You would be living under an educational rock if you didn’t realize how massive open online courses, known more commonly as MOOCs, have given students around the world the opportunity to take courses over the Internet from some of the best professors of those subjects at elite universities like M.I.T., Stanford, Harvard, and so on.
One of the most famous MOOCs offered for free in the spring 2011 semester was an electrical circuits course at M.I.T. It wasn’t exactly easy. While tens of thousands of students enrolled in the course offered by Anant Agarwal and only about 7,200 completed it successfully, that’s higher than the total number of students who have passed the class on campus in several decades.
But now, only a few years after MOOCs exploded onto the university scene, there’s somewhat of a backlash. The Philosophy Department at San Jose State University in California refused to allow its students to take a course developed by edX featuring Harvard government Professor Michael Sandel’s survey course entitled “Justice,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
In an open letter to the Harvard professor, the department said they didn’t want to enable what they see as a push to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”
“In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience,” they continued, “we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”
And at a cross-disciplinary conference in Milwaukee over the weekend, Rita Raley, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said advances in technology had “reconditioned the idea of the university into that of an educational enterprise that delivers content through big platforms on demand,” according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here.
The misguided views of online content deliverers
As we reported, a proposal for an online charter school in 18 districts in Illinois’s Fox River valley wasn’t greeted with open arms by local boards of education (here, here). Since that time, all 18 districts have rejected the proposal, and the charter school operators plan to appeal to the Illinois State Charter School Commission, which can overrule the democratic votes of the local boards of education.
In addition, new legislation (HB0494) introduced in Illinois would create a three-year moratorium on virtual charter schools in the state, the Daily Herald reported. “We need to put the brakes on it to make sure it’s fluid,” the paper quoted state Rep Linda Chapa LaVia, Democrat of Aurora, as saying, referring to how the charter school would operate. The bill passed the House, 80-36 (1 abstention), and just today passed the Senate Education Committee, 9-3 (1 abstention).
The denial of the virtual charter school by all 18 districts, most of them by unanimous vote, and the positive movement of HB0494 in the Illinois General Assembly say Illinois’s citizenry doesn’t want this move to happen quite as fast as charter operators would like it to happen.
Look, I’m a big, big fan of the Khan Academy, which has created thousands of videos and developed lessons, practice problems, and other drills to help students learn the content they need to learn. In a word, it’s awesome. It’s a great tribute to Salman Khan, who came up with the idea after helping a relative in third grade with her math homework. This guy’s an absolute genius and truly cares about helping kids master content. But there’s a whole lot more to “education” than “content.” That is, an education is more than the sum of the individual courses that make it up.
This idea is lost on people and companies that would replace teachers with videos or avatars. The Elgin Courier-News quoted Virtual Learning Solutions President Sharnell Jackson, whose organization would run the Illinois Virtual Charter School @ Fox River Valley, as saying, “We will appeal, and we’re not going to give up. Online learning is here to stay, and we’re going to keep pushing.”
Again, I stress, my argument is not with online content delivery. It can assist teachers without limits. But when massive online courses turn our great universities into nothing more than vehicles for content, we cheapen our higher thinking. When videos turn our great schools into nothing more than babysitting and testing factories, we cheapen our kids’ lives. It’s almost fraudulent to tell Illinoisans that online “schools” can provide a complete “education” for our youngest citizens, even if Salman Khan and Michael Sandel taught every course themselves.
