Udacity's New Method: replace teaching faculty with undefined "mentors" to save on tuition

From Financial Times, Nov. 26, 9:02 pm we have a letter from Sebastian Thrun of Udacity  It can be found at 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/36d6eee8-5388-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html

The letter is titled "With mentoring, we can do 20 times better than ‘Mooc 1.0’"

 
Thrun there claims that Udacity is not dropping out of MOOCs but instead is evolving the concept.   The Spring pilot at SJSU failed, but he refers to a second pilot in the summer in which the average pass rate was 71 per cent, which is the same as face-to-face courses at SJSU.   He stresses that the cost was %10 of the normal cost, although how he comes up with this number is not clear.  He then says "If these results were to hold for all college classes, we could soon say goodbye to student debt" implying that one of the main reasons to go with Moocs is that student cost will go down dramatically.  Did students in fact pay less for these classes in the summer than they do for normal classes?  I have seen no evidence of a student discount or any reason to believe that students will be paying less for Udacity courses than for regular courses.  Thrun also mentions that "We achieved our results by teaming up students with personalised mentors who provide feedback and help when needed" and suggests that these mentors are what make Mooc 2.0 so much better than Mooc 1.0.  Usually at SJSU we call such mentors "teachers" and "professors."  Who are these personalized mentors?  What status do they have in the profession?  Who pays them?  How much are they paid?  If classes are going to be cheaper and yet each student will have a personalized mentor does this mean that the mentors will be paid very little per student?  How many students did each mentor mentor?  If the answer is 1000 then this could hardly be an example of personalized mentoring.  Remember that a Mooc is "massive."  This means thousands of students.  How many mentors were hired?  How good are these mentors?  How are they tested?  credentialed?  Perhaps the answer can be found at Georgia Tech.  Thrun writes "Udacity’s new model is the foundation for our work with Georgia Tech, where we are offering an entire master’s degree at 15 per cent of the tuition cost of on-campus education."  My understanding is that the class that went well in the summer consisted mainly of students who already had BAs.  Moocs do seem to work well with highly motivated students who already have a college education.  But Thrun still sees Moocs as a model for bringing down tuition costs of students without BAs.  It looks to me that this is a scheme to replace faculty with undereducated and underpaid part time workers.  What kind of an education is this?  Would you want your own children taking these classes, for example getting his or her papers graded by an underpaid person without any credentials?

Are MOOCs great because they give us new literacies, which are actually not the same as the old-fashioned "literacy"?

Geoff Cain at his blog criticizes my article on MOOCs in the Boston Review.  Cain complains that I am not an expert on the educational theory surrounding.MOOCs.  This is true.  MOOCs only became a big deal in education within the last couple year and only came to my attention a few months ago.  My area of specialization is not theory of education.  So I am catching up quickly.  There is so little time, however, and one has to speak quickly since the threat to higher education is immediate.  Some MOOC promoters are arguing for reduction of faculty by fifty per cent in the next five to ten years. So we only have that much time before higher education as we know it is over.

Cain notes that I do not distinguish between different types of MOOCs.  Yet I make important distinctions between types of MOOCs in the opening paragraph of my article.  The MOOCs I am concerned about are not the ones that are there primarily for autodidacts and are not for credit.  I am concerned about MOOCs that are being used to replace teachers in higher education.  This is the real point of MOOCs.  This is how MOOCs will save money.   Coursera and the other companies would not exist if there was not money to be made somewhere in all of this.

Cain writes, "I hate to tell Leddy this, but literacies are changing. I do a lot of writing, but my work depends more on my ability to collaborate with others and the creation of intelligent networks than my ability to write a ten page paper."

This kind of comment reminds me of when people would say in the 1960s that watching TV gave one a new kind of literacy.  Sure, one could say this in a way.  But even though someone could learn a lot by watching TV, literacy was still literacy, i.e. a matter of being able to read and write.  Watching TV doesn't help you much with either. 

Cain tells us that he does a lot of writing, and I do not doubt that Cain himself is literate.  I suspect that his literacy came from actually taking classes from live teachers in a university.  Still, even if he is an autodidact himself and learned how to write from reading the writings of others, those others probably learned how to read and write in a formal educational context.  Even autodidacts depend on the educational institutions they avoid.

What I want to ask, however, is whether Cain's literacy changed because he uses a computer to write and post?  I doubt it.  More puzzling is his comment about his "ability to collaborate with others."  There is a long tradition of co-writing articles, books and so forth.  There is no change in literacy between writing an article by oneself and writing it with someone else.  The philosophy department at SJSU co-wrote out letter criticizing Sandel.  Our literacy did not change because of this.

Cain also wants to contrast collaborative work with the ability to write a ten page paper.  I wonder why the length of the paper is so important to him.  My students are required to write pieces of various lengths, from under one page to as long as ten pages.  Graduate students are expected to write even longer pieces.  Writing at greater length requires greater organizational skill and deeper understanding of a subject matter.  (Part of the attack on the ten page paper may belong to some belief that in the age of tweets, the more complex literacy needed to write about something in depth is no longer needed.)  In any case, whatever literacy is required to write a good ten page paper or a good one page paper is the same as whatever literacy is required to write something collaborative.

I suspect all of this talk about "changing literacies" is just a excuse for rejecting the very notion of literacy.   Perhaps Cain doesn't think that it is important any more to learn how to read and write critically and creatively.  That would be too bad, since if the view was widely held we could well be said to be entering into a new dark ages.

So is "creation of intelligent networks" supposed to replace reading and writing?  Well, whatever "creation of intelligent networks" is, it is not a matter of literacy any more than creation of a good pot is.  Creating good pots is a wonderful skill....but it would be a great mistake to claim that any skill is a "literacy."   (I wonder whether I am part of Cain's "intelligent network" or does an intelligent network only consist of people who agree with each other?)