Professors’ open letter: MOOCs a ‘compromise of quality education’


SJSU professors said they wouldn’t oppose blended courses.

The latest professorial backlash against massive open online courses (MOOCs) comes from San Jose State University (SJSU), where just last month edX officials and MOOC advocates trumpeted the expansion of the online courses that have proven controversial in many circles of higher education.

Professors from SJSU’s philosophy department penned an open letter to Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor and the creator of a MOOC on Justice, saying that they wouldn’t adopt his MOOC because “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.”

SJSU’s battle with some of its faculty members comes just days after Duke University faculty voted against an initiative that would have granted college credits to Duke students who took classes in online classes using 2U, which, unlike MOOCs, only hosts hundreds of students rather than tens or hundreds of thousands.

The university’s philosophy professors wrote that the mainstreaming of MOOCs would lead to deep stratification in higher education. One kind of school would be “well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of videotaped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant.”

See the edX president’s comments that irked some professors on Page 2…

The philosophy professors said they would not oppose the integration of “blended” courses, but stood firmly against “one-size-fits-all” MOOCs as a technology that would erode the institution’s educational quality.

The university announced April 10 that it would expand its edX pilot program that will make the edX engineering class available to as many as 11 of the 23 California State University system schools, reaching thousands of students across the state.

edX President Anat Agarwal said the traditional model of lecturing — or “spouting content,” as he said — doesn’t fit today’s digitally minded college student. That, he said, is largely why universities have adopted MOOCs.

edX is a nonprofit online learning platform established in 2009 by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to provide high-quality education for free to students around the world. Agarwal said the nonprofit would charge a licensing fee for use of their web-based learning platform, but that “hopefully it will be a net win for everybody” while reducing college costs.

Qayoumi said the effort to expand the use of edX in California colleges and universities was in part driven by the completion rate in the pilot program’s blended classes. Nine in 10 students completed that class, Qayoumi said, while just six in 10 students completed the traditional engineering course.

“We’re definitely experiencing a breakthrough in this area,” he said. “I believe the future of public universities rests in our ability to adapt …  and collaborate. … Our students brimming with such potential and drive deserve nothing less.”

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