My year in MOOCs


I walked into the evening cocktail hour at the recent American Philosophical Association (APA) Eastern Division Meeting even more self-conscious than the job-hunting graduate students nervously prowling the halls, Jonathan Haber writes in Slate.

For they at least had Ph.D.s, while my philosophical training consisted of just one year of intense study—study conducted entirely online, facilitated by massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of free learning.

I was attending APA as the self-assigned “final exam” for my Degree of Freedom One Year BA project, an experiment designed to determine whether it was possible to learn the equivalent of a four-year liberal arts bachelor’s program in just 12 months using the online classes that have been in the news so much over the last two years.

In fact, it was those very news stories that inspired my project. For in 2012, declared the “Year of the MOOC” by the New York Times, enthusiasm for massive open courses was running high.

MOOC boosters (from Thomas Friedman to Udacity Founder Sebastian Thrun) were talking about an academy about to be disrupted to its foundations. And elected officials in California and Florida answered by introducing legislation that would give college credit to students taking them.

By the end of my “sophomore year,” in June of 2013, however, a MOOC backlash had set in, with educators questioning the value of a teaching method where less than one in 10 of those who enroll complete a course. Legislation that proposed granting credit for MOOCs was shelved or watered down amid complaints that MOOCs (many offered by venture-backed companies) might decimate the educational landscape in order to turn a profit for investors.

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