coldhearted scientist وداد

This must be cut to 600 words. It may need another title, and it needs sculpting: there are too many ideas. Tell me what you think; then I will tell you what I was asked to do. Then, we will all compromise. I will be grateful, and so will Remaking the University.

On democracy, economy, and the rise and fall of the MOOC

A few months ago it was announced that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, would soon solve the problem of the university by replacing traditional universities. With their advent costs would fall, quality would soar, and access to education would be greatly expanded. But soon, the discussion shifted. Now MOOCS would provide education to the masses, replacing as many faculty as possible with “facilitators” to guide students. Elite students, or “deserving” ones, would still study at traditional institutions. The next thing we knew, MOOCs were no longer to replace traditional institutions, but would still provide opportunities for certificates and enrichment to students lacking other forms of access to classes. Then some MOOC providers changed course, scaling down goals to become mere contenders for a market share as providers of platforms for online courses.

As the dust settles we are back where we were, albeit more bedraggled, it having been announced all year that we were outdated pedagogues, unengaged in research and lecturing from yellowed notes. This characterization, as many have pointed out, is not only inaccurate, but is motivated by commercial concerns. As a wake-up call this debacle may have its uses, however, since the MOOC discussion has thrown the contours of the neoliberal assault on our institutions into high relief.

Is higher education “broken,” as we keep hearing? Defunding has had deleterious effects on programs. Students now graduate encumbered with a debt burden that severely limits their horizons. Many faculty are part-timers without access to a living wage, let alone resources for teaching or professional development. The advent of administrations not arising from the higher education community clearly signals a repurposing of our institutions to insalubrious ends.

Yet we are still teaching and conducting research. Indeed, one of the most distressing features of the MOOC craze is its enthusiasts’ ignorance of the relevance of research–collaborative learning–to university teaching. What is to be done, if defunding and corporatization, and not “poor teaching,” are our real problems, and if these problems are more difficult to solve than it is to retrain and reinspire a tired teacher or reframe a weak course?

Rather than react defensively to the mischaracterizations of our endeavor that appear daily in the NYT and the WSJ, we should articulate the relationship between learning and teaching in our terms. American academics do not have the custom of writing opinion or other journalistic pieces that is common for faculty in other countries; we would do well to adopt it. We, and not Bill Gates, should be framing the public discussion of pedagogy and research.

We should also take active roles in restoration and expansion of infrastructure that has been eroded. Many of those who, sometimes of necessity, have focused on our own careers as the erosion of the past three decades has proceeded, now say “I am retiring, let the next generation discover a new educational paradigm.” If something is wrong with failed higher education, it is not lectures from yellowed notes; it is this.

More modestly, we should make an inventory of our needs for teaching and research–for learning–and make these clear in every departmental, college, and university meeting. Against endless discussion of ways to “flip” classrooms, we should emphasize, for example, the continued need for current reference works; we should point out that there is good discussion of pedagogy in many displinary journals, more up to date and more relevant than anything a commercial educational consultant can offer.

I teach Latin American literature and culture in a public research university that, having lost 80% of its state funding over the last five years, has moved at near warp speed to an entrepreneurial model. So as to become more current on pedogogical and policy issues affecting us and other institutions in similar situations, this summer I joined a Coursera MOOC and a Facebook group where faculty from around the country discuss online teaching.

One of several salient differences between my MOOC and online courses at my own institution is that our online students have full access to our library resources. While not a major research library, our library does provide access to many online academic databases, journals, e-books, and bibliographic guides well as to online chat and telephone consultation with reference librarians. The lack of access to such resources is the greatest difficulty students in my MOOC face. This serious problem seems to be lost in the discussion of extending quality education to people without access to universities.

Other major issues in this MOOC are that the professor is not an expert in the field, let alone a “star,” and that the materials and also the activities we have are substandard for a college-level course. Is this situation an anomaly? Or is it what MOOCs may become once the current fervor wanes? Are stellar MOOCs the wave of the future? Or will there be a small vanguard of loss leaders, designed to legitimate the new convention, but soon to be diluted in cost-cutting mediocrity?

In the Facebook discussions, it has become evident that a well thought out MOOC costs and does not save money. It is clear to me that in order to move forward on the creation well-tempered MOOCs, we should at least for the moment decouple the discussion of cost-cutting from that of extending access to education to people who have none. These are two issues, not one, and it is my distinct impression that they have been conflated to one by the language of neoliberalism, which offers both democracy and economy as it stakes out new resources to monetize. We should not allow this logic to direct our own.

As the summer progressed our discussions on the creation of high quality MOOCs grew idealistic, and focused on extending the resources of our most privileged institutions to those living far from any institution. Out of sight in such discussions are the hundreds of thousands of students who have enrolled in college only to find that their institutions are being defuned and dismantled at a furious pace. Serious as the situation is, to take it as a fait accompli to be remedied by MOOCs is still premature. Especially in view of the expense involved in creating a good MOOC, my strong recommendation is to push back against the defunding and dismantling of our institutions rather than invent strategies for accommodation.

In California, I would recommend directing all energy to restoring funding and the integrity of the master plan for higher education–which ought also to go nationwide in my view. At this national level, it seems to me that the discussion about the need to extend high quality education to people “shut out” of traditional universities that emanates from some very privileged institutions contains elements of liberal guilt and naïvété.

The students actually at my institution are already underserved and I need to improve their educational opportunities before I begin broadcasting my expertise via MOOCs or shunting my students to these. We need, not in any particular order:

a. For the library: acquisitions, as there are fields in which we own no materials from the present century, and continued maintenance of all current subscriptions.
b. For study abroad: expanded programs, office support for these, and also locally based financial aid supplements since we are utterly dependent upon Federal scholarships, which are inadequate.
c. Smart classrooms: so we can access the Internet and use other a/v materials in all courses, without having to apply ahead of time for use of a special room on a special day.
d. FTEs, so students are not taught by a patchwork of adjuncts, and tenure-track lines, so that they can be taught by experts currently engaged in research.
e. Salaries and benefits adequate to recruit and retain quality faculty. For example, Louisiana universities will now only contribute 1.5% of salary to retirement funds of new hires. People who understand the implications of this and other effective reductions to salaries and benefits, and who have any options, will not come. With the lack of raises, instructors are now teaching up to 7 courses per term so as to make ends meet; this cannot fail to have an impact on course quality and is unfair to these instructors and their students.
f. For faculty: restoration of regular sabbaticals, summer salary support, research and travel funding, and funds for the acquisition of books and other research and teaching materials. These, it should be noted, are not “perks” but materials and opportunities designed to maintain quality teaching as well as support research.

When our universities have all of these things, we can begin to think further. In the meantime, we have a lively university college and university extension, and an active distance learning consortium that uses richer platforms for online teaching and learning richer than the one I encountered in my MOOC.

Axé.