Dear Superprofessors: This is how a labor market works…

I know I’m late to the party on this, but that letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department really is quite wonderful. I’m going to try to take up its implications with respect to academic freedom and shared governance over at the Academe blog as soon as I get my grading done, but what I want to discuss here is the way that those nice folks in California actually called out Sandel, not just their administrators.

You can see this most clearly at the very end of the letter:

“We respect your desire to expand opportunities for higher education to audiences that do not now have the chance to interact with new ideas. We are very cognizant of your long and distinguished record of scholarship and teaching in the areas of political philosophy and ethics. It is in a spirit of respect and collegiality that we are urging you, and all professors involved with the sale and promotion of edX-style courses, not to take away from students in public universities the opportunity for an education beyond mere jobs training. Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Sandel, to his credit, responds the way faculty everywhere would hope he would:

“The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.”

The question then becomes what happens when the rubber meets the road. I’ve observed a common attitude among superprofessors that they’re unquestionably providing a service for humanity by taping their lectures. I think it seeps down from the propaganda of the MOOC providers. For example, there’s a prime specimen of this in today’s Washington Post:

To be clear, Lander himself does not suggest that his videos should replace what biology faculty do from day to day. But MOOCs such as his might offer some professors elsewhere a chance to spend less time preparing and delivering lectures and more time working hands-on with students.

“Everything in education should be about the value that can be added by having the real teacher there,” Lander said in an interview. “The mistake is the idea that this [MOOC] replaces the teacher. That’s crazy.”

Yes, but your MOOC empowers crazy people. As the SJSU Philosophy Department niftily explains in that letter:

“Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.”

So, Michael Sandel and other superprofessors, what exactly are you going to do about this? Are you going to stall and make believe that budgetary austerity does not exist anywhere in academia or are you going to stand on the side of the other members of your discipline and your profession? If the folks at SJSU are too distant for you, how about your own graduate students? Are you going to make them compete against your own taped lectures for teaching work long after you’re retired or dead?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Like automating your wedding or the birth of your first child.

The best line in that “Grading the MOOC University” piece that came out in the Times over the weekend was obviously the part about the superprofessor being:

“out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.”

That line was also the most obvious.  Nobody had to take eleven MOOCs to figure that out as the entire point of MOOCs is to automate the educational process enough so that student/professor interaction becomes unnecessary. That’s an inevitable consequence of the number of students involved.

That’s why I find it so puzzling that the person who has famously stated that any professor who can be replaced by a computer screen should be wants to be a superprofessor. It’s as if Cathy Davidson wants to be replaced by a computer screen herself.

But, of course, her MOOC is going to be different.  ”Personally,” Davidson writes:

“I’m skeptical of many MOOCs as they are structured now.  This is precisely why I am planning to teach one.”

I’ll bet that’s what the people running the first UK MOOC said to themselves before they started.  From the write-up in the Times of London:

“In contrast to the set up of many programs offered via Coursera, the developers of Edinbugh’s e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers.

The decision proved unpopular with some students…as they had been expecting to see professors imparting knowledge as they would in a lecture theatre.”

As I’ve explained before, a class is not a commune.  Professorial authority is the glue that holds the whole educational enterprise together. Even if you manage to set up the perfect online learning community, students can only teach other students so much. And a college course that amounts to reading texts on the greater WWW and participating in a few discussions on gigantic message boards is destined to be extremely unsatisfying. Watching videotaped lectures would actually be an improvement.

So Cathy Davidson is already taping lectures for her MOOC that will probably land next year.*  She writes:

“And it is hard to imagine that, if you are fortunate enough in every way to attend a face to face university with real profs who listen to your ideas and respond to them passionately and personally, and who include you in their research and who help you on their way into a complicated world using all the best ideas and best methodologies and best tools and best theories available, that you would ever want to give up all that astonishing privileged luxury to take a class online with 160,000 others (even if 90% of them drop out during the term).  If your profs are able to offer the full range of classes you wish to take, if they have kept current in their field, if they use exciting new methods and respect your own ability to learn and contribute in new ways, then they are doing a great job and you are spending your money well. Why would you want to take a MOOC in that case?”

