He is currently musing on the cost of college, the decline in college enrollments, and the general purpose of college in today’s society.  How are the current forces in society, culture and policy shaping the future of the system?

What does this kind of projection tell policymakers?  The regional growth formula of “meds and eds” would still work, perhaps.  Or that they should simply prepare for greater economic inequality, and assume education no longer reduces class divisions.

I responded on his blog, but am posting my response here as well.  My focus is on the argument that college is a waste of time and money, and people should forego it.  There is lots to unpack in that argument, but here are some touchstones.

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1) Books like DIY U or Don’t Go Back to School are written from a very privileged position: both Kamenetz and Stark have extensive education backgrounds from prestigious universities. The “I went to school, and it was a waste for me” is disingenuous; that’s a personal belief that waxes dangerous if applied without context of environment . If they were picking themselves up by their bootstraps, they were already wearing Doc Martens.
2) If college is about getting jobs (some to a lot of it has to be by necessity), it is a broken model if the jobs are dramatically shifting. But so are vocations if we are moving toward this “knowledge economy” everyone speaks of as if it’s ethereal. Employers say they want people with critical and divergent thinking skills, people who are well-rounded and understand the ability to go from concrete to abstract back to concrete. That is the definition of education rather than training, so why are the new initiatives looking at training under the guise of “lifelong learning”?
3) The MOOCing population is well-educated and self-motivated. That will likely change as MOOCs start to offer credit as being done at SJSU and now looking like GATech, but it will only change for those private-private-public partnerships. Autodidacts don’t necessarily need the scaffolding and social learning that the majority of people do in order to retain and grow knowledge and wisdom. I hope that research on these credit-offering MOOCs goes past direct outcomes from the course and into longitudinal work on the effect
4) College does not have to be this expensive, and the MOOC does not have to be the Obi Wan Kenobi Only Hope of education. People point to the decline in public subsidy, and that is one argument, but that’s not coming back any time soon. Education can run as a government rather than a business, more in the line of Jerry Brown’s current CA budget that seeks to balance the ebb and flow of tax revenue. I am not a fan of Teach for America, but the AmeriCorps model of public service has tradition in our society. Of course, if there are no public structures to dedicate the first years of workforce experience to (and it’s quite a stretch to call TFA a public service), we are relegated to lectures brought to us by our good friends at AT&T.

This is evident at a conference like the American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting, happening right now in San Francisco, where thousands of educators are presenting their research findings to thousands of attendees.  The sheer volume of papers and presentations on topical issues across the various strata of education is overwhelming, and AERA has worked diligently to divide their membership mass into divisions and special interest groups so that individuals can find field-specific topics to utilize for their scholarship or to share their scholarship.

I want to ask the question but does it matter? and then cut to the page break, being all provocative and such.  That’s not the right question, because it does matter.  It matters a lot.  But how much of a difference is it truly making? 

I had the opportunity to listen to Leonard Waks and Gert Biesta speak on the state of higher education in an increasingly market-friendly society, a definition many use the phrase neoliberal* to define.  These scholars, with very different perspectives on their field, are luminaries in the research literature, popping up consistently throughout past and present research.  I agreed with much of what they said, disagreed with some, and approached both about access to the full work they presented (and both were very kind and obliging).  I tweeted some of the touchstone points I took from their sessions (though I’m doing a lot less of that, for reasons I should explore later), and left the day at AERA thinking about how their work plays into my scholarship, and how my scholarship plays into the overall discourse in the field.

And then I happen across Charlie Rose’s recent exploration of MOOCs (via Bryan Alexander) and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s infographic on the main players in the MOOC world, and note an almost exclusive lack of connection to the developing research shown at a place like AERA.

(NOTE:  The conference did get some mention in a NYTimes op-ed about the gap between affluent and less-affluent students regarding learning outcomes, but this mention suggested the education research was somewhat to blame for the gap, either explicitly through failed initiatives or implicitly because the education/poverty theme of AERA comes 30 years after A Nation At Risk, yet outcomes for impoverished students have remained stagnant while those for affluent students have risen considerably.)

The MOOC as we think of it is less than two years old, and it’s spoken ancestry (Khan Academy) is only two years older than that.  The flipped classroom, the pedagogical model associated with both MOOCs and Khan Academy, is no older than the MOOC.  Yet these three models/platforms/enterprises have received an unprecedented amount of media coverage and institutional focus.  Outside research on these endeavors is trickling in, though we can expect a deluge soon.

