I suspect it may be only the beginning of Nick's nightmare. There really are gifted people who can teach an exciting course to 1000 students. Any if 1000, why not 100,000 via a MOOC? Parents and students who are paying $40,000 and more for tuition may wonder about where their money is going if there are 200-1000 students in a class. It's also easy to find mediocre to poor MOOCs on the Internet.
Although it's very unclear were MOOCs will wind up, it's important to note that the primary driver of the movement in most universities is not the quality that MOOCs might be able to deliver nor providing universal access but money. Boards of Regents and other governing bodies are pushing MOOCs as a cost reducing measure. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good source for what has gone on at UVA and some other large universities. At Virginia, the President was forced to resign over the issue and was only returned to office after continuing protests by the faculty and students that were going in the direction of a strike. Some of what I see now reminds me of the hype when video courses became available. Schools including USC and Stanford offered MS degrees by video and a consortium of universities formed the National Television University (NTU). I did some of a course for USC and one for NTU. But the economics changed as did the technology and NTU is now defunct. That may be the way of MOOCs. Ed __________ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) [email protected] 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 7, 2013, at 8:19 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote: > And, alas, many university classes, especially in introductory courses at > large universities, bear little resemblance to the kind of ideal situation > Nick created and sustained but rather look a lot like Nick's nightmare. > > Bruce > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
