MOOCs: Deja vu all over again

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No one can have   possibly missed the rising popularity of what have come to be known as MOOCs: massive open online courses.  Popular, charismatic professors in big universities such as Harvard have videotaped their courses and put them online.  This process is aided by certain companies such as Coursera and Edx, which have seen the commercial potential for developing these online courses.

Some smaller colleges and universities have used these online courses as a part of their own curriculum, and found that when two similar sections of the same course had one of them use the videotaped lectures as part of their instruction system, the students in that section did better on tests.  All across the country, it appears that small colleges and universities are either paying for this service by the companies that market the videotaped lectures, or are looking into it.  The few who resist it, or in colleges that  buy into the MOOC concept wholesale, the few departments that don't play along are considered foolish holdouts.  See here for what happened at San Jose State University.

I don't like it.

As a professor in a small liberal arts college, I can see the writing on the wall.  First there was Big Farms, then Big Stores, then Big Milk, and Big Books.  Big Business is altogether too eager to jump on the bandwagon of putting small businesses out of business.  In almost every instance, when a big business takes over a pile of smaller businesses, at first quality goes up, and prices go down.  But over time, the quality inevitably goes down.  People lose control of the delivery of the product; the neighborhood farm, or bookstore, or general store, or college, or factory closes down.  The town closes down, everybody moves to the big cities, and the yuppies only feel a vague annoyance that something is wrong.

At the moment, moderately hardworking kids in small colleges are able to beat out their lazy buddies by paying attention and studying hard.  But these exciting videotapes from big Eastern colleges grab the attention of otherwise bored undergraduates, and at first, everyone succeeds.  Soon there will be a flood of graduates across the country with video college degrees, all indistinguishable from each other.  Thank goodness: one of these could even be your own no-goodnik junior, who tended to be easily bored no matter what the professor did!  There are some kids who do not get excited by anything; even if the teacher dances naked on the desk, it's all ho-hum to him.  But a videotaped lecture from an exciting new professor from Harvard might grab his attention.

As mediocrity across the nation rises, it supports mediocrity at every level, until all the little high-performing wrinkles are smoothed out, and we get a smooth sameness, and it is very, very hard to create a local bubble of superior achievement in the face of determined Big Business.  This is the genius of free enterprise: to exploit an idea until it smothers slightly different ideas that might appeal to a minority of people.

It is a depressing thought, but that's the American Way, unless everybody resists it; but resisting that sort of progress is considered obstructionist.  Of course, if we look carefully, there are localities where local enterprise thrives in a small way.  It's important to impress on people that success is good; it isn't absolutely necessary to be a huge success.  Until that message reaches every little kid, it's going to be the dream of every go-getter business major to exploit every new trend right into the ground.  If you thought that American college kids come out looking mass-produced, you ain't seen nothing yet.

[Added later:]

These most recent two posts could be all very confusing to those outside academic circles, even very well-educated people: what is the bottom line here?  How do we advise the kids, when the issues are so badly muddied?  We need an executive summary now, you're thinking, like you never did before!

To be absolutely clear: educational institutions do at least two things:
(1) they put a lot of material in front of the youngster (or oldster; whatever--) which has typically been difficult to get for himself.  Now that is changing; this stuff is becoming available on the Internet, in an unmetered, unfiltered form.  But school, teachers and universities did supply you with information, ideas, skills and attitudes.

(2) They certified you at the end of it (provided you satisfied them that you knew enough of it).

As I said, the information is out there; in a sense it always was.  You could always get it in a library, if you looked hard enough.  The best schools help you assimilate the material, and measure it out in a graded way, so that you're ready for the new stuff once you've got a handle on the old.  Most schools really leave it up to the student; part of the training is to be able to get into the swing of taking charge of your own education.

Though the first phase (1) above is now loosening up, there are still controls on (2).  You hear horror stories of hucksters fabricating certificates for people; in the Wizard of Oz, the Wizard gives the scarecrow a Testimonial, a certificate of worthiness.  Today it's a little harder; good schools don't just hand out credentials, because their reputation depends on minimal quality control.  As the number of schools increase to the point where nobody knows which way is up, some schools may abandon the quality control entirely, and simply hand out diplomas if you pay the fees.  But we're not quite there yet.

But the main point is (3) that a person must educate him- or herself far beyond the level at which some institution will be sufficiently satisfied with them as to give them a diploma.  That's the minimum.  To live a happy life, you've got to fill in the gaps.  A good school will make you aware of the gaps, but there just isn't time to fill them all in four years.  Some schools have very eccentric educational agendas, and sometimes those work.  But the best schools of the past succeeded by carefully selecting their students, based on their estimate as to how much that kid could be depended upon to educate himself, regardless of what the school did.  The best schools attracted gifted professors (note that I didn't say "teachers"; at a good college, the students will normally not depend on fabulous teaching), whose ideas they can absorb over four years.  My school is lucky to have more than its fair share of these sort of illuminati; just hanging out with them is inspiring.  On a Friday, I would go to a bar with some of them, and I would learn so much, just shooting the breeze with them.  And I was a professor, with a Ph.D. and everything!  But that's the truth.  (These are not particularly special people.  They don't wear signs saying: come and hang out in bars with me.  And they're just as interesting to have lunch with, if I chose to do that.)

Despite how humdrum I may sound on this blog, I have been considered an excellent resource by my colleagues.  But my students sometimes look at me as if I were an idiot.  It is baffling what to do to engage the younger generation; perhaps this pseudo-TV approach is what it takes.  But at any rate, somehow the student must learn to keep learning.  The finding of the information (1), and the certification (2) are just the most obvious things that one has to get.  The training of the mind (3) is the hard part.

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