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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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MOOCs and Privilege 

10/14/2013

11 Comments

 
Picture
An intimate brochure-photo gathering over a shared text book on the pristine lawn. From insidecolby.com.
Marc Bellemare, a fantastic new faculty addition to my department at the university wrote a couple of weeks ago about the things you can't get out of a MOOC (sidebar: it is awesome to have a professor in my department who doesn't think blogging is a waste of time).

He first discusses Pritchett's approach to education as a means of enforcing social norms, values and behaviors for its citizens. To me (as a daughter of an educator), this sounded wacko. But I think Pritchett explains it best in this Cambridge Nights interview. Right around minute 5:20.

As nation states strove to legitimate the rule... one of the ways [they did this] was through control of the socialization of the youth. Governments said: "Ok, kids are going to get educated, if we don't control the education, who knows what they're gonna learn vis-a-vis affiliation of the nation state, affiliation to particular ideologies. So it was really the ideology of affiliation of nation states combined with parental demand around their children's economic futures that led to more schooling and that schooling being controlled by the state.

This perspective doesn't solve the problem that Massive Open Online Courses might leave me unemployed in the future, but its something to keep in mind when we talk about education policy.

Meanwhile, my parents, in concern for their daughters possible future unemployment (economists read: parental demand around their children's economic future), brought a New Yorker Magazine all the way to Tanzania. In the May issue was an elaborate, New Yorker style, ten-page article about MOOCs.  Good thing they haven't seen this visual about my low prospects on the job market (until now: hi M&D!).

Bellemare discusses the social capital students earn in college, learning to work together with young people from various backgrounds, especially in American college students where students tend to live on campus all together. While I completely agree with this assessment of social benefits, I'm skewed with privilege because I attended a small liberal arts college that prided itself with academic community, cultural diversity and intimate brochure-photo gatherings over a shared text book on the pristine lawn. But, according to the New Yorker, my experience is not the reality:

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder.... Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind. But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills.... This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

For these students, at the eighty percent of colleges in the states, higher education is about simple cost-benefit analysis. It's about finding short-term child care and rounding up enough cash so you can finish that certificate in dental assistance or officially learn to operate the infrared spectrometer.

From a (hopefully) future faculty perspective, the impending imposition of MOOCs is ominous.  I can only hope that I will be lucky enough to become employed at an institution like Amherst, where the faculty voted against joining a MOOC program, and the administration and endowment were privileged enough to support that decision.

Hat tips: Mom and Dad.
11 Comments
Name (required)
10/14/2013 04:14:08 am

Are you against MOOCs overall, or just from a direct employment point of view?

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Aine link
10/14/2013 04:44:27 am

I am not against MOOCs. Their impending prevalence will certainly make it harder for me to get a tenure-track faculty position, but they definitely save time and money for a lot of students.

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Name )required(
10/14/2013 06:18:54 am

If I were to guess, MOOC students are more likely to threaten non-academic jobs traditionally taken by BA students. I would guess that most phd granting departments are very far removed from the idea of hiring a MOOC-educated phd (assuming that ever becomes a title MOOCs grant). Either way, interesting piece.

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Aine link
10/14/2013 06:34:29 am

MOOC programs threaten faculty positions because with online open source courses, a college does not need to hire as many humans as professors to teach courses. They can simply have the students connect to the MOOC from a larger institution with broadcasted lectures. As the New Yorker article says, it reduces the professor at the small school to a glorified TA.

This is a threat to me, because I am a PhD student hoping for a faculty position. I do not expect to compete with a MOOC -granted PhD.

And by the way, your comments are interesting. Would love to know who you are, Mr/s Name (required).

