It's understandable why Brown would want to participate in Coursera. The rhetoric surrounding Coursera and other massive open online courses - MOOCs - is certainly lofty. Advocates promise nothing less than the democratization of education, liberating the world's best educators and thinkers from the ivory tower and making their material available to students in the developing world and non-traditional students. The reality of MOOCs, however, does not live up to the rhetoric.
According to a July 2012 article in the New York Times, MOOCs consist of "online materials broken into manageable chunks, with short video segments, interactive quizzes and other activities." None of these are new technologies. Astute observers have noted that college professors have condensed their knowledge into a suitable pedagogical format divided into "manageable chunks" - they're called textbooks. Libraries have made these materials freely and readily available to non-traditional students for generations, yet there's still demand for university education.
While streaming video recordings are admittedly relatively new technologies, they don't seem to be inherently transformative. Educational television has been around for decades, with limited impact. In fact, the invention of the radio and the invention of television resulted in similar claims regarding educational value, but brick-and-mortar universities thrived during the television era. Distance learning technologies have demonstrated a historical inability to replace in-person university education, and there's no reason to believe that MOOCs will be any different.
Supporters of MOOCs suggest that employers will value the "certificates of completion" provided by these programs as equivalent to a university degree. In response to this claim, it is enlightening to list the elements of a university education that are not provided by MOOCs. Importantly, MOOCs do not provide trustworthy assessment of student work.
In August 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that humanities courses offered by Coursera have seen many instances of plagiarism, including blatant acts of academic misconduct such as copying from Wikipedia. Udacity, another MOOC provider, has announced plans to offer in-person testing for a fee at a number of worldwide testing centers, but such a scheme contradicts the MOOC model.
MOOCs also cannot provide opportunities for directed independent study and research and co-curricular and extracurricular activities, which are heavily valued by employers. Given that these critical elements of a university education are absent from Coursera, it is perhaps unsurprising that these supposed economic benefits are a promise for the future and not a reality.
Ian Eppler '13 would rather endure Providence weather than use Coursera. He can be contacted at ian_eppler@brown.edu.