Why indeed?  But why on earth should you ever settle for anything less?  

Instead, superprofessors like Davidson are settling for you. In the name of increasing access to higher education, extremely well-meaning liberals are cooperating in destroying its quality. They’re sending a signal to the people who make higher education budgetary decisions that an automated education is henceforth and forever acceptable. You want to fight permanent austerity? Tough luck. Davidson has already raised the white flag of surrender on your behalf. ["If I had a magic wand...," she repeats like a mantra, thereby implying that real change is impossible almost by definition.] She’s also raised the white flag on behalf of most of the world’s potential college students for generations to come.

Education is supposed to be an exceedingly personal enterprise.  This is why forcing students into MOOCs as a last resort is like automating your wedding or the birth of your first child.  You’re taking something that ought to depend upon the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and turning it into mass-produced, impersonal, disposable schlock.

I’ve read Now You See It, Now You Don’t. Therefore, I know that Davidson is a great teacher. However, given a choice between a Cathy Davidson who’s about as accessible as the pope or Thomas Pynchon and the vast majority of the dedicated people working adjunct jobs in academia (who could get a significant raise and still be cheaper than a wrap-around contract with Coursera), I’d take the adjuncts any day of the week.

And yes, I understand that people in underdeveloped countries need higher education too. However, privatizing our system of higher education so that we can export the mere essence of instruction is a favor to nobody. Everybody else on the planet deserves personal relationships with their professors just like American students do.

Maybe Coursera could start a MOOC about organizing the global proletariat in order to demand better educational choices than MOOCs.  I know that I’d finish that one.

*  Davidson’s post says Spring of 2013, but I think that’s a typo.

“They mean to win Wimbledon!”

Since this blog is getting kind of popular, I think it’s time for me to scare off as many readers as possible with an extended Monty Python analogy. And rather than go for a scene from a movie that almost everybody’s seen like “Life of Brian” or “Holy Grail,” I’m going to discuss a skit from the Flying Circus that only diehard fans like me can remember (since it comes from the season after John Cleese left the show), let alone quote without watching the whole thing again.

Here’s the video:

And part II:

And part III:

If you want the short version: Giant blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the Galaxy of Andromeda are turning Englishmen into Scotsmen. Why? Because Scotsmen are the worst tennis players in the entire world. When the blancmanges are discovered practicing on tennis courts throughout the country, the Graham Chapman scientist character logically concludes in a very alarmed voice, “They mean to win Wimbledon!”

This is a long way of saying that I thought of that line on Friday morning when I read a similarly absurd but obvious conclusion in the IHE article about Amherst College rejecting MOOCs:

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’” [Adam] Sitze [Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought] said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Gee, ya think? The Amherst faculty are like that plucky Scotsman, Angus Podgorny, fighting off the scourge of the alien blancmanges at Wimbledon before they get a chance to eat us all.

But I also have a more serious point to make here that’s a little less obvious. The blancmanges could only win Wimbledon once all the real competition had disappeared (either by being eaten or being turned into Scotsmen). Similarly, I think Amherst’s liberal arts college model is a threat to the MOOCification taking hold nearly everywhere else in academia.

In order to take over, MOOCs have to worm there way into places where they might not obviously belong. That requires something that has come to be called wrap-around. [Kind of reminds me of a boa constrictor, now that I think of it.] As Michael Feldstein recently wrote:

I was able to ask edX’s Howard Lurie about whether the course design for the blended classes in the SJSU project will be the same as the fully online one. He acknowledged that there would have to be a variant. We’re going to see more of that. To the degree that MOOCs are going to used in this way, they need to (1) have the curricular wrap-around that scaffolds the classroom use, and (2) be designed to be modular so that faculty using them in their own classrooms can customize them to the local needs of their students. In other words, we need to be able to draw different and more flexible lines between where the course-as-artifact ends and human-directed course experience begins.

