Is a course like a record album? Should we "debundle" - that is the existential question.

Stanford Computer Science undergraduate Raven Jiang has written in his blog an unusually perceptive discussion of some of the issues I raised in my article in the Boston Review.  I disagree with much of what he says but I want to begin my comment with praise.  He has a good grasp of some of the larger cultural implications of MOOCs and even of possible dangers.  For instance, he writes, drawing on parallels in the newspaper industry,

"MOOCs make consumption of knowledge cheaper, but who will pay for the creation of knowledge?"

But overall, Jiang is pro-MOOC and what is commonly called "debundling."

Jiang's thinking is that courses are like record albums.  Customers should be able to buy the one cut rather than be stuck with ten songs they do not really like.  First, I wonder about this whole approach to music:  maybe this is a generational thing, but when I was young and a big music fan, what I really loved was albums, not singles.  I loved to hear the whole thing over and over again.  Sure, I had favorites songs, but the work as a whole seemed the real work of art.  So the move from buying albums to simply buying the singles that attract, singles that might have been at best the lead-ins to the larger artistic experience, seems more than sad to me.

But let's pursue the analogy.  Should higher education be like that?  Should students be able to unbundle your Introduction to Philosophy class, choosing for instance just to read and study the ten pages on their favorite religious philosopher and ignore Nietzsche and the rest?  I would think that one of the great things about going to college is that you are forced to thing about ideas you would normally not think about ....forced to expand your mind.  You may not approve of or even value some of the philosophers you have read but at least you will have encountered them.  Unbundling record albums is sad, but unbundling philosophy classes is particularly worrisome.  Why?  Education is not entertainment.  It might be entertaining sometimes, but customer choice should not be the ruling idea in education.  If it was, most students would choose only that which is easy and unchallenging. 

Jiang writes, "A kid in India today can take a Stanford course on cryptography on Coursera without having to move to Palo Alto and fork out sixty grand a year in tuition. Sure, she doesn’t get to enjoy the green grass and palm trees, but then again, why should she be forced to pay for the whole package if all she wants is the knowledge? It seems that if greater access to education is good (and it is), then we should embrace MOOCs."  A number of questions may be raised here.  First, is this really a course?  One does not receive credit for its completion, only a "certificate of completion."  Is there, perhaps, a reason for this?  Could this "course" be better labeled "entertainment?"  I like seeing video courses produced by the Teaching Company.  If I see all of the videos in a series have I completed a course?   That would be delusional.  Have I learned something.  Yes, just as I might learn something from reading a book checked out from a library. But learning in libraries independent of taking classes is nothing new.  So what is the big deal about MOOCs?   

I do not think it is a bad thing that the kid from India can learn something about Cryptography by taking this "course."   But I also think it is interesting that this is always the kind of example used by MOOC supporters.  It seems quite off the point.  Remember, Coursera is not a company of do-gooders.  If they care about kids in India, this is a sideline.  These people want to make money.    Where they can make money is by getting people to replace teachers in the US with their courses.  What MOOCs are about is outsourcing.

Third, perhaps the argument could be better put in this way: greater access to education is good, MOOCs sometimes provide greater access to education, therefore we should support that aspect of the MOOC phenomenon that provides greater access to education.  Should we support everything else about the MOOC movement?  Not based on this argument.

Jiang continues:  "Californian public schools such as SJSU have bought into MOOCs in a big way largely because the state’s public school system is broke."  Don't be silly.  The public higher education system in California is not broke.  If believing this is a big motive for supporting MOOCs then some more thinking is needed.

Jiang then gives a very nice summary of my piece
 "

• MOOCs’ emphasis on multiple-choice quizzes fail to teach students how to write clearly and persuasively and to read critically.
• MOOCs reduce knowledge to piece-wise consumption and does not train the “ability to integrate and explore information creatively”.² Leddy refers to this as “a symptom of our society’s degraded approach to knowledge itself.”
• MOOCs relegate instructors to the role of mere technicians and degrade teacher-student interactions. Students lose the opportunity to participate in the creation of knowledge because they are now further removed from the professors.

And he replies:

"While entirely valid, these points are missing the long-term picture. These are substantial criticisms for why MOOCs in their present form are defective and cannot yet fully replace traditional classrooms. However, the key word here is “yet”."

This is where we really disagree.  Jiang thnks that MOOCs will get better and better, and so all of the points raised above will eventually no longer matter.  I can't picture how this is going to happen, although, to be sure, the future is always full of surprises.  What then is the basis for Jiang's hope? 

He notes that at least one teacher of a MOOC course for Coursera is impressed by how it is constantly improving.  This looks to me more like the typical self-advertising hoopla we are constantly getting from MOOCsters.   He then mentions Google glass, although it is not clear how this product will address the three bullet points.  He also mentions Leap Motion which is a product that will sense one's hands and fingers...and I cannot see how this will deal with the bullet points either. 

(MOOC believers remind me of people who believe that virtual sex will replace real sex in the near future.  Think of all the advantages...no STDs for one.  One might say that virtual sex now is not too impressive...but just way, with Google glass and Leap Motion, virtual sex will be awesome.) 

Jiang then writes, "My feeling is that it is too early to write MOOCs off as lecture videos with multiple-choice questions. But I do agree with the argument that it might be premature at this stage of development for schools like SJSU to put all their eggs into the MOOC basket."  We disagree on the first point:  I think it is the right time to write MOOCs off for exactly this reason.  I just cannot get excited about being able to see what Prof. Sandel sees through Google glasses or touch what he touches through Leap Motion:  this will not make his lectures or his class (in the MOOC form) better than a real class with a real teacher.  I suppose that Jiang will argue that criticisms of MOOCs are premature because we have not tried Sandel in three-D yet!    (These technologies might make virtual sex better...I'll leave evaluation of that to the next generation.)  However, I appreciate the second point and wish that more MOOCsters would think more seriously about this issue.

Finally, Jiang raises an interesting question, whether MOOCs may just be a good thing mainly for Computer Science classes, and not for Philosophy and other Humanities type classes.  Since I teach Philosophy and know nothing about Computer Science teaching, I could not say, and would be interested in what Computer Science teachers would say about this.

Here's the quote:


"Even if we truly believe that online teaching will forever be an inferior alternative to traditional lectures for some purposes, there are clearly elements of a modern college education that are directly replaceable by MOOCs without any loss of content. Engineering students for example perform much of our learning by doing problem sets. Lectures are generally a non-interactive affair, unlike a history class where some form of debate or discussion can conceivably arise. Even with just the limited technology available to us today, one can imagine a MOOC system of online lectures where a small specialized teaching staff is required only to hold office hours and to grade parts of the problem sets that are not machine gradable (at least not with current natural language parsing).
It is easy to see why Computer Science professors tend to be the ones behind MOOC start-ups: many of them already run their own classes like one. At Stanford, it is common for students majoring in CS to watch all their lectures online and turn in their problem sets by e-mail."

The rest of Jiang's article is also worth reading.  Would you consider changing majors, Jiang?