An inspired idea: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/05/20/mooc-skeptic-proposes-anti-mooc-mooc
http://academeblog.org/2013/05/18/open-letter-from-robert-meister-cucfa-to-daphne-koller-founder-of-coursera/ ---------------------snip MOOC Skeptic Proposes an Anti-MOOC MOOC Here's a course topic not currently offered by any of the providers of massive open online courses: "The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education." The course was proposed last week by Robert Meister, professor of political and social thought in the department of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz and president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. He sent a letter with his idea to Daphne Koller, a computer science professor at Stanford University and co-founder of Coursera, and then published his letter on the blog<http://academeblog.org/2013/05/18/open-letter-from-robert-meister-cucfa-to-daphne-koller-founder-of-coursera/>of the American Association of University Professors. Among the topics Meister proposes covering: - Why venture capitalists "are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions." - The way "free MOOCs weaken the link between scarcity and quality on which the business model of all higher education, both public and private, unfortunately depends." - Teaching students to "think financially about the socio-economic spreads created by our public educational system as a potential source of private profit." - "[T]hat the *for-profit* logic of their online educational empowerment depends on the fact while they are consuming information, they are also producing information that Coursera can correlate with other data to predict what prices students with particular profiles would eventually pay for courses they are presently consuming for free." The piece ends by asking Koller if she would co-teach the course, saying "I’m sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed."
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