The Huge Growth of MOOCs Threatens America's Great Public University System

http://www.alternet.org/education/who-profits-moocs



In a college-level course about social justice issues, you can often find students sitting in a circle discussing society’s inequalities with one another. But in Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s JusticeX class, a massive open online course (MOOC), tens of thousands of students watch Sandel lecturing on, among other things, affirmative action, income distribution, same-sex marriage and property rights all from their laptops.

When philosophy professors at San Jose State University were encouraged to have their students take Sandel’s MOOC, they were strongly against their students taking an online course in justice. So they wrote an open letter to Sandel (signed by all of them).

“The move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university,” the letter said, “We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice.”

MOOCs have been in the news lately, from the Chronicle of Higher Education to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, and legislation in California calls for public institutions to use MOOCs for students who can’t get into overcrowded courses. MOOCs differ from regular online course in that they are free (although students can be charged for credit), and tens of thousands of students can be in one class. Often grading is done by computer or by peers. The biggest three providers of MOOCs are edX, a nonprofit formed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard; Udacity, launched by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor and the founder of Google’s autonomous-car program; and Coursera, a nonprofit started by two other Stanford computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.