In one way, this would be a pretty good future. MOOCs as textbooks would restrict MOOCs to the role of tools and professors couldn’t possibly replaced by tools, but what if we don’t need MOOCs at all? Why should we blow up the entire concept of courses [Feldstein calls the concept of the course an "artifact."] just to facilitate a technology that plenty of professors don’t want and won’t use? Indeed, if we’re going to go ahead and question everything, then the need for professors at all would inevitably find its way onto the table.

This seems to be what bothered the faculty at Amherst most. From that IHE article again:

Some Amherst faculty concerns about edX were specific to Amherst. For instance, faculty asked, are MOOCs, which enroll tens of thousands of students, compatible with Amherst’s mission to provide education in a “purposefully small residential community” and “through close colloquy?”

Yes, there’s a reason tuition at Amherst is so expensive. An Amherst education is labor-intensive because faculty there are primarily concerned with educational quality rather than price. Yet partnering with edX has the potential to make Amherst even more expensive! That makes as much sense as blancmanges playing tennis.

For people without access to higher education, the ability to enroll in MOOCs is certainly better than no higher education at all. If you’re already in college, then the question becomes whether the cost saving that MOOCs might offer can offset the inevitable decline in quality. [Claiming there's no decline in quality is just a way to justify the unjustifiable.] Amherst students who have the qualifications and the means to attend that school have little to gain from MOOCs.

MOOC providers are in a different position entirely. If they want to convince the public that their education is not just sufficient, but somehow superior to face-to-face instruction, liberal arts colleges become a nagging reminder to everyone who cares about such things of the road not taken. In other words, they can never win Wimbledon as long as this kind of competitive counterexample remains MOOC-free.

Will the last non-super professor in academia please turn out the lights when they leave?

In 1892, William Weihe, the former President of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union, testified before Congress that his union:

“never objects to [technological] improvements and makes allowances in every particular where there are improvements…[W]henever there is an improvement made by which certain men will be done away with, then their jobs will be done away with. There is no objection.”

By 1909, his union had effectively disappeared, relegated to a couple of small specialty mills in Ohio.

I realize that I’ve been kind of shrill lately, but this kind of complacency just scares me to death. Yes, skilled iron and steel workers faced a particularly steep hill to climb during the late-nineteenth century because mechanized steel production was a huge improvement over hand puddling, but the question in education is not whether MOOCs and online education are superior to face-to-face instruction. [When Harvard and Princeton start giving actual credit at Harvard and Princeton for their MOOCs, then maybe we can begin to question that assumption.] The question is whether MOOCs and online education are sufficient to serve as substitutes for the face-to-face instruction that so many of us provide.

It’s easy to guess how I’d answer that question, but imagine you’re a college student who’s been convinced that all he or she needs is a degree rather than an education in order to make it in life. Which path are you going to choose?

What faculty need to understand is that a lot of other players in this discussion, particularly the ones who don’t actually teach for a living, are using similar criteria. In other words, they couldn’t care less whether the future of higher education actually teaches students anything or not. Some of these people are interested primarily in efficiency and improved test scores. Some of them are interested in their bottom lines. Some of these people just hate universities.

For purposes of the primary audience for this blog, it is also worth noting that precious few participants in this discussion have any interest in the economic situation facing college professors, adjunct and tenure-track alike. Much to my continued alarm, the people ignoring our economic concerns includes an incredibly high number of actual college professors. They seem to think it is not their place to object to “improvements,” and are willing to make allowances for any such changes even if they work against their own self-interest.

Perhaps if more of us actually understood that there’s a target on all our backs, this shocking degree of complacency will finally change.

Half the professoriate will kill the other half for free.

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

– Attributed to American financier Jay Gould, 1886.