Reply
Christine O'Connell link
10/14/2013 06:37:02 am

This post is timely - I've been thinking about the scariness of the job market this week, too. My advisor posted a pretty interesting opinion about that nature biotech figure on his facebook. He got a lot of thought-provoking comments back from his followers:

https://www.facebook.com/globalecoguy/posts/10202494452308953

Anyways, David and I are OBSESSED with talking about associates degree/vocational/professionally-directed training. How does the proliferation of MOOCs interact with the types of applicants in demand by the types of industries that are growing? You mentioned a health care technician example: I honestly don't know the answer to this question, but are there MOOC programs that get you certified in something like MRI technician-ism?

Finally, and this is a bit out there, but I'm not sure that I think MOOCs really threaten the types of jobs you, Aine, want. Don't they more threaten the professors at the 80% of colleges and universities? Since the "elite" system the New Yorker mentioned is peddling a brand of educational experience that isn't substitutable with MOOCs, I don't think.

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Christine
10/14/2013 06:40:41 am

Oh, and I also meant to mention this, but one thing I was surprised you didn't touch on, is what about MOOCs run by the elite schools for free aimed at audiences in the developing world? One way for schools like your SLAC to at least put some of the privilege to good use. (Until the MITs and the Stanfords figure out how to profit off 'em...)

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Name Required (required) link
10/15/2013 04:41:10 am

I suppose there are both supply- and demand-side effects from MOOCs. MOOC-phds being a supply increase of potential faculty (which won't happen in a long time) and MOOCs being a substitute for traditional courses lowering demand for traditional faculty. I think this second effect also won't hurt your employment. Most MOOCs are taught by traditional faculty, often at elite institutions as Christine mentions. A large percent of enrollees in these courses are persons who would not otherwise attend courses in the traditional setting. This group would increase the demand for "faculty-services" assuming you allow teaching a MOOC to be part of the definition of what faculty will do in the future. There may be some amount of substitution from people who would have attended a traditional program but don't because the mooc existed, but the net effect of moocs would only hurt you if the second effect is greater than the first.

From a broader point of view, this question mirrors many similar times when technology changes an industry (schumpeter's creative destruction i guess...). Yes, things change and yes they may hurt those who are relatively well off, but if you are a person, institution or country wishing to remain on top, it is almost always best (and history bears this out quite thoroughly (Acemoglu and someone 2012) to use one's position of being relatively well off to "ride the new wave." In other words, change is only bad for the well-off if they don't adapt. In this case, MOOCs are only bad for traditional faculty if those faculty don't enter the market and provide their own MOOCs, which will probably be better than those produced by non-faculty.

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Required (name)
10/16/2013 12:43:29 am

Wouldn't the proliferation of MOOCs increase demand for TA's, thereby increasing financing for Masters/PhD students and opening up the opportunity for more people to obtain a MOOC'ed as well as non-MOOC'ed education? What's worse - fewer opportunities for people seeking to be professors (if this assumption is granted), or more people obtaining a higher-higher education?

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Name (Required?) link
10/16/2013 12:53:46 am

The above Required (name) is not me. Different people.

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Aine link
10/20/2013 06:06:05 am

Christine- The threat that MOOCs present to the non-elite colleges seems to be just a start of the influx of MOOCs. Because they save time and money for the average student, I'm concerned they will soon be a threat to professors at all colleges. And totally true that elite colleges can create serious public good by sharing and exporting some of their classes in MOOC form. This again brings up the fact that MOOCs have the capability of flattening the educational hierarchy because they do really save time and money for the average student.

All you Name Requireds- you make some good points. I recommend reading the New Yorker article to find out how seriously colleges are considering making MOOCs part of the faculty course requirement.

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Christine
10/21/2013 06:46:24 am

Aine - intriguing. My brain is just too limited to think that far into the future of a brave new world of MOOCs (in all seriousness - I try to think about a mostly-MOOC landscape and I just imagine scifi B movies and have a hard time imagining what that might really look and be like). Anyways, interesting stuff - thanks for posting.

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    Aine Seitz McCarthy

    International development, economics and some pretty ambitious ideas from a stubborn graduate student clinging to her sense of adventure.


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