“Democrats tend to lean toward public institutions because they should have a public-serving mission,” he said. “Not all of them act that way, but most do.”
In an article for Salon last year, writer Andrew Leonard called deeply conservative governors Rick Scott, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker “the three horsemen of the MOOC apocalypse.”
But one of the most high-profile attempts at bringing MOOCs into mainstream education has been in the liberal state of California, under its Democratic governor Jerry Brown.
At San Jose State University, a highly-touted agreement with the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity quickly fizzled when nearly half of the students enrolled in their elementary statistics MOOC failed to pass the course.
The partnership has since made a comeback of sorts, but the experience led Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun to call MOOCs a “lousy product.”
The demand for education in California is outgrowing the space and money available on its campuses, Poulin said, leading to such experiments with online learning in lieu of charging students more tuition.
“While Republicans may be more vocal in their criticisms of public higher education, the option of raising tuition and fees is becoming less palatable to both parties,” he said.
At the federal level, Julie Peller, director of federal policy at the Lumina Foundation and a former Capitol Hill staffer, said that there continues to be a lack of understanding among members of congress on both sides of the aisle as to how sophisticated online learning has become, and who it is meant to serve.
To combat the lack of knowledge, Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D, created a congressional e-learning caucus in 2011.
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