One of the really awesome things about being an academic is that we all share information with each other about how to do our jobs better. Some call it mentoring. Some call it the scholarship of teaching and learning. I like to think of it as the natural side effect of not working with a bunch of assholes.

Cathy Davidson tries to do this all the time over at the HASTAC blog, including online peer review of the peer-grading assignment for what would be her first MOOC. Now, I’ve already explained my attitude toward peer-grading elsewhere so I won’t pick on her again here. Besides, what I find more interesting about this post is how she hints at the Coursera superprofessor selection process. Davidson begins the post with, “I’m a finalist for teaching a Coursera MOOC next year on “The History and Future of Higher Education.” It continues later with, “If Coursera accepts the course, it will run next Spring.” This kind of competition among the “best of the best” must feel like trying to get into Yale for grad school all over again.

One of the very rude questions I keep asking about MOOCs is, “How much do superprofessors get paid?” If the ability to run your own Coursera MOOC is indeed a competition, the answer to that question is almost certainly zero. Superprofessors could still receive financial incentives from their home campuses in order to teach MOOCs, but try bargaining with a private employer when there’s a line of people waiting to get the same job. They’d have more in common with Walmart workers than they do with other professors.

If superprofessors really do work for free, why isn’t Coursera having recruitment problems? In a word: ego. Margaret Soltan has stated this flat out. For added evidence, there’s this is from yesterday’s NYT:

“I’m 70, and frankly, at my age, to reach more students in one course than I have in decades is astonishing, and I love it,” Dr. Nagy said.

That’s from an article about Harvard asking its alumni to serve as unpaid teaching assistants for an edX MOOC on the Ancient Greek Hero.

Who benefits when the professor and the teaching assistants all work for free? The MOOC provider, of course. It’s digital sharecropping at its exploitive best. Who suffers when everyone in higher education works for free? A new study offers a possible answer:

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.

His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.

The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”

But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.

In other words, while a few already well-paid superprofessors get their egos stroked conducting experiments that are doomed to fail, “second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges” risk closing because Coursera and its ilk have sent higher education price expectations through the floor and systematically devalued everybody else’s work. And they get to do all this while dispensing a produuct that they know is inferior! Jay Gould would be proud.

In the meantime, thanks for nothing, superprofessors. I may not work with a bunch of assholes on my campus, but MOOCmania is starting to look like a pretty good test of whether Academia in general has enough assholes in it in order to destroy itself.

At least there’s still time for most of them to see the error of their ways.

“You tell anyone and we’ll kill you.”

Many thanks to the Edububble guy for finding the above Saturday Night Live clip. It’s been at the back of mind ever since I started blogging about online education, but I couldn’t remember enough of the details to find it myself. Hit play and you’ll see that it’s about Winston University, “located just 35 miles west of Boulder, Colorado” (which would be on top of a large mountain). Winston University takes parents’ tuition money, splits it fifty-fifty with students and only requires them to come back on Visiting Day, April 12th. The school’s motto: “You tell anyone and we’ll kill you.”

This is the development that inspired that clip’s appearance on Edububble:

It’s official: Colleges can now award federal student aid based on measured “competencies,” not just credit hours.

In a letter sent to colleges on Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department told them they may apply to provide federal student aid to students enrolled in “competency-based” programs and spelled out a process for doing so.

One way to measure these “competencies?” MOOCs, of course. While I’m mostly in agreement with the Edububble critique here, what I do object to is the title for the post, “Ka-Ching! Professors Can Skip Class Too Now!” Like any of this was the faculty’s idea. With shared governance in the state it’s in these days, there’s no way that Winston University would ever share the take with whatever faculty that might show up on Visiting Day. Nowadays, they’d just offer all their fake classes online and get rid of Visiting Day entirely.

Of course, Winston University is just the logic extension of the corporatization of higher education. While money for nothing is every university president/aspiring CEO’s dream, faculty serve as a check on these kinds of abuses. As Katherine D. Harris writes about MOOCs at San Jose State:

Do we want students to simply get through our curriculum? Or do we want them to learn?

