MOOCs debate: Socrates, Access, and Hyperbole

The following exchange took place on Facebook earlier today. It is based on a story on NBC News which aired yesterday.  Hear from on expert on why MOOCs are highly over-rated and hear from someone that thinks they might be transformative. As is often the case, it is likely the final tally of what they bring about will likely be somewhere in the middle, i,e, 'muddling through', as the great pragmatist and philosopher Richard Rorty liked to say.

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NBC News story opens with the following words:
Massive open online classes raise questions about future of education
dailynightly.nbcnews.com
"University of Virginia history professor Philip Zelikow has taught the course, "The Modern World: Global History Since 1760" for 16 years -- but this semester is different. Instead of delivering it to 120 students on campus, he'll be teaching 42,000 students around the world. Whi …

In the story, one academic says this:

‎"Imagine taking a university and removing all the really fun stuff," Vaidyanathan said. "And all you're left with is me talking to you through a camera. That's not that good for anybody."

what follows is the exchange between Parke Muth and Siva Vaidyanathan:

Parke Muth: The issue of MOOCs has many shiny facets. Of course ‘fun stuff’ is great, but the most important question, to me at least, is, at what cost? Numerous studies show that the student debt load that is out and about right now makes the housing crisis look like a bump in the road. If this is even close to accurate, then at least some people who are pursuing an education should be doing a cost benefit analysis. It is worth going into great debt for ‘fun stuff’; or would it make better long term sense to have many of the world’s best professors lecturing to many thousands of students for little or no cost? Friedman’s piece, in The Times this past Sunday, quotes a Harvard prof saying there is greater interaction from students via MOOCs than in a classroom. Are probing questions from students and greater discussions among them not under the rubric of ‘fun stuff’?
Salmon Kahn, and other billionaire geniuses, are telling people the paradigm in education must change. Are they overlooking the ‘fun stuff’? Maybe so, but they seem to think giving people across the world access to the best and brightest scholars might be ‘worth’ it, if it can give those who don’t have the money an opportunity to raise their chances of future success.
6 hours ago ·

Matt Paco: That's partly why I'm taking a MOOC. I want to experience it to see how it compares to in-classroom learning.
6 hours ago via mobile ·

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Parke, don't fool yourself into believing MOOCs offer any financial relief to anyone. You are falling for another scam by billionaires, not geniuses. And please, "world's best professors"? What makes you think Harvard, MIT, and UVa have better professors than PVCC? I happened to speak to NBC for 20 minutes, laying out all the strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs. They used three seconds of my quip. You want to understand what's going on ignore Tom Friedman, Bill Gates, and other idiots who don't know a damn thing about teaching, students, higher education finance, or the greater meaning of education. You might check out the six or seven articles I have written about MOOCs since the summer. If you still think massive corporate welfare by which elite universities spend money to supply materials to upstart companies so they can try to make money for themselves makes any sense at all, then check back with me.
6 hours ago · Like · 1

Parke Muth: Siva, thank you for your words. If you read my blog you will see I am always suspicious of any 'experts' the press has put forward, me included. No one knows the whole story. I will read all your pieces and add them to my internal database on this issue. I have read Khan's book and been persuaded by much of what he says. In addition, he has taught and taught effectively. I would not call him an idiot. Would you? If I follow your logic here you are saying that Piedmont teachers might be better than those at Harvard. If this is accurate, then perhaps a better way of saving money is to get students to stop looking at rankings and start enrolling in community colleges where costs are much lower. Is this something you would support? I am concerned with the debt issue which you don't directly address in your response. Is this an issue you write about in your MOOC pieces? Your words have raised many questions and I am always looking to get educated. I would be love it if you could give me a tutorial here or over coffee. I have learned more about the world talking with people over coffee than I could begin to measure in coffee spoons or Starbucks receipts (apologies to TS Eliot).
5 hours ago · Like

