In the spirit of my new anti- “the misuse of technology to destroy higher education by usurping faculty prerogatives” position, I want to discuss this Joshua Kim post about “the end of courses.” He gets into the subject by discussing George Siemens’ keynote at the edX Consortium #FutureEDU conference, and only takes issue with one of George’s points:
Where I take issue with George’s claims of what MOOCs are destroying derives from how I am seeing open online education at scale play out at my campus.
Faculty autonomy. No way. Faculty are more important than ever, and there is absolutely zero intent to influence what they will be teaching. (And I’d argue that the what, rather than the how, is the really important part of the autonomy equation. But we can debate).
I know George, and don’t know Joshua, but really that doesn’t matter because I think they’re both right. My contribution to the debate Joshua invites is going to be to explain why.
If you run your own MOOC, you are indeed more important than ever. You provide the content that something like twenty people have to present. You make the decisions about how learning is going to be evaluated. After all, the thing has your name on it. You want to be sure that everything runs smoothly. If you run your own online course, chances are you’re doing so through your school’s learning management system, but even the worst of those have tools that allow you to customize the platform to your course. That’s probably why everybody always says that it takes much more time to teach online well than it it does to teach in a face-to-face setting.
The problem is (and although I’m not sure this is what George was referring to as I haven’t seen the speech, but I wouldn’t be surprised) what happens to the professors who get left behind? Every man cannot be their own super professor. The world will run out of students first. And as online classes get scaled up and MOOCs get scaled down, all the rest of us will be left as ministers without portfolios. Faculty don’t have any autonomy if nobody will pay them to teach anything to anybody. If we do, our autonomy won’t prevent us from starving.
So if I have any criticism of Joshua’s column, it’s a fairly mild one. While he’s busy counting the number of times the basketball is being passed back and forth, the guy in the gorilla suit has just walked by and waved.
George sees the whole MOOC picture. So should everybody else.
More or Less Bunk 
[…] skills, but by the faculty Rees calls “superprofessors.” In his post, “Every Man His Own Superprofessor,” Rees […]