More or Less (Part Three)

- By Woody Brown

A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course

(in Seven Easy Lessons)

(Link to Lesson One)
(Link to Lesson Two)

Lesson Three: Let’s Not Forget the Poor

MOOCs are cheap; or rather, they are less expensive than courses at traditional colleges and universities. This is one of the MOOC’s major selling points: according to proponents, it reduces education to its essential parts and in doing so shaves off tens of thousands of dollars from the cost to the consumer, which a fortiori makes education more affordable and more accessible to the innumerable masses of America’s undereducated poor. Bill Gates would have us believe that education is “hard to get because there is less money for it.” The MOOC arrives as a solution to this problem, a radical, streamlined, flexible substitute for higher education.

But if you set the bar high enough, everything looks cheap.  And if you set the bar low enough, everyone is a winner. The incredible rise in the price of higher education is unsustainable—that fact is not in dispute. In the last 35 years, the price of tuition has increased 1,120%. But is comparing the cost of a MOOC to the cost of four years at a residential college something that makes sense? It feels a bit like comparing the price of a single textbook to the price of a plane ticket to visit the textbook’s author. Next to the other, less flashy challenges to the skyrocketing costs (like the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013, signed into law by President Obama on August 9, 2013) the MOOC seems startling and novel. The hope is that the MOOC will appear in retrospect as what’s called a “disruptive innovation,” a sudden novel method that is violent enough to forever alter the problematic status quo. An example of this is downloadable digital media, which replaced physical media like CDs and DVDs. In the language of Apple’s corporate hegemony, this disruption is often explained with reference to iTunes and its alteration of the music industry. We are to believe that just as a consumer can now pick and choose which songs on an album she’d like to download, she can choose which classes she’d like to take without having to deal with the restrictions of a prescribed curriculum. Again, from Harden’s “The End of the University As We Know It”:

            “The contraction in the music industry has been relentless since the Mp3 [sic] and the iPod emerged. This isn’t just because piracy is easier now; it’s also because consumers have been given, for the first time, the opportunity to break the album down into individual songs. They can purchase the one or two songs they want and leave the rest. Higher education is about to become like that.” 

  In a similar vein, Anant Agarwal, president of edX, predicts that

“over time, as people look for more flexible kinds of skill sets and diverse, interdisciplinary skills, the whole concept of degrees will be changed. Today, degrees are ‘stovepiped’—you have a degree in mechanical engineering or you have a degree in electrical engineering—but the time is coming where we’re going to have a lot more interdisciplinary talent needed. The jobs will also require knowledge of energy, policy, computer science, writing, business, and so on. People care about competency, how good you are at something you do. Degrees are an OK first step, but at the end of the day, employers are looking at how good you are. There are a number of ways of demonstrating your skills.”

We might disagree with any of the several blanket assertions Agarwal provides in that paragraph, but the conversation gets a whole lot more urgent when we consider the fact that the American Council on Education, funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is currently investigating the question of whether or not MOOCs should be eligible for college credit. Many institutions, including Antioch University, University of Texas, University of Washington, and Colorado State, already grant college credit for MOOCs completed.

So according the MOOC narrative, everyone, whether poor or rich, educated or un-, now has access to high quality education that can in fact contribute toward a “real” degree at a traditional college or university. It is this claim that is perhaps the most pressing reason to investigate the efficacy of the MOOC. If we devote all of our support to MOOCs and they prove to be somehow fatally flawed, we will have been successfully duped into wasting valuable time and resources that would have been better spent addressing the crisis of education for impoverished U.S. citizens. So let’s ask: Is the MOOC a sufficiently effective replacement for higher education? Does a video lecture have the same educational potential as time in a classroom with a living, breathing professor or is it in fact a sort of academic pornography, in which the viewer watches other people perform her unsatisfied fantasies of learning? What about the not insignificant fact that participation in a MOOC presupposes access to a computer and high-speed internet? Can we in good conscience offer the MOOC to the disenfranchised people with whom we live?

Woody Brown is a writer living in Buffalo, NY.  He graduated from Amherst College in 2011 with a degree in English.

(Link to Lesson One)
(Link to Lesson Two)