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Piedmont teachers are better for Piedmont students. UVa professors are better for UVa students. Teaching is not one-size-fits-all. But yeah, MIT and Harvard profs are generally horrible teachers. It's much harder to teach at PVCC and that's all they do. PVCC teachers are rewarded for being good teachers FOR THEIR STUDENTS. That's no secret, although somehow Tom Friedman missed out on that information. So yes, many students should be going for community colleges and mid-level public colleges where teaching is generally MUCH better and the price tag is much lower. Most students do go to those institutions, of course. There is still this unfounded assumption that teachers at UVA are better overall or in general. No. At most elite research universities teaching is disdained and thus devalued and discouraged. The handful of great teachers at MIT and Harvard are well known for being distinctive among a throng of horrible teachers. UVa is special. Good teaching is rewarded here. That's why I'm here. But yeah, I would be a complete failure teaching students who are not talented, motivated, acculturated, wealthy, supported, already invested in success, blessed with the time to attend class regularly and read long books, and well versed in the background knowledge and skills it takes to get into UVa. Please read this: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/11/16/siva-vaidhyanathan/a-new-era-of-unfounded-hyperbole/
...Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » A New Era of Unfounded Hyperbole
www.cato-unbound.org
"In 1938, Orson Welles’ broadcast of the radio drama of War of the Worlds caused massive panic among listeners. Early scholars of communication used this event to cement their belief in what was called the “hypodermic needle” theory of communication. According to this model, a speaker or producer inj..."
5 hours ago ·

Siva Vaidhyanathan And this:  http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/11/26/siva-vaidhyanathan/the-accent-is-on-the-massive-should-it-be/

When pronouncing MOOC, the accent is on the “Massive.” Everything exciting about MOOCs comes from their potential (if often fleeting) massive enrollments. And everything troubling and challenging about MOOCs reflects their massiveness as well.
5 hours ago ·

Parke Muth: Thanks again for the follow up. I was not aware that MIT and Harvard profs were horrible. I am glad, however, that you at least enjoy Khan academy. As you have written: "Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference." You favor the Socratic method and the interaction with students. Can you do this in a class of 300? One professor was surprised recently when his long time class of 15 was turned into a class of 300. The reason? Budget and lack of faculty. Would you say that lecturing live to 300 can be done Socratically in a way that is truly Socratic? As I recall, when Socrates talked to a large crowd about what his fate should be, he was not successfully persuasive.
5 hours ago · Edited · Like

Parke Muth: Perhaps we agree at least about one part of the issue--the opportunity for the poor to get something they never would have had before. Your words strike me as especially persuasive: "MOOCs offer even better opportunities for great populations of humanity who do not have access to high quality courses. If even one young person in a corner of the world without universities gets excited and motivated by physics or poetry, then the whole MOOC endeavor has paid off."
4 hours ago · Like

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Of course. But that's unspectacular. It's dangerous nonsense to promote "transformation" or "revolution" or to imagine that MOOCs can or would do anything about costs. College costs so much because state and federal governments removed funding steadily over 30 years and put the burden on labor and students. MOOCs COST money. If we do this wrong, we create less access to quality higher education and more access to television shows about higher education.
4 hours ago · Like

Siva Vaidhyanathan I lecture to 250 students. And I do it well. And then they break into small groups and work with my TAs in a Socratic forum -- just like we have been doing it for 100 years. We have improved a great many things about that process, of course. My class, like all lectures, is an introductory course. Once you get through my course you take small courses in the upper levels. Why maximize the massive? We should be hiring more faculty and building more classrooms to teach more students the right way instead of pretending there is some magical quick fix.
4 hours ago · Like

Parke Muth: Your "of course" is not quite clear to me. "Of course..." what? MOOCs are indeed worth it to the poor? Of course budgets have been cut. I have been a witness to this and commented on it many times. But do you see much of a chance in the near term for States to raise taxes to regain the grandeur that once was, or is it time to try something else, sans hyperbole but with pragmatic and data driven assessment?
4 hours ago · Like

Siva Vaidhyanathan: That "something else" is a false description of what we do and what education means. There can be no "data-driven assessment" of anything meaningful. And it does not matter what the chances are of restoring funding. If that's the cause of the problem, then that's how we solve it. Anything else is foolish, and only compounds the problem. You don't drive out a ditch by gunning the engine.
4 hours ago · Like

