Anyway, past the fold it also reports that “Professors say” [not *some* professors say] or “the *professors we contacted*, at various Centers for Pedagogic Futurity say”] their in-class students benefit from the online materials…” The “irresistable draw” for “many professors” of teaching and reaching hundreds of thousands of students in the fields with bread and fishes is dutifully noted. Even the slight speed-bumps that are noted, like “the cheating problem” or “peer-to-peer” grading, are largely swept aside. Thrun has a few quibbles, but he’s gone with another MOOC outfit.

From a journalistic perspective, the imbalance of the coverage over time here is breathtaking. You almost wonder if the _Times Store_ isn’t trying to sidle into the Ng and Koller Coursortium. You could get a genuine Babe Ruth “game-used bat,” say, or an actual patent application file for a nineteenth century railroad locomotive with every course you enroll in. Other news in the _Times_ is that Margaret M. Sullivan, the editor of the Buffalo News, will become the _Times’s_ next Public Editor on September 1. She should perhaps be deluged with e-mails to open a file on this case now.

I doubt very much, even with technological improvements—always just around the corner—online education has much promise, other than to line the pockets of university administrators.

(Also, the idea of students sitting and watching lectures never seems to work out. The whole TED talk paradigm simply doesn’t fit, because TED talks are by their nature the opposite of an academic lecture. They’re shallow and dramatic, and made for fun, not real learning. In many in-person lecture classes at my university, professors film and upload their lectures. Unsurprisingly, many students take this as a hint that they don’t need to go to class, and will just watch the lectures “later.” Those lectures rarely get watched, and when they do it’s in a last minute cramming session before an exam.)

Matt L.: the 40+ years of the (tenure track) “job crisis” is why I’ve argued that we actually live in a golden age of humanities scholarship. Even underfunded unis like mine, whose priorities are completely a$$-backwards, are able to recruit hires who are truly outstanding. CCs, which tend to be in urban areas & so can probably compete pretty well for high-quality faculty with partner employment concerns especially, are probably in the same position.

I can’t remember if I’ve shared this with the lot of you before or not, but my department was in the completely unprecedented position this spring of interviewing on campus *four* outstanding young scholars, although unfortunately we could offer only one job. All four were as terrific in person as they had been in their Skype interviews. All four gave very good job talks, and all four made convincing cases for why we should hire each one of them. (How many searches have you faculty types been in on where that’s happened? I’ve never seen it before.)

I guess this is what really grinds my (flying car’s) gears about these claims about how ridiculously out of date education is, and how we haven’t changed anything in the past 930 years, etc.: the people who make these sweeping claims have clearly not been involved in any graduate education nor in any faculty hiring over the past 20+ years, maybe 40 years.

What we’re seeing is clearly a great deal of ressentiment that 1) education has not turned out to be something that is either infinitely scalable nor something that we can outsource to Bangalore, and 2) that not every last American worker can be roughed up, dis-organized, pension-robbed, and threatened with firing and/or outsourcing.

What’s super-depressing is the fact that many of the sorts of people who are our nominal “leaders” have decided to drink the moustache-flavored Kool-Aid instead of trying to explain to people what the difference is between universities and high schools or trade schools, in that we are here to produce new knowledge, and we are the experts in our fields.

Add to the list above the #3 ressentiment: this is more evidence that we live in the age of anti-expertise, where the expert is always the pointless defender of non-existent expertise and the World-Is-Flatters rule.

For more rants on all of the above, in addition to Jonathan Rees, see Undine and also Leslie M-B at The Clutter Museum, who is taking on the Preznit of her own uni, for realz.

Sorry to have missed these other critiques of the mooks and their MOOCs, but I’ve been on vacation. Even cowgirls get the blues.

“Massive online courses provide disruptive competition to the status quo,” Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Centre on Education Policy at Brookings, said. “Would you rather listen to a lecture about Shakespeare from not only the world’s best Shakespeare scholar but one of the world’s best teachers and do it online, or, you know, listen to the third-rate person that’s provided by your community college?”

Why is there this assumption that the person teaching at the community college is ‘third rate’? My grad school cohort has placed people all up and down the ladder in terms of prestige and privilege in higher ed. Some of us are at Princeton or other Ivies while others are at Big Ten, Liberal Arts Colleges, or State Colleges like myself. We are all pretty damn good, but the ones who ended up at community colleges did so by choice, and are committed to being excellent teachers. I see nothing third rate about that.

It’s in the blog section, so not behind the paywall.

I love the phrase “associate vice hominids.” Will have to figure out how to use that some time in conversation with an actual human being.