In my view, an important part of the article is the discussion of resistance to MOOC’s. Also, the author speaks from experience, not from studies. We need both, but we are short on op/ed’s from experience. It is by Andy Kessler. You can find him in Wikipedia.
Here is the link, followed by my comment, but if you are a regular reader of this blog, the comment is old hat.
My Comment:
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From my experience utilizing MIT’s OpenCourseWare at an “elite” university, I saw the power of the internet to allow MIT to make available to my students the materials and approaches MIT had developed over years of hard work. (The course was differential equations, fundamental to all of science and engineering.)
But my experience confirms another important point discussed here – the reaction of the administration. I saw how much the administration seemed to want to treat the students as naive “consumers” – something that David Reisman and Clark Kerr warned of as far back as 1980. In brief, here is the reaction of the university’s administrators to my asking students to work through demanding material. My Chair asked me to change it to a “cookbook” course. I refused. The Engineering School, apparently concerned that a few students might decide engineering is not for them, used the following comment from one of their advanced students as a “complaint” about my course. He wrote that I shouldn’t be teaching the course; after all, he wrote, “…I cannot do many of the [MIT homework] problems…and I made an A in the [previous cookbook] course…” My students laughed when they heard this. (They did outstandingly well.)
This leads to another wonderful use of the online courses. Students can go to courses, like MIT’s online differential equations course, and see if they are getting the real thing from their school. Then, maybe this “content deflation” (something much more pernicious than just grade inflation) will cease.”
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