Category Archives: Courses

Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come

Michael A. Peters, TruthOut, August 17, 2013– The New York Times dubbed 2012 the year of the MOOCs – massive open online courses. Suddenly the discourse of MOOCs and the future of the university hit the headlines with influential reports using the language of “the revolution to come.” Most of these reports hailed the changes and predicted a transformation of the delivery of teaching and higher education competition from private venture for-profit and not-for-profit partnerships. Rarely did the media focus on questions of pedagogy or academic labor. This article suggests that MOOCs should be seen within the framework of postindustrial education and cognitive capitalism where social media has become the dominant culture.
Ernst & Young’s Universities of the Future carries the line, “A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change.” The report suggests that the current Australian university model “will prove unviable in all but a few cases.” It identifies five major “drivers of change”: democratization of knowledge and access, contestability of markets and funding, digital technologies, global mobility and integration with industry.

With the driver “digital technologies,” the report mentions MOOCs specifically as transformative of the way education is delivered and accessed and how “value” is created by higher-education providers. Clearly, this feature also is systematically related to the other features. I do not have the space here to evaluate this report except to say that it is self-serving in that it favors the privatization of education.

In An Avalanche is Coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead, Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizv, like the Ernst and Young, report, use the language of “revolution” to describe the changes about to transform higher education. Lawrence Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University who writes the foreword, suggests that An Avalanche is Coming correctly predicts the impending transformation:

Just as we’ve seen the forces of technology and globalisation transform sectors such as media and communications or banking and finance over the last two decades, these forces may now transform higher education. The solid classical buildings of great universities may look permanent but the storms of change now threaten them.

Michael Barber, one-time education adviser to Tony Blair and now consultant for the giant education publisher Pearson, signals that the functions of the traditional university are being “unbundled” – which means that some universities will need to specialize solely in teaching. Barber and his colleagues mention emergent forms of the university: the elite university, the mass university, the niche university, the local university, the lifelong learning mechanism. For Barber and his colleagues, MOOCs are symbolic of an avalanche: “Just as an avalanche shapes the mountain, so the changes ahead will fundamentally alter the landscape for universities.” With the student consumer as king, the growth of MOOCs and a more global system that makes up a leading part of the growth of the knowledge economy, “the new world the learner” will choose an education in a global marketplace with an “eye trained on value.”

The New York Times “Schools for Tomorrow” Conference to be held September 17, 2013, focuses on “Virtual U: The Coming of Age of Online Education.” The opening plenary asks “Is Online Education The Great Equalizer?” and provides the following primer:

There is no doubt that we are in the middle of an online education revolution, which offers huge potential to broaden access to education and therefore, in theory, level the playing field for students from lower-income, lower-privileged backgrounds. But evidence to date shows that the increasing number of poorly designed courses could actually have the reverse effect and put vulnerable students at an even bigger disadvantage.

This is to be followed with the debate: “Has The University As An Institution Had Its Day?” for which this description is added:

Higher education has always been an array of autonomous institutions, each with their own courses, their own faculty, and their own requirements for their own degrees. But online education is starting to break down those lines, in ways that are likely to lead to a lot more shared courses, consortia and credit transfers. In addition, there are a growing number of companies (not schools) providing higher education courses outside the traditional higher education institutions. As we move towards the possibility of a multi-institution, multi-credit qualification, is the traditional higher education institution in danger of losing applicants, income and identity?

The next agenda is devoted to “new era business models” including “an increasing assortment of new ventures offering for-profit schools, for-profit online courses, tests, curricula, interactive whiteboard, learning management systems, paid-for verified certificates of achievement, e-books, e-tutoring, e-study groups and more.” And finally, the conference is to address “Gamechangers: How Will Online Education Revolutionalize [sic] What We Know And Understand About Learning?” with this orientation:

Traditionally, pedagogical research has been done in tiny groups; but new-generation classes of 60,000 students make it possible to do large scale testing and provide potentially game-changing research on how students learn best. Using the big data from online courses, we have access to new information about what pedagogical approaches work best. MOOCs, and many more traditional online classes, can track every keystroke, every homework assignment and every test answer a student provides. This can produce a huge amount of data on how long students pay attention to a lecture, where they get stuck in a problem set, what they do to get unstuck, what format and pacing of lectures, demonstrations, labs and quizzes lead to the best outcomes, and so on. How can we use Big Data for the good of the education profession, and not for “Big Brother”?

In “MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education” – a self-described “white paper” – Li Yuan and Stephen Powell embrace a balanced analysis that sees MOOCs as an extension of existing online learning approach, but one that has generated “significant interest from higher-education institutions and venture capitalists that see a business opportunity to be exploited” that offer scalability and new business models of open education, enabling the disaggregation “of teaching from assessment and accreditation for differential pricing and pursuit of marketing activities.” They embrace the theory of disruptive innovation (Bower & Christensen, 1995) to explain why some innovations can disrupt existing markets at the expense of incumbent players and suggest that current UK policy through a radical agenda allows “new, for-profit providers to enter the higher education market.”

Read More: TruthOut

George Mason University course to examine Trayvon Martin case

Holly Hobbs, Fairfax Times, July 18, 2013– As the nation reflects on the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a college course this fall will offer an academic look at the case’s impact outside of the courtroom.

George Mason University Professor Rutledge Dennis, a professor of sociology and anthropology, will teach “From Homer Plessy to Trayvon Martin: Issues in Race, Culture, and Politics,” which he said would look at historic cases involving race and their impacts on society. The course title has been abbreviated on Mason’s website: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics.

“I hope our students will get out of it a sense of how racial, political and cultural issues impact how we interact,” Dennis said.

While the course aims to introduce students to historic themes through a contemporary example, Dennis and the university garnered much criticism online, mostly from conservative bloggers and media outlets like The Daily Caller, The National Review and Red Alert Politics.

“I have received a lot of nasty, hateful emails about this course because people assume it’s a course [only] about Trayvon Martin,” Dennis said. “Trayvon Martin is just one case.”

The course begins with coverage of the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation of public facilities. Students also will study other historic cases, such as the 1931 arrests of the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The course includes a number of contemporary high-profile trials like the 1992 trials of Los Angeles police officers accused of beating construction worker Rodney King and the murder trial of former NFL running back O.J. Simpson, which ended in 1995.

Many of the trials included in the course syllabus occurred before most current undergraduate students were born. The Trayvon Martin case offers a current example and context for undergrads, Dennis said.

“The Trayvon Martin case is important academically because race and issues around race are academic issues,” Dennis said, adding that the humanities often study gender and class; so why not race? “While this case did not begin as a racial case, it ended as one.”

Mason Provost Peter Stearns says criticism of curriculum is not a common occurrence for the university, but it is also not unheard of.

“Regularly, university faculty deal with topics that have different viewpoints. [Previously] George Mason University has been accused of being too liberal and too conservative,” he said. “One of the challenges in teaching is you want to make sure students understand the historical context and themes. But we also want to make sure they can apply this knowledge to current issues.”

Dennis said he hopes his course will offer students the opportunity to debate why Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s trial sparked intense media coverage and debate.

“I think it got attention for many people because we have an unarmed teenager who was shot by someone of another ethnic group,” Dennis said. “Young black men have been taken advantage of by the system. … And this becomes, for many, another example of a young black man being taken advantage of by the system.”

As of Wednesday, 16 students had registered for Dennis’ class (AFAM 390), which is cross-listed as both an African and African American Studies and Sociology/Anthropology course.