The more contact you have with your professor, the better that professor will be able to do their job, which is to make sure that everyone in that classroom is actually learning.

But what about people who don’t care whether they’re learning or not? Aren’t plenty of people taking MOOCs because they just want access to information? Yes they are, but are their narrow interests worth letting greedy administrators destroy higher education entirely? Stephen Downes (no friend of this blog) seems perfectly content to let them do this in the short term:

MOOC success, in other words, is not individual success. We each have our own motivations for participating in a MOOC, and our own rewards, which may be more or less satisfied. But MOOC success emerges as a consequence of individual experiences. It is not a combination or a sum of those experiences – taking a poll won’t tell us about them – but rather a result of how those experiences combined or meshed together.

This may not reflect what institutional funders want to hear. But my thinking and hope is that over th long term MOOCs will be self-sustaining, able to draw participants who can see the value of a MOOC for what it is, without needing to support narrow and specific commercial or personal learning objectives.

This is what we call in American football “moving the goalposts.” If the idea of universal college education doesn’t work for everyone, then claim that that wasn’t the original goal. Or maybe that wasn’t Downes’ original goal, but there are still plenty of universities all around the world who are chomping at the bit to treat “competencies” gained through MOOCs as the exact same thing as having attended college because they are desperate to shed faculty labor costs (even though the faculty they want to shed are what make a college education valuable in the first place). Turning a blind eye to this tragedy, the MOOC Suicide Squad prefers living in a dreamworld in which students can all teach themselves everything that they need to know (and grade each other too!).

As a parent with a daughter in college right now, I can assure you that the vast majority of us will not pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to have their children’s “competencies” tested, nor will employers hire “graduates” whose sole means of demonstrating those supposed skills is a standardized test or a MOOC completion certificate, even if it’s from Harvard lite. At least the people who ran Winston University were smart enough to keep their scam secret. This scam is going to be run in front of everyone, students and parents alike, because MOOC enthusiasts have no sense of shame.

Adopt a superprofessor today!

Are superprofessors (i.e. the people who run MOOCs) enemies of justice in academia for faculty at all levels? You might think so by reading the results of this Chronicle of Higher Education survey of superprofessors in all disciplines:

Many of those surveyed felt that these free online courses should be integrated into the traditional system of credit and degrees. Two-thirds believe MOOCs will drive down the cost of earning a degree from their home institutions, and an overwhelming majority believe that the free online courses will make college less expensive in general.

And those savings will come from where exactly? Or then there’s this:

A number of the professors in the survey said they hoped to use MOOCs to increase their visibility, both among colleagues within their discipline (39 percent) and with the media and the general public (34 percent).

This opportunity was not lost on Mr. Sedgewick, the Princeton professor. “Every single faculty member has the opportunity to extend their reach by one or two or three orders of magnitude,” he said.

And at who’s expense will your visibility and reach improve?

I could go on for pages fisking this thing, but I won’t because I want to get to my action plan before I have to start teaching today. I propose a superprofessor education project. Everyone reading this should pick a superprofessor in their discipline and start e-mailing them immediately, explaining the employment situation at their home institutions and why they’re afraid that the widescale acceptance of MOOCs might leave them or other colleagues at their home institutions jobless.

Trust me, I’ve got two historians covered already, but I figure the more the merrier! After all, if, as the Chronicle suggests, 79% of superprofessors surveyed really do think MOOCs are worth the hype, then it’s time for the MOOC backlash to generate some grassroots hype of its own.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting any kind of harassment here. It just strikes me that an awful lot of people running MOOCs or who will be running MOOCs or who are considering running MOOCs need to learn a few things about how these courses are already playing out in the real world. This kind of reasoned dialogue can only help us all.

