MOOC Points

What is MOOC? The short answer: distance education meets the Internet. The slightly longer answer as per Wikipedia:
“A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs).”

Many top universities are on board and have their own MOOC courses: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon to name a few. But many in education question the efficacy of online education, and ask whether face to face interactions can ever be replaced. Of course, many dismiss their concerns saying that being in the education business, the critics have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

So it was kind of amusing to see the tables being turned with a couple of critics of MOOC questioning both the motives and “double standards” of the biggest enablers of MOOC (not Yahoo! or Google, but tech companies in general). Scott Newstok cites Yahoo!’s notorious decision to revoke the work-from-home option for its employees. He goes on to ask:
“Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.”
Alan Jacobs adds:
“The famous amenities of Google’s campus are there so employees will want to be at work as much as possible.”
Jacobs then wonders whether the same tech companies which prefer their best and brightest coming to office, interacting in office might then be pushing for MOOC because they are:
“not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so.”

So has the MOOC debate just degenerated into a preserve existing jobs v/s make money discussion? Has it shifted from focusing on the effectiveness (or lack of it) to questioning the motives of the players?

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