Comments on: “The manager’s brain under the workman’s cap.”

By: So I signed up for another MOOC… « More or Less Bunk

So I signed up for another MOOC… « More or Less Bunk — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:56:13 +0000

[...] high school teachers or even worse. Despite Zelikow’s excellent intentions, this is how the debundling of the history professoriate [...]

By: Barbara Sullivan

Barbara Sullivan — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:17:18 +0000

Yes to what others have said above; we need to remind people that education is about more than information transmission and storage. Teachers are the people who most often change lives, and they do it in ways that no MOOC will ever be able to deliver, let alone assess. I just wrote a long post about it called “What is higher education?” if anyone is interested.

By: Mazel

Mazel — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:38:53 +0000

I guess I should add that this isn’t just about the future. It’s not just about MOOCs. The growth of pseudo-courses and pseudo-universities has already hurt enrollment-driven universities like mine significantly. Every student and FTE we lose to the pseudo-academy makes us that much more financially desperate, that much more willing to look at the ever-increasing number of inferior-but-cheaper, community-eroding alternatives. At my own humble institution, no one has gotten a raise in years and years, but we’re constantly being invited to supplement our stagnant base salaries by teaching online courses. One result is that the de facto courseload for our faculty has crept up from 4/4 to about 5/5. (As so often happens, technology increases rather than decreases workloads.) Among other things, this means less faculty time and energy to contribute to the enrichment of “student life,” which thus winds up more and more left in the hands of student-life staff who, lacking tenure, are more interested in organizing the Tunnel of Oppression than a protest against the racial segregation of the local charter schools or the fascist politics of an influential donor or anything else that might actually matter. (Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t happen at wealthy institutions, which will continue to offer real education to the children of the eliite long after the poor kids are all consigned to Virtual U.)

By: Mazel

Mazel — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:23:35 +0000

I’m maybe a little less inclined to see intentionality everywhere. Yes, some of the players understand exactly what they’re doing when it comes to disempowering faculty, and see that disempowerment as a feature rather than a bug. Others are genuinely idealistic (and yet others simply clueless about consequences). But it doesn’t matter a whole lot, because of the economic bias built into the system. Under the current neoliberal regime there’s a built-in ratchet effect which ensures that, out of the tremendous variety of techno-pedagogical experiments currently underway, the only ones that will get any real traction are the ones that serve the bottom line–not the ones that allow us to teach better, only the ones that allow us to teach more cheaply.

Of course, no one will want to admit that the quality of education is declining, and I suspect that the main way this decline will be masked is by means of the reductive rhetoric of “learning outcomes” and the like. Once you reduce the fullness of the college experience to a discrete set of bullet points that can be “objectively measured” by the Academic Profile or some other bubble test or simplistic rubric, then it becomes easy to say that MOOCs or online programs or whatever are “just as good as” F2F. The reduction of “education” to “the measured attainment of SLOs” has the effect of erasing any consciousness of such holistic notions as the university as a community of people who are not just “mastering SLOs” but interacting in ways that engage the full spectrum of human emotions–developing friendships, falling in and out of love, partying together, working on the school paper together, whatever–and that contribute to the building of a better world–all of which are necessary to education in the fullest sense of the term (rather than the viciously cramped sense of the neoliberal/DIY crowd).

By: VanessaVaile

VanessaVaile — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:13:11 +0000

Afterthoughts: There has been less ripple from the Palo Alto Conference than might have been expected. A few connectivist mooc-ers (also prolific bloggers) were invited, mentioned attending beforehand (referring to it as a summit), but nothing after. There was something unnerving about (Stanford) Venture Lab’s DNLE (Designng New Learning Environments) mooc, far more than the usual xmodel. I still can’t quite put my finger on what but it may have the hordes of real and borderline educators as glassy eyed wannabe venture capitalist bait competing for recognition by the Stanford brand name.

By: VanessaVaile

VanessaVaile — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 03:22:11 +0000

debundling, Taylorization