I really don’t think the proponents of MOOCs as substitutes for traditional college classes, despite the fact that some of them hold Ph.D.s and really ought to know better (and despite their giving lip service to the value of hands-on work by both teachers and students) understand that education is far more than information transfer. Especially at a time when knowledge in many fields is changing rapidly, developing skills has to be at least as important a goal, and choosing materials and designing and updating assignments, activities, exercises etc. that will develop those skills one of the professor’s core tasks. One could, indeed, use MOOC lectures as part of the mix, but the labor-intensive part is still best done locally (and, if it were done at the MOOC level, would need to be updated quarterly/semesterly, which would considerably increase the workload of the MOOC-creators).

Nor have I seen (still) a satisfactory explanation of how a set of MOOC lectures is different, except in method of information from a textbook (or any book). Koller seems to assume that college professors don’t regularly teach outside their areas of expertise. That’s simply wrong; we often do so, by doing just what she imagines with MOOCs, but with books: choosing work on the subject produced by people who have spent more time on the subject, and learning ahead of, and alongside, our students. A teacher who knows what (s)he is doing will conduct such a class differently than one in which (s)he is a subject-matter expert, being upfront about what (s)he does and doesn’t know, and making the class an opportunity to model for students how to approach an unfamiliar subject. The one thing (s)he won’t do is pick a textbook (or a MOOC) and just follow it through, step by step, assigning chapters, exercises, etc., verbatim. Such an approach would, indeed, be glorified TAing (and not very good TAing at that). Anything more — i.e. the process of making the course the professor’s own through making innovative, individualized use of the materials in the book, or the MOOC — will make for a much better course, but will also erase the supposed productivity gains from MOOCs.

But real education involves creating new curricula, questioning old knowledge, rethinking, trying out ideas. And those things require not babysitters, but engaged minds with a lot of knowledge and a variety of experiences.