I openly confess the traditional path to a career in higher education was the path I expected to take. Hushed conversations with fellow Ph.D. candidates only recently set adrift on a wide academic sea, I admit, alerted me to the absent all ports of call along the emptiness of a shoreless horizon. We still stubbornly believed against all the available evidence, because somehow we managed to convince ourselves this wouldn't be our fate. After all: the economy was going to pick up just in time for us to graduate and the elderly occupants of endowed research chairs were all going to retire and die (and not necessarily in that order). The buzz around MOOCs is that the educational industry is undergoing a massive change, which means I am SOOL.
(Please consult http://www.urbandictionary.com/, should either of these acronyms be unclear.)
That doesn't mean recalcitrance cannot serve a broader purpose. Let me paint a caricature to defend traditional forms of higher education and refuse the vision put forward by the prophets of the MOOC tech who spoke, very recently, atop Mount Davos.
Why? The proponent of traditional education in me says, For a few of reasons people are going to discover along the way:
1) A Basic Good. In the century and a half old experiment with setting universal standards for education, the government-subsidized 'educational-industrial' complex was meant to provide a pathway to full citizenship. It was designed to inculcate the basic skills necessary to participate in the political processes of government and the economic processes allowing for the 'competitive' distribution of goods and services not otherwise covered by government. The 'educational-industrial' complex has grown exceedingly more complex, as has the business of governing and buying and selling, but that doesn't mean its core purposes cease to be aimed at those goods, in principle, we should share in common.
2) Not A Mere Consumable. Schools need to make money. Universities are going to find ways to do exactly that, by partnering with corporations willing to hook their financial fire-hose to a bank account and soak the campus with money. That's the world in which we live. Governments may talk as if their sole responsibility was to run the country with the purpose of maximizing national productivity; but you can't fire citizens like you can fire employees. The same applies to the 'educational-industrial' complex. Government funding will have to continue, right up to the top of the system, in varying measures (complete coverage at the bottom; partial coverage at the top) for at least two reasons. The production of knowledge should not going to be completely swallowed by corporate for-profit interests, the goods shared in common ought not be offered up solely to the paying public.
They say the customer is always right. Except in education the 'customer' has to be told when they are wrong; and for their own benefit. Schools must be able to tell students, no matter how much money the student themselves spent on their education, that they fail when they don't complete the work to the teacher's satisfaction. Treat education as a mere consumable, undermine the teacher's right to correct, the entire rationale behind educating a person goes out the window.
3) Accreditation. If someone is going to look at your transcript and say, yes, I believe you have accomplished all the things this transcripts says you have accomplished, they are going to need a system of standards which says this course or program meets a basic standards at this level of education. The online environment exacerbates problems associated with how students are judged. In traditional universities, students can skip entire semesters, but they must sit and write exams and papers and the like to receive a mark. But what happens when there are 40,000 students in a class and only one instructor? Follow the link and find out what happened when Coursera offered a course on how to teach online courses.
Certainly, where people have finished their degrees and are looking for additional training for their professional careers, MOOCs are an entirely plausible option. The core of the educational system, however, will require some sort of face-to-face interaction between students and an instructor, who can look to see how students are progressing and offer help where needed. That requirement doesn't lend itself to the MOOC model, at least as it presently stands.
4) Bodies. I'll let Louis Betty ('The End of the University?') make the final point:
Physical presence is key to every aspect of their learning experience, be it my hovering, breathing presence in the classroom or the office, the cohort of 30 or so warm bodies that shows up for lecture twice a week, or the more abstract form of embodiment conveyed by the weight of a book...
What [we forget] -- and indeed, what just about everyone prophesying the eclipse of face-to-face interaction in a virtual world forgets -- is that human beings are, above all else, bodies, and that to lead full, happy, and meaningful lives, we need other bodies. Let’s consider the following examples of how technologies of virtualization have failed to triumph over our species’ thirst for physical presence.
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