Parke Muth: And how to we pay to hire more faculty and build more classrooms? Of course schools should be doing this but who can afford to? And one last question as I actually have to go to a coffee to talk to a student. Would you say that our interaction via this medium is useful to people who read it? In other words, ail readers be more informed on this issue and perhaps then go to your articles and become better educated on the topic? Do our exchanges rise to any level which might be called Socratic even though we are not in the same room?
4 hours ago · Like

Siva Vaidhyanathan We did have more faculty. We can build more classrooms. We can afford to. We choose not to because we choose to subsidize oil companies and golf courses over universities. This is the richest nation in the history of the world. We purposefully dismantled our public institutions over the past 30 years. We have plenty of money. It's just going to the wrong people and institutions. And no, it's not Socratic.
4 hours ago · LikeSor

Parke Muth: Very quickly: You say: "There can be no "data-driven assessment" of anything meaningful." Anything? Really? I agree with Nate Silver, there is a of lot of noise about data and not much signal. But a universal dismissal of all data? Really? I respectfully disagree. As I say, I would love to continue this conversation here or in any forum, live or on blogs etc--whatever you think would help educate me and maybe some others too. Or would this only happen in person as some of your comments seem to suggest? Thank you so much for your time and insights.
4 hours ago

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Where do you think education is headed? The Ivies, Stanford and others are offering MOOC courses through a consortium. Some schools are now offering credit. But clearly some experts have significant reservations.

I hope there will be more lively discussions on this topic here and on many educational forums across the world.

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I am adding a response to my post from a friend of mine named Tico Braun. He gave me permission to post it here. Tico has taught for many years and received great acclaim as one of his university's best and most committed faculty when it comes to teaching and students. He has served as the chair for the Latin American Studies program. His speech to students about a year ago on empathy and learning is just one great example of how he challenges students. I will post the link to this speech after I past his comments here: 
There are so many kinds of education in higher education that it is difficult to talk about it as one thing. Science, engineering, architecture, agricultural economics, Nursing, Education, liberal arts. My sense is that online instruction lends itself to most of what takes place in a university today. It lends itself less the to liberal arts. Or more specifically, it lends itself to broad survey courses, those that have a few hundred students and then discussion sections. What Zelikow is doing. The model of large survey courses in the liberal arts Siva extolls is pretty broken. Not sure yet whether MOOCs will represent an improvement, beyond reaching more people. But they may become that. Also, in the near future, we will not have sufficient graduate students in residence to staff those discussion sections. MOOCs may find a solution to that. A good liberal arts education requires small courses, seminars. Can those be put online? Not sure. Probably not. In that sense, MOOCs may impair our goals.

MOOCs seem to be better for verbal communication than written. Do MOOCs represent a new, better, form of verbal communication, when students do not actually see one another and are thus less inhibited to express themselves? What do we do about writing in the age of MOOCs? How to teach it, how to evaluate it, how to get students to write 10, 20, 50 pages? Writing is central to a liberal arts education. It is pretty much irrelevant to engineering and so much else today. Will Word and the like correct our writing so that we do not have to learn to do it on our own?

I can imagine one year residential college careers in, say, Engineering, or even Biology (can Lab work be done on line?), after three years of online learning. Colleges and universities would develop exams to determine whether students are admitted, less to the institution, more to a major, a school. And two years of residential experience in the humanities and social sciences, also with entrance exams, to say, English, History. That would make the liberal arts more expensive than other educations, and that would hardly work. But I can see it. For the few, pretty much as it is now.

But then, are our liberal arts goals still realizable? They have always been an embattled effort in American, but almost always with a strong defense. That defense is increasingly difficult to make in this society, run by market realities and metaphors, efficiency, professionalization. Maybe MOOCs will come to represent the fall of a liberal education.

Students would pay for MOOCs in order to get into colleges. This should reduce the price of a higher education quite decisively. Colleges and universities would accredit MOOCs. Some would be harder than others. The current hierarchical structure of higher education would be preserved.

What happens with all those fancy dorm rooms? More students than before taking a MOOC/residential education, to fill those rooms? What do we do will all those graduates? Can the market employ them? 

Here is the link to his speech:

http://onlyconnectparke.blogspot.com/2012/08/visions-2-point-is-to-change-it.html