay too much time covering Natural Law... but it's also the basis for contemporary thought regarding human rights.
tl;dr: This one guy's skepticism enriched the whole class.
Exactly. This is what many people are worried will happen. At 80%+ of schools you'd just need a few profs to oversee the GA's (who would be using MOOCs for most of their grad courses), then the GA's and adjuncts could handle the undergrad courses. The financial pressure is very great to make this happen, and it is already happening gradually.
The for-profit higher ed industry has already largely moved to this model: canned online courses whose content cannot be altered by the instructors, who are hired only to "deliver" the content and moderate/grade online discussions and papers for $2000 per course. That this is seriously being considered by real institutions of higher ed is terrifying.
It will blow up in any university that tries this' face.
It is not a sustainable way to run a college program.
Or a country, for that matter.
And I think most everyone involved in education, except for the politicians, understand this. So I'm not too terribly worried.
Frankly if you're looking at straight up resumes and publications, it's essentially the same experience. I was thinking of a very specific Professor when I mentioned the guy at UVA who also got his undergraduate degree at Harvard. His name's Brian Balogh. Teaches some earlier American history as well as the history of science. Undergrad Harvard. PhD from John Hopkins. His counterpart at Harvard University is a professor named Joyce Chaplin. She also got her PhD from John Hopkins just two years earlier. On paper, they are literally the same person. I consequently reject the notion that you're getting a measurably better educational experience taking an online class from Dr. Chaplin than you would be taking a class taught by Dr. Balogh insofar as the quality of the instruction and intellectual background of the professors in question.
In terms of actually having a professor who knows your fucking name and can write a letter of recommendation for your own future employment or academic pursuits beyond "SammyF? You mean student No. A38715-C? Yeah, A38715-C and I go way back. We exchanged emails twice while he took an online class that I taught. I read one of them while taking a giant shit after some bad Chipotle?" Yeah in that case I would have to say that physically and personally interacting with Professor Balogh would be infinitely preferable to taking an online class with Dr. Chaplin.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
And yet, after several major scandals, the "education reform" movement still continues to be a powerful force.
And yet, higher education soldiers on.
I'm not saying that proponents of high ed need to take down the battlements, I'm saying that MOOCs don't keep me up at night.
The sky is very much not falling.
Considering the job is like 90% fundraising from millionaires or billionaires to raise money for new facilities or faculty positions, yeah, I probably could believe it. No one strokes out a $500,000 check to a guy who just rolled up in a 2002 Toyota Camry.
Doesn't have to. There's a long game involved, and it needs to be stopped now.
So very tiring.
MOOCs are not a serious threat to high ed, they are a weapon wielded by the people who threaten it, but they are not scary to me and they shouldn't be to you.
They're jokes and should be treated as such. Like a boggart.
Then they are a joke that is swiftly gaining traction among cash-strapped universities as a solution to their hemorrhaging of red ink. Which is what makes them less funny.
The University System, however, will not fall to MOOCs.
There are real threats to higher ed that should be dealt with, not boogey men.
You've entirely forgotten about the bean counters, who love this idea. It's the bean counters even more than the politicians who will push something like this through.
The fact that it's working exceedingly well in the private education industry leads me to think that it will show up much more strongly in the public education industry in the next few years. It's another bubble that is going to once again severely hurt this economy.
What's your basis for thinking it won't happen?
There is a massive world of difference between those two things. There are colleges who will make the mistake of seeing MOOCs as their salvation. And they will fail. I will fight to keep it from happening at my college, but it isn't a threat to College.
It is a good scare tactic though, I'll give it that.
The bean counters could conceivably be a problem for some institutions. Last year, a hesitance on the part of President Sullivan to accept what the Board of Visitors saw as the inevitability of MOOCs was a heavy component in their decision to attempt to remove Sullivan from office. Notably, they ultimately failed, and board rector Helen Dragas will basically never be able to publicly show her face on campus again.
The moral of the story is this: a lot of very smart people recognize that there are huge and insurmountable flaws with MOOCs. A lot of political appointees are too stupid or too concerned with what a balance sheet might suggest to care. So far, the smart people are winning.
UVA is a high prestige university and is ranked 36th overall in Political Science and 14th for the specific department they're running. So saying "some public school in Virginia" isn't quite accurate. UVA is not VCU (though VCU is by no means a bad school) it does not have the reputation that UVA has.
Edit: I do agree however, that the general quality of intellectuals is a lot more spread out than people give credit for. Harvard et al are prestigious positions but oftentimes people who accept positions will do so because they value other things over that Prestige. Sometimes that, in and of itself, leads to prestige (like say NYU/Columbia which likely benefit greatly from people wanting to live in NYC/Manhattan). Sometimes it doesn't but I do know of people who have chosen to work in Montana rather than take positions at top 20 schools.
We always need instructors because we always need the ability to have questions answered in parsimonious manners. Because while you can give a lecture to 40,000 people you cannot teach a class of 40,000 people. In addition, theoretically, we need instructors else we never find out which methods and ideas are most valuable.
If only Harvard's econ 101 course is taught students who get to Graduate School to become professors have only learned Harvard's version of 101. While I don't particularly endorse heterodox economics I am not willing (given my views on 101 courses) to endorse any current offering as "the one true way"
What's the difference between a private and for-profit education?
Also, what specifically does MOOC stand for?
A private college is simply a college not run by the state. Harvard is a private college, University of Florida is a public one.
A For Profit college is what we used to call a diploma mill. Your ITT Tech, Full Sail, Rasmussen and the like.
I'm not gonna lie, my brain is having a hard time parsing how elitist and jerkwaddy this guy is coming off as. Like really.
Current Playthroughs: Neverwinter Closed Beta|Let's Build! Sim City
I mean, if I am a salesperson and i get asked how long something would take, wouldn't my best response be to ask the person responsible for doing it? Sure its my job to know that when its asked but that just means that, as a salesperson, its my job to ask the engineers before i make my pitch
I think that whole piece was actually written as an excuse to get the "football programs versus AP computer programming courses" jab in.
What a fucking waste of internets.
Apparently this guy's company does its production and development in India...so I guess the message is "know some coding, but don't try being an actual coder and wanting to paid for it".
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we got booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had some sort of bureau that collected statistics about the cost of labor to verify that this is indeed happening?
Oh? We do?
And wages are stagnant in non-supervisory, non-farm skilled production jobs in the United States of America, relative to inflation, having only increased about a tenth of a percentage point over the last year?
So Kirk McDonald is a cock-slurping fuckwit?
Well that's too bad, then.
Isn't Harvard an insanely wealthy institution that mills out diplomas to rich folks? I mean, is there any chance that someone from the Bush or Kennedy families would get kicked out of an ivy league school?
Admittedly, I think public schools are just taxpayer funded diploma mills with more recruitment restrictions. At the end of the day, a degree is just a piece of paper. And these days, it's much less valuable because the pool of people who have one has been pushed so much by the government.
In fact, a lot of job postings I see don't require a degree at all, but are obviously just using one as a way to weed out the less fortunate.
I don't think you know what a diploma mill is.
Or how higher education works.
A diploma mill is a school that gives basically nothing back to the students and churns out diploma after shitty diploma. These degrees are jokes and do nothing but prey on people trying to better themselves. This is your for-profit education industry. It is terrible and despicable and if I could press a button and wipe them from history I would do so.
Colleges are not "diploma mills" in general. You have bad schools and good schools, sure, but your diploma is not, at the end of the day, "just" a piece of paper.