Considering how much you disagree with me I’m touched that you’re still reading.

– Intellectual Property policy. If the university wants to continue making money offering a course you’ve developed, will it have to keep you on the payroll, or can it fire you and hand your course off to a drone?

– Credit for Prior Learning policy. This and similar policies, e.g., transfer credit and test-out policies, will determine how, if at all, students at your institution can get credit for things like MOOCs.

– Student Learning Outcomes (and how they’re assessed). The supposed equivalence of a MOOC to a real course will largely be justified using SLOs as the criteria. Of course, such justification is bogus; it’s a logical error (reductive fallacy) to say that the full range of pedagogical benefits a student gets from a course can be reduced to a list of a half dozen bullet points. Just because two courses do an equallly good job of “addressing” a set of SLOs does not mean they’re equally good courses; you can scale it down, but you can’t necessarily scale it back up. Unfortunately, this kind of reductive thinking is the very lifeblood of the “accountability” and “assessment” mania plaguing higher ed. (Ditto for K-12 “education reform.”)

So, are things happening in your courses that aren’t happening, or better yet, CAN’T happen in a MOOC? Then find a way to articulate those things in higher-ed bureaucratese and get them listed on the departmental or institutional syllabus as student learning outcomes. If things at your institution work anything like they do at mine, what’s likely to happen is something like this: sooner or later, someone will ask an advisor if they can get credit for a MOOC. The adviser will phone the Records Office and ask the transfer coordinator, who will kick it to a department chair, who will say, “Wait a minute, let me look at the institutional syllabus…. Nope, no can do. This course requires that students ‘demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively to describe a historical controversy and convey that knowledge to the public.’ In our classes, students do this by presenting their work in poster sessions during Student Scholar Days, but the MOOC doesn’t require students to do anything remotely like that. So, sorry. If the MOOC doesn’t address the SLOs, we just can’t award credit for it.”

There are all kinds of pedagogically wonderful activities that can be done F2F (or even in an online class of a dozen or two students) that are impossible to do in a MOOC. We need to get those things embedded into our courses and policies in all the places where the bureaucracy can see them, planting them in all the right places for the MOOCsters to trip over them later.

I’ll add that the language “Professor Smith’s course” can be problematic, too. I’ve worked with departments on curriculum redesign efforts which were impeded by professors who thought of their courses as “theirs”… and couldn’t think deeply about how “their” courses fit within, say, an undergraduate major experience. Our students don’t experience the courses they take in isolation, and so it’s important to think of how they fit together. Courses, on some level, “belong” to the curriculum.