Sweet dreams, professor. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

I’ve already missed the boat on that proposed California MOOC legislation. Nevertheless, I still wanted to talk about this related quote from Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, which I find absolutely amazing:

“If you think about your favorite teacher you had back in college and the conversations you had with him or her, there’s just no way to replace that with a computer,” Ng said. “But you need to figure out the economics and the logistics to hire more teachers to deliver those sorts of amazing interactions.”

That’s like an arms dealer telling us that war is wrong, but his conscience is clear because all the weapons he sells only get used for self-defense. Seriously, the guy’s entire business model is predicated on permanent austerity. How then can we possibly take him seriously when he claims to lament that situation?

If you’re at all informed about the MOOC situation, you obviously can’t. However, as Mark Cheathem recently reminded me, most faculty aren’t particularly well-informed about the possible effects of technology upon their future employment. Therefore, should they accidentally find themselves reading an article like the one that Ng quote is in, they can listen to the gentle cooing sounds emanating from Coursera’s general direction and then go back into a deep, deep sleep.

Should they wake up without a job, Andrew Ng has an airtight alibi. He supported hiring more professors all along.

What if superprofessors aren’t really all that super?

I’ve been taking some flack in various places for my continued use of the word “superprofessor.” While I used to think the term was mocking, I would argue that it has become such a regular piece of the edtech lexicon that whatever irony it once held is now gone. That’s a shame, because the word “superprofessor” should serve as a wonderful reminder of the class system that exists in higher education already – the one that the biggest edtech enthusiasts around don’t mind perpetuating. After all, Clayton Christensen will still be able to teach as many classes about disruption as he wants even after MOOCs turn the rest of us into glorified teaching assistants.

I wish I lived in the world in which Clayton Christensen thinks I live. He and his current co-author seem to think that I can pick my own courses, that my research actually gets me rewards and that there’s no such thing as adjunct labor. Now that would be a really awesome place to work! More importantly, if I was actually one of Shirky/Christensen’s Teamsters in tweed I’d be much-better equipped to fight the profiteering vultures who are deliberately trying to destroy my profession while simultaneously trying to make that process seem like an act of God.

The great irony here is that the kind of rhetoric that Christensen and his co-author use in that piece is designed to facilitate that system in some places while destroying it everywhere else. As Sara Goldrick-Rab explains:

To me, the picture Broad painted was not so much of higher education at a “crossroads,” but rather a disturbing vision of colleges and universities frantically trying to pull up the drawbridge and create a new moat for their protection. They want to keep those unwashed masses of unkempt, post-traditional students off their campuses; they want to prevent federal “intrusion” into colleges and universities. If they can’t meet costs by raising tuition (the public won’t stand for it), they shift to protecting the elite survivors of today’s downturn (the “A institutions,” Broad called them) by generating MOOCs that can be launched into the cloud to create a virtual wall between the chosen and the rest.

Perhaps the desire to board the good ship luxury ship before it sails explains the rush to MOOC-ify everything as fast as possible. When superprofessors at “A” institutions get their MOOCs up and running so that the machine runs itself, they’ll be too important to do menial jobs like grading. For the rest of us, grading will be all we have left.

Do professors at “A” institutions deserve to be treated differently? With two Coursera trainwrecks under our belts now, it seems pretty darned obvious that those two superprofessors at least were hardly the best teachers available. In fact, the number of Coursera partner institutions is getting so numerous these days, that it seems likely that practically any tenure-track professor could become a superprofessor in the near future if they are willing to respond to the incentives that Coursera and/or their home institutions offer. You don’t even need to have any online teaching experience to set yourself up with a class of tens of thousands! Does anybody else besides me see a problem with that?

Unfortunately, the whole point of being a superprofessor is to deliver a decidedly non-super class. Christensen et. al. make this perfectly clear when they write:

Eventually, the disruptive innovation changes the very definition of quality in a marketplace.

Ooooh, I didn’t know they taught cultural relativism at the Harvard B School. One of them must have picked that concept up from a really super liberal arts professor somewhere. Too bad those folks are about to become an endangered species.

