LAPTOP U
Has the future of college moved online?
MAY 20, 2013 BY NATHAN HELLER
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all&mobify=0
This article poses different viewpoints on MOOCs. The one passage that resonated with me was on page 14 where Peter Burgard (Harvard professor of German) discusses how MOOCs will cause the slow demise of higher education. Here is the quote:
“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less povertystricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . .If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”