I also heard Bowen speak on _The Shape of the River_ several years ago, and thought that sounded like good and important work (and I didn’t know about his role in funding JSTOR, but yes, that’s a huge contribution to the scholarly enterprise).

I haven’t read the Stanford lectures yet (though I will), but it seems to me that in the passage above Bowen is confusing development of a workable course platform, which probably will happen in a number of places, but eventually settle down to a limited number of possibilities (much in the way computer software and/or operating systems have), and development and running of a course, which is, of course, the labor-intensive part — and the part where skilled laborers dedicated to a particular institution and its students (or at least a particular set of students with some similarities in current educational status and needs) make a real difference.

By the way, on that subject, Noliwe Rooks had some useful things to say on yesterday’s “to the Point” discussion of MOOCs (yes, yet another one; I wouldn’t have listened if I hadn’t been in the car, but I’m glad I did): http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp121126college_reinvented_i . Basically, her point was that the students most likely to benefit from technologically-delivered and/or enhanced education are those who are already doing well, and are ready for greater enrichment (she didn’t put it this way, but I’d say those who have already learned how to learn). Students who are still struggling to get their academic feet under them benefit more from hands-on, bricks-and-mortar-based approaches. One of the other guests then, of course, brought up the idea of showing MOOC content to community college students in a flipped-classroom format, with class time taken up by teacher-student interaction. But at that point, the MOOC isn’t the class, it’s a multimedia textbook (which would be just fine, but not labor/cost-saving). And undoubtedly the most effective MOOC-based class of that sort would be one in which the actual teachers selected among, rearranged, repurposed, etc., MOOC content, and added some of their own exercises, adapted to their particular student population. In short, you need actual teachers, which is what Bates is getting at.