Massive open online courses have been trumpeted as
the death-knell of liberal education, eliciting elegiac murmurs from those who
like liberal education, or think they like it, and generating euphoric shouts
from those who do not like liberal education, or think they do not like it. I
see things differently. For me, MOOCs are but the academic manifestation of Web
2.0. Remember that the standard model of online education came in during the
late 1990s and was very much Web 1.0: platforms like Blackboard were static,
hierarchical and only interactive insofar as their clear model, the USENET
groups of the early 1990s and the listservs of a few years later, were
interactive. MOOCs as a platform are attempts for the online modality to catch
up with how multimedia our classroom are--rare is the class in which I do not
show a video or at least check a fact on the Internet--and indeed how
multimedia our research is. When I am researching a topic these days, I am as
likely to look at YouTube or Netflix as JSTOR or Project Muse, and that is true
even if say I am researching the fifth century AD. There are so many resources
out there that are relevant to any given topic.
Furthermore, the 'massive' in MOOCs is a clear
reflection of the impact of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter.
Platforms like Blackboard centered around small classes and direct
instructor-to-student contact, assuming that would foster immediacy and
engagement. On social media, though, one can have thousands of friends of
followers without limiting engagement, indeed the larger one's train of online
interactants, the more effective one's clout (or Klout). The importance placed
on delivering the message and responding to those who are interested in it,
rather than fostering a designated community of pre-culled individuals,
constitutes a sense of the identity and ontology of the learner, which MOOCs
have in common with social media. In other words, it is not a small size that
guarantees a community but an atmosphere of active participation and solicitation
of intellectual involvement.
Much like social media--where the people with the
most friends or followers are already-established celebrity, and those who have
had their reputation emerge organically form the medium itself may have
substantial but in aggregate terms far smaller followings--there is no
structural autonomy in MOOCs, the canonicity of the topics and teachers spill
over from the anterior world. Much like an All-Star game in sports, MOOCs
attempt to leverage the fame already attained by their participants within a
practice to a far larger group of people in different places and contexts and
attempt to make them interested in their allure. MOOCs will be a threat to the
way academia has traditionally operated when they do not just utilize star
professors but generate them. As it is now, the stars teaching in MOOCs were
all generated the conventional way--through doctoral training, on-site
classroom observation, journal and/or book publication, and peer review.
It is as if Latin America were not a place where
baseball players were found but where they went to play for lucrative rewards
once they had become famous. Indeed, MOOC professors are the David Beckhams of
their 'game', in that what people are experiencing is not just their skill at
their craft--which his undoubted--but the aura of fame, the social capital,
they have already accumulated in their 'home', To take an example of what I
mean, when cinema started around the turn of the last century the people who
did it, the people who starred in the movies, were new, one did not just have
theatrical performers transfer over, new people became famous and more
importantly there were new ways to become famous that the movies provided. When
MOOCs generate rather than channel celebrity, they will have achieved
structural autonomy as a platform.
Moreover, the institutions sponsoring MOOCs are
established brands, category leaders, who are providing MOOCs for free more or
less as ways of extending the brand. The admissions elitism, the social capital
which came from high selectivity--in other words from keeping as many people
out as possible--seems to be less of a priority than garnering publicity and
fostering brand awareness. One can posit that elite universities have gotten
all they can out of exclusivity and are turning the wheel to inclusivity, and
even if one posits this in a dark, Adornian way as a cynical admission that all
the hegemony that can be reaped from the exclusivity has been, that the allure
of high-stakes admissions is now played out (something gestured at laterally by
articles such as this one) context. In a way this makes good business
sense Apple or Microsoft did not become category leaders by only letting a
few exclusive customers buy their products after a rigorous vetting process. In
a way it is a response to globalization, as so many of the applicants to
high-prestige US universities are now from abroad. In another way, MOOCs can be
seen as a way of justifying the expense of college tuition to stakeholders such
as parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents of traditional-age undergraduates, that
what the younger members of their family is getting is good and worth the
expense. On a higher level, MOOCs are kind of an answer to the culture wars' of
the 1990s, or perhaps a symptom of their unexpectedly benign resolution, as
much of the attacks on 'political correctness' and so on in that era came or
were addressed to parents who were baffled by trends in contemporary humanities
academia; perhaps MOOCs might bridge the gap and make these stakeholders feel
more included in the approaches and methodologies at play in the contemporary
humanities classroom.
There seems to me a clear age gap between the
students in practically oriented MOOCs, who I see as 'young' adult learners, in
their late 20s or so, whereas the students in humanistic MOOCs (and this is a
totally anecdotal sample, based on the people I know personally who have
mentioned enrolling in MOOCs to me) tend to be older, people in middle age or
after, busy, working people too distracted to study full-time but who
nonetheless desire intellectual illumination. When people in their late 20s are
interested in this sort of thing, they will (again anecdotally) be likelier to
watch/listen to YouTube videos or TED talks, material they can digest on the go
and not necessarily have to interact with. Older adults on the other hand,
further removed from literally being in school, might want some
interaction, a feeling, however remote and indirect, of engaging with a
professor of the knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and wise sort they remember from
their youth. In addition, MOOCs do offer some sort of institutional apparatus
or connection, whereas TED talks do not come directly from a university. Indeed,
MOOCs and TED talks both flank, but in neither case directly embody, the Open Badges movement which allows credentialing of expertise without any sort of
affiliation with an existing educational institution, no investment in storied
tradition or category-leader prestige. MOOCs have this residual aspect, and
this accounts both for their heft and their ability to make news, but also lead
to questions as to whether, in an educational era that will inevitably be less
elitist and more democratic, they will in their present mode have staying
power. A third vector here is the Yale YouTube videos, which give lectures from
actual classes again without any interaction. In my (again, personal and
anecdotal) experience these are largely watched by other professors, interested
to see in what their distinguished colleagues are up to in the classroom.
Thus I see MOOCs as not an apocalyptic but a
transitional phenomenon, whose thrust is less to indicate that traditional
liberal education is being put out of business but that the expertise and
allure the traditional model has fostered now is considered worthy of export
beyond the traditional (in both age and ‘space;) populations it has served. As we have known as far back as Newman's
Idea of a University" whuch as fate would have it I am teaching today) the theoretical and the functional interplay in the coalescence of a liberal-arts ethos, and though the modality may change in this century, the underlying pertinence of the model will not. I suspect the specific configuration of MOOCs will change, and the name itself may not be used, but the phenomenon will certainly have impact. Until and unless online-only education can produce, can generate, stars, though, I think the traditional academic platform will still have the pride of place.
Idea of a University" whuch as fate would have it I am teaching today) the theoretical and the functional interplay in the coalescence of a liberal-arts ethos, and though the modality may change in this century, the underlying pertinence of the model will not. I suspect the specific configuration of MOOCs will change, and the name itself may not be used, but the phenomenon will certainly have impact. Until and unless online-only education can produce, can generate, stars, though, I think the traditional academic platform will still have the pride of place.