More or Less
- By Woody Brown
A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course
(in Seven Easy Lessons)
Lesson One: Roughly $81 Billion
That is the size of the combined endowments of the existing members of edX, one of the leading massive open online course [MOOC] platforms. That amount of money alone is enough to give anyone pause, even if we don’t consider the global reach and massive political capital of the institutions that have thrown their great weights behind this iteration of the MOOC machine. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, in June 2012 issued a $1.12 million grant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] to develop a MOOC course in computer science “via the edX platform.” MIT and Harvard University each contributed $30 million, which investments, along with the absurd endowments that support them, have made edX one of the leading MOOC platforms, along with Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has in fact donated an enormous amount of money to the MOOC endeavor, money that has been multiplied many times over by established institutions of higher education. And that’s not to mention the tens of millions of dollars venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have invested in their favorites of the big four platforms. Coursera alone managed to raise $22 million in venture capital in its first year.
But money is not the only reason MOOCs have been so much at the forefront of the public discourse surrounding higher education in the United States. If you have managed to avoid encountering any of the thousands of articles written about MOOCs in the past several years, the presidents and boards of some of the nation’s best colleges and universities certainly have not. Though the number of institutions that have made significant financial contributions to MOOCs (like Columbia, Harvard, MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania) is relatively small, the number of those that have partnered with one of the big four is most assuredly not, and the number of schools currently considering entering into some sort of agreement is almost certainly much larger.
What is it that has attracted so many institutions of such repute to a group of websites, none of which is older than three years? Why is it that American universities and colleges are apparently so eager to join hands with TED-talking Silicon Valley prophets like Sebastian Thrun, co-founder and CEO of Udacity, who has said with glee, “in 50 years... there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education”? Wouldn’t this supposedly ideal doomsday scenario spell the demise of higher education as we know it? Why is it that so many people, from the richest man in the entire world to faculty members of institutions whose annihilation the MOOC discourse both predicts and earnestly desires, favor and promote the MOOC agenda? What can and can’t MOOCs do?
These are the questions I had when I enrolled in “The Modern and the Postmodern,” a MOOC offered through Coursera and conducted by Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University. I wanted to investigate how the MOOC machine (and it is, after all, a machine) would respond to the definitive characteristic of human subjectivity: error. I devised a method that primarily required me to write each of my assignments in a discourse that was as erroneous as possible. I decided to include at least one error in every sentence I wrote for my MOOC. My purview was not limited to mistakes of grammar—I pledged to be an all-inclusive embodiment of the full human potential for blunder.
The student I became for this project was an enthusiastic iteration of the sort of ignorance Amherst College President Biddy Martin discussed in her 2013 Convocation Address. “Ignorance is not the absence of information,” Martin says. “It is not a simple emptiness waiting to be filled.” The misrecognition of ignorance as a fillable fault, we will see, is the unspoken predicate that founds the MOOC discourse. Martin continues, “Ignorance is active, even willful, though often unconsciously so; it is structured by configurations of power and distribution of resources; it works through us by virtue of the ways we are enfolded in those configurations.” Ignorance, then, is a form of desire. I enrolled in “The Modern and the Postmodern” to discover how a MOOC addresses the passion for ignorance, a passion that cannot be counteracted by “an education that has only narrowly instrumental purposes,” which is exactly the kind of education proponents of MOOCs proffer as a replacement for higher education as it stands today.
Our examination of the results of my experiment cannot proceed, however, without a brief excursion into the discourse of the MOOC, a discourse that as a rule does not recognize its own potential to say something it did not intend to say. We will then take a short trip to the disavowed decade that preceded the current generation of MOOCs, a decade that, as we will see, witnessed the failure of every major MOOC consortium, even those backed by elite universities. I will explain why, how, and to what end I went about testing President Roth’s MOOC. Along the way, we will examine what education means, really, and what is the point that the MOOC method misses. Because something is lost, something we can only find if we know where it once was.
Woody Brown is a writer living in Buffalo, NY. He graduated from Amherst College in 2011 with a degree in English.
