“My MOOC is a pale imitation of the class I teach on campus.”

I’d like to thank all my friends on social media for making the last diatribe I wrote the single best-read post in the history of this blog (by far). The fact that I used the word “assholes” three times in it would make my Mom particularly proud.

For any of you who might be sticking around this blog for more posts like it, you should understand that I’ve been writing about online education in general and MOOCs in particular for many months now. So if you want to know why I think MOOCs are inferior to regular college history classes, check out the posts in these categories.

You should also understand the intended audience for this blog. It’s one professor (namely me) writing to other professors, grad students and related higher ed professionals. That doesn’t mean others aren’t welcome, it’s just that I don’t expect you all to share all of our concerns.

Perhaps the weirdest thing for me about that Jay Gould post was the way it quickly crossed over into this wider realm. From what I can tell, this was largely due to Erik Loomis. He managed to attract the attention of Matthew Yglesias at Slate, who wrote a post there that I actually mostly agree with:

It’s worth noting that lower quality is often a better value-proposition and that’s exactly why there’s a profit opportunity. Ikea, for example, has not risen to power by manufacturing better furniture than other companies. If anything it’s worse. Deliberately worse. The profit opportunity is that it turns out that cheap Nordic modern furniture is something a lot of people want. It turned out there was a big market for “somewhat worse but much cheaper” furniture. Lots of people listen to music, but very few people choose to invest in the highest-end products. Things like “it’s cheap” and “it’s convenient” drive people to listen to a lot of MP3s over earbud headphones.

I constantly go back and forth with respect to MOOCs on the question of whether students will laugh at the idea of an online, no-direct-contact-with-the-professor higher education or whether university administrators will successfuly force them to accept that scenario because it will be the only higher education available to most people. Where I differ with Yglesias is over the question of whether higher ed on the cheap is a good thing. I’ve covered this elsewhere, but the quick version of my response would be that educating the entire world is of no use to anyone but university administrators if the economy has no place to employ the recipients of all those online degrees.

What’s most refreshing about that Yglesias post to me is how he freely admits that a MOOC education is an inferior good. Getting back to my original subject, did you ever notice that you never hear anything like this from superprofessors? Just once, I want to hear a superprofessor say (or write):

“My MOOC is a pale imitation of the class I teach on campus.”

or

“The fact that I have a 90% drop out rate in my MOOC partially reflects the fact that many of my students find me boring.”

Why don’t you hear/read obvious statements like these? Ego, again.

While recent news has made me sorely tempted to call for a shunning campaign against all superprofessors, instead I want to reiterate my call for a campaign of moral suasion. Adopt a superprofessor today! And while you’re explaining to them how their choices might affect your future employment prospects, you might subtly hint that destroying the market for other people’s labor by distributing an inferior product could actually hurt their academic reputations in the long run rather than make them more cool.