What if the cure is worse than the disease?

On Friday, Aaron Bady (who I seem to get all my MOOC material from these days) was Twitter-fisking an absolutely appalling 2012 report (.pdf) on “disaggregating” higher education from the American Enterprise Institute.  It argues:

Entrepreneurs see a window of opportunity because higher education has become far too expensive for many students. Rather than embracing innovations that have swept over the rest of the economy, boosting productivity, lowering prices, and improving quality, most colleges and universities have chosen to batten down the hatches, raise tuition, and hope for the best.

This is a common position among edtech entrepreneurs.  Indeed, when they tell us to “Think of the children!,”  that’s why.  Cutting costs is supposedly all on behalf of the students and (unless you’re from the American Enterprise Institute) not for the people who’ll be at the receiving end of the redirected money stream at all.

Unfortunately, using distance learning and MOOCs to cut the cost of instruction is like cutting off an arm when the patient’s leg is infected with gangrene because that’s not the site of the problem.  Here’s a Times article from last year on the subject I found thanks to Frank Pasquale that explains the real problem:

It is this cumulative public divestment — and not extravagances like climbing walls or recreational centers advertised on a few elite campuses — that is primarily responsible for skyrocketing tuitions at state institutions, which enroll three out of every four college students.

Colleges have found ways to hold costs per student relatively steady. Since 1985, the average amount that public institutions spend on teaching each full-time student over the course of a year has barely budged, hovering around an inflation-adjusted $10,000, according to a State Higher Education Executive Officers report. But in the same period, the share of instruction costs paid for by actual tuition — not the sticker price, but the amount students actually pay after financial aid — has nearly doubled, to 40 percent from 23 percent.

In theory it’s possible that technologically-enabled cuts in the instruction budget could be passed on to students through lower tuition, but universities have too many other cost centers that technology can’t cure that will still be growing – the growing number of administrators, obscenely high administrative salaries, sports, climbing walls in the gym, energy costs, and let’s not forget debt servicing on all that unnecessary campus construction.

The other thing that MOOC enthusiasts tend to forget is that setting up the infrastructure to run their precious babies is expensive in and of itself.  Sure, Coursera and the large universities that are home for these MOOCs are eating the start-up costs, but they’re doing so in anticipation of future revenue later.  That revenue will likely come, at least in part, from licensing those courses to other schools who will charge MOOC participants for credit.  There goes part of the technology discount right there.  Then there’s the cost of the police state that all those schools  will have to set up in order to prevent their MOOC students from cheating.

Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but I think the real root of MOOC-mania is an edifice complex on the part of university presidents and trustees.  The last time I checked, the average university president in this country served for about four years before moving on to greener pastures.  It used to be that the easiest way to leave a legacy on campus would be to build something.  With bond financing nearly impossible to come by these days, the easiest (but not necessarily least expensive) way to build something is to create a virtual campus.

The really neat thing about taking this route is that you get to give lots of really clever speeches filled with buzzwords that make you sound like a dynamic leader.  Check out the President of MIT, for example:

President L. Rafael Reif has announced the creation of an Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, saying that the stunning rise of online learning may “offer us the historic opportunity to reinvent the residential campus model and perhaps redefine education altogether.”

Of course, MIT isn’t going anywhere, but what happens to those schools that replace face-to-face classes with MOOCs as a cost-cutting device rather than as a brand extension strategy?  They won’t be able to shove the genie back in the bottle because disaggregation is forever.  Those faculty they’ll have to let go won’t be coming back.  What’s being pitched as inevitable is actually quite a gamble for most schools.

On the other hand, higher education reform could go down another path entirely.  ”Imagine,” Adam Kotsko supposed last week:

if we actually invested money in improving instruction rather than actively degrading it for the hope of greater efficiency!

This gave me a scary thought:  What if the real point of disaggregating higher education is to kill the patient rather than to save it?  What kind of legacy would that leave?