My MOOCshake Brings All The Boys to the Yard

MOOCs, man. That's the acronym I've heard the most lately. In STEM meetings. In Academic Tech meetings. On blogs. In articles on Higher Ed.

I've been in a MOOC, as a student. It was a literature MOOC done through Coursera.

It sucked.

No interaction with the professor. Lacking interaction with peers. Sure, there are videos of the professor talking, and those are generally well done, but I can't ask questions of a video. A video can't check in on the work that I'm doing. In the MOOC I was in, there was really no metric of success other than handing the assignment in.

At a time when research (and actions at the college) are moving toward increased student contact, toward 'high touch' approaches, the tilting of attention towards MOOCs is counter-intuitive.

Unless, of course, all intuition is centered around tuition. And cost.

It's all about the money, folks. What? I can register 500, 1,200, 16,000 students in a course with a single professor? Well, gee...that sure seems cost effective. Moving from a workforce of full-time, tenured profs to mostly adjunct to (maybe) MOOCs picking up a lot of the burden.... We're headed in the wrong direction.

The students I see every day would not benefit from a MOOC for remedial math or English or ESL. These students need face-to-face contact. They need to be put in touch with someone who cares about them, who checks in on them, and who puts them in contact with tangible resources (tutoring, library, disability resources, etc.) on campus.

If there's no campus, there are no tangible resources. There is no face-to-face.

But there's low overhead. Why pay 5 of me to teach 15 classes when one MOOC can handle it all--for a dramatically cheaper price-point? Because only about 10% of students are successful in MOOCs. And it's not even clear what 'success' actually means there.

In my classes, the success rate is a lot higher than 10%.

Who are these community colleges supposed to be serving anyway? Last I checked, it wasn't publisher and business entities. Then again, I'm probably naive.