Thank you, Benjamin Lima, for providing a sane response to the wild speculation that MOOCs are going to put colleges out of business. Lima's article is so good that it's hard not to quote most of it. Be sure to read it for yourself (hat tip: Marginal Revolution). Here are a few things that really resonated with me:
A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together:
- The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
- The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
- The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a "better" or highly ranked college.
- The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and "school spirit."
...I think it’s immediately apparent that the first type of goods—the curriculum—is by far the most vulnerable to disruption from the internet. Highly self-motivated students (i.e., Abraham Lincoln) have always been able to teach themselves, given the resources, and the internet is simply going to accelerate and expand this opportunity to anyone in the world who has an internet connection.
...A college course can be unbundled into two separate functions: first, there is the transfer of knowledge to the student, and second, there is the evaluation and feedback of student work.
...With MOOCs, now anyone in the world with an internet connection can download and watch lectures from eminent experts at top universities, for free, and hundreds of thousands have done so. This is indeed a huge leap forward in the area of knowledge transfer. But the equivalent leap in the area of evaluation and feedback has not yet taken place.
Really, don't miss reading the whole article for yourself. Rightly called out, MOOCs are not disrupting 2, 3, and 4 (the extra-curriculum, the signaling process, and the college experience)--at least not yet. Even the curriculum is in the nascent stages of disruption. That is, there isn't much of a guide toward proficiency in a certain subject yet. Something in Winston Churchill's biography
"I need someone to point out some specific subject and to direct my reading in that subject. The desultory reading I have so far indulged in has only resulted in a jumple of disconnected and ill-sorted facts."
Saylor.org is making a first stab at guidance, but such an effort has yet to be adopted by more online education providers. The individual course, however, is clearly being disrupted in an awesome way. Knowledge transfer from professors at top-tier school is available to anyone who wants to watch and listen.
Of course, real learning requires a feedback loop, and this is where MOOCs are beginning to experiment. The Great Courses and iTunes U has a lot of breadth in their knowledge base but feedback is conspicuously absent. Udacity and Coursera both use forums for student-driven discussion and direction, and use automated grading and peer evaluations for feedback. Coursera goes a step further by enforcing assignment deadlines as a way to try to keep a peer class together. So MOOCs are driving quickly toward 1, curriculum disruption.
Might MOOCs one day take on 2 and 3? Of course, and soon. Many are broaching those areas now and will be successful.
As for 4, well, it's hard to say. Many college students don't get that even in off-line university experiences today. I got it when I lived on campus; I recall those times fondly. But it was out of reach when I commuted to college and worked 32 hours a week. And my husband never got the experience nor wanted it. He didn't go to college until he was in his mid-30s and the "college experience" just wasn't part of the package he was after.
Still, even if you discount 4 and give a healthy "check plus" to MOOCs for 1, colleges won't be going out of business anytime soon! Rather, the two will become complements in one sense, and goal-directed alternatives in another.
