Now back to the lectures…

If you fail as a superprofessor, you can go back to your day job. As a similarly tenured professor, I probably have enough security to hold on and retire in twenty years before any transition is complete.

However, if you suceed as a superprofessor (and your continuing willingness to visit this blog convinces me that you will), you are betting other people’s livelihoods that admistrators the world over are willing to behave responsibly. That’s a huge bet to make with other people’s careers as the stakes.

I’m not saying that you should halt all MOOC activities right now, but I think you have a responsibility to your colleagues elsewhere and your colleagues yet-to-be to keep both eyes wide open.

I’m glad you’re back. Thanks again for listening to me and the rest of us in the peanut gallery here. I realize you have a lot to do with your time already.

I’m going to have to digest some of what you say (perhaps for a future post), but reading your comment does make me think of one point instantly: the nature of the administrations involved really matters a lot. As a native Princetonian (Not sure I ever mentioned it on this blog before, but Daniel T. Rodgers currently lives in the house where I grew up), I really am willing to believe that the people who run Princeton University have the best of intentions when it comes to MOOCs. They can afford to be benevolent. However, it’s pretty clear from those e-mails that the student newspaper broke that the people who run the University of Virginia don’t. If MOOCs ever make they way down to the tier of schools below that, their focus on costs will likely become so overwhelming as to be virtually exclusive.

Should we faculty agree to participate in a system that is designed to produce our own destruction? Isn’t this just like the chicken agreeing to cooperate with Colonel Sanders? Try to see this whole issue from the perspective of us chickens for a moment.

The first is a variation of a collective action problem: that what is good for one institution or one superprofessor is bad for the common good. More students pushed through, fewer professors doing it because MOOC’s give the illusion of finally solving the Baumol problem of the absence of scale economies in higher education. There are two sides to this. One argues that this will reduce costs and therefore enhance access (and tackle the high attrition rates by giving students more on-ramps back into higher education). The other, and this is Jonathan’s concern, is that this kind of mass production does to higher education what previous technical changes did to other production processes. Of course, what one side sees as pathological the other sees as a miracle solution. But they agree on the logic. The difference is not in the evidence or the formula; it’s what the norm should be.

Second, the question of brand-dilution. If Princeton gives out credits, will that dilute the brand? Who knows? But that’s not why Princeton doesn’t give out certificates. In fact, there is nothing magical about my employer’s rationale. The reason why Princeton does not give out credits and certificates as others do is because how could we possibly know that students had satisfactorily completed the requirements for a course without the kinds of assessments we apply to our in-house students (which is not scalable, I might add)? To do that would require investing resources into clarifying learning objectives, grading standards, and assessing work accordingly and in the spirit and with the same standards we use at Princeton. Doing anything less is called a simulacrum. Why bother?

Third, it may help to distinguish between universities’ commitment to professional knowledge or expertise vs universities’ commitment to social knowledge. Some MOOC’s aim at the former; some (like mine) at the latter. It would be a shame for us to over-generalize and slam down the potential of the latter in an effort to control the former. Rather than be anti-MOOC, I’d like to see us think more carefully about their social functions.

Finally, just a bit on my personal motivation for doing the course. It was not because I fantasized about massive numbers of students. What we know — and I have said this before here — that with massive enrollments come massive attrition. Many students enroll in a course and don’t realize that a university course is not the same as a series of TED talks. This is one of Jonathan’s points. So, anyone with celebrity fantasies should not profess. Rather, my motivation as a world historian was to experiment with a model of teaching that brought the world into the subject itself; to have Princeton students engage in conversations about the multi-perspectival nature of their subject. There is no single narrative of world history — and what better way to hear the polyphony than to have the world talk about what’s being taught. And if students in the rest of the world get something from the experience, if I can socialize some of the knowledge I work with with my Princeton students, that’s great — in my view.

Hope this helps elevate the debate!