“If you dislike annoying techno-utopian hype, you’re going to love Jonathan Rees’s anti-MOOC rant that Slate recently published,” Matthew Yglesias writes on Slate’s Moneybox blog. “And I think it’s fair to say that Rees raises a number of very legitimate concerns that MOOCtimists are giving short-shrift to the benefits of in-person education. At the same time, as Jonathan Chait points out a lot of Reese’s piece also seems to consist of naked appeals to the class interests of college professors. There are some interesting dynamics around this because academia has long been a stronghold of left-wing political ideas, and many people have savored the irony that you’re more likely to hear the case for socialism from a professor or a graduate student than from an actual member of the working class. But there was a very recent interesting N+1 article making the case that the growing precarity of university labor means that it now does make sense to explicitly construct left-wing politics as the class politics of professors and intellectuals.”
- What does higher-ed look like in 2023? - January 5, 2015
- Are ed-tech startups a bubble that’s ready to burst? - January 1, 2015
- Are MOOCs really dead? - August 28, 2014