1. We need more nuance on “costs”. For Mazel, I would not fixate so much on Thrun because advocates, especially in retail, have to simplify to sell. But be careful about how you measure costs and value. Here’s a thoughtful piece on the subject:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/17/AR2010121705587.html

2. Scale. Consider data. Since I am, like Jonathan, a resident of a reality-based world, I check against what we know. It’s well worth reading Bill Bowen’s recent Tanner Lectures (Oct 2012). Scalability depends on what you are trying to optimize! You might find helpful, Jim:

http://events.stanford.edu/events/333/33327/

“Thrun said he gave up tenure at Stanford because he believed traditional
higher education was unable to meet the need for low-cost, universal
access to higher education.”

Well, maybe his perceptions were a little skewed. Consider:

Stanford tuition: $41,250
Adams State University tuition: $3,816

Sure, ASU is a step or two above open access, so we’re not quite providing “universal access,” but still, if the goal is to provide “low-cost, universal access to higher education,” then we’re coming reasonably close. We’re offering real, face-to-face courses (average student-to-faculty ratio of 17:1) instead of low-quality digital knockoffs. Many of those courses are quite lively and innovative and use active learning, project-based learning, etc. Students here are building robots, editing Wikipedia pages up to “featured article” status, you name it. It really pisses me off when people like Thrun say that traditional models cannot provide low-cost higher education. I think he says such things because, when it comes to the big wide world of higher education, at least beyond the elite precincts in which he’s been operating, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The fact that he teaches computer science at Stanford doesn’t make him an expert in higher education. It just makes him someone who will be listened to by thoughtless journalists and starry-eyed ed-tech investors, no matter what kind of nonsense he says.

More from Thrun (again via the CHE):

“Having done this [taught a MOOC], I can’t teach at Stanford again…. I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

So, he had a class of 20 students–20 extremely smart students paying a godawful amount of tuition–and he’s effing LECTURING them? Is that what you get at Stanford for your $41,000? Jesus.

The problem with MOOCs is the M: most of the techniques we have for teaching don’t scale. Once you get above, say, 200 students in a class pretty much all you can do is talk at them. You get to provide individual feedback to the handful of students who succeed in obtruding themselves on your attention. Above 500, it starts to get difficult to coordinate the TAs. I suppose that a MOOC with a set of (necessarily) uncoordinated TAs wouldn’t be much worse than a 500 student traditional lecture class with a set of barely coordinated TAs. But there’s few courses, even in R1s, we’re willing to teach as 500 student classes.