And perhaps that’s the issue.  The archetype of research involves careful consideration, protection of subjects, institutional and peer review, deliberation, redefinition, historical precedent and future outcome.  It takes time to put those elements together in a thoughtful way that furthers the knowledge and discussion within a field.  For MOOC research, that means at least a year between identifying the phenomenon and being able to publish research that links to prior work and passes peer review.  Research is a slow cooker, an entity where time is required for it to function as it’s intended.

If MOOCs/KA/Flipping are ahistorical, a tie to any research is irrelevant.  Sal Khan is on the record multiple times as saying education research either states the obvious (several times in his book he notes that research exists on something he believes, but he figured it out without consulting the research), or it is so hyper-specific it bears no utility for larger use.   The seminal literature on the flipped classroom contains no citations, references or bibliography.  The MOOC developers and institutional presidents are more in concert with research (perhaps because of their roots as professors), but even that causes question:  edX’s Anant Agarwal cites research from 1972 as imperative to the understanding of the 2013 MOOC movement.  Perhaps the individuals at the center of these movements are keeping up with the emerging research in the field, but there is no evidence to suggest it.  Education policy is moving in one direction, and research is moving in a perpendicular direction.

What can be done?  I would love to know.  At an AERA session entitled Neoliberal Education and Political Subjectivity, Eva Reimers of Linkoping University (Sweden) noted the problems inherent in research critical of or resistant to dominant ideologies:  (paraphrase) by using the terms and definitions of the dominant ideology, we are providing them the power as a structure that we question. At the same time, the only suggestion on how to combat these movements was to work within them to promote the ideas and scholarship emerging from the research.  It is a good idea, though organizational leadership and change scholarship indicates a reluctance or unwillingness for administrators and those in power to open their doors to dissenting opinion if the existing system seems to be working.  A faster stream of publishing might seem ideal, but the peer review system is built on a donation of time and the reflection process necessary for all aspects of research is much of what makes research viable.  If we as a society continue to feel an insatiable need to consume content, it is the ahistorical stuff that seems to digest easily that will win the day.

*On Neoliberal, the word is thrown around quite often by critical theorists and pedagogues, to the point it has become an all-encompassing spectre of things wrong with society.  I struggle to define it adequately, and for now choose not to use it.

Certainly, a lot of hype accompanied the MOOC…more hype than for any EdTech innovation in education history, and perhaps more hype than for any learning model (or even agent of change) in higher education history. Spurred by a media narrative focused on a broken educational system, the MOOC was heralded not only as a means of providing cost-efficient education, but doing it through the best universities and professors in the world, for the entire world, in a way that would break down existing conventions of class and privilege. In short, MOOCs could crumble a bloated ivory tower while providing an education of higher-than-existing quality to individuals from around the world, eradicating student debt all the while.

Use of the hype cycle in discussion of MOOCs looked at the learning model as a present artifact that needed attachment to a history. That history could be MIT’s OpenCourseware, Columbia’s Fathom, Yale & Stanford’s AllLearn, the use of television in education (such as Nebraska Educational Telecommunications of the 1960s), the use of radio in education, or even the establishment of correspondence-based schools in the late 19th Century (such as Cornell University’s satellite school of correspondence). None of these innovations proved to be game-changers for higher education; moreover, almost all of the above were deemed failures by the developing institutions.

But the MOOC is ahistorical, borne of an intersection of machine learning, computer science and a TED talk by Sal Khan. It cannot be rated entirely on the history of similar distance education ventures, if at all.

If 2012 was The Year of the MOOC, one would expect 2013 to begin the MOOC’s path into trough of disillusionment. And to be fair, the MOOC has encountered more criticism* from a wider array of thinkers and researchers since The Year of the MOOC. But the hype continues to soar. Education continues to be broken. MOOCs continue to focus on their model successes. And history’s biggest backer of education is maneuvering to make the MOOC more than a flash in the pan.

Since The Year of the MOOC, state and federal governments have proposed and/or enacted these policies:

• A rethinking of college accreditation, either through linking federal aid to student outcomes/value/affordability, or establishing a separate accreditation model for education initiatives based on “performance and results” (State of The Union – Supplemental Materials)
• State funding for the development and establishment of online courses designed to assist students in subject remediation and dissolve wait-lists for college courses (State of California 2013-2014 Budget)
• State legislation designed to require colleges to accept a number of MOOC courses for campus credit (CA Senate Bill 520)
• State legislation designed to create a fourth system of higher education in California, the New University of California, which would not offer any courses but provide credit based on examinations (CA Assembly Bill 1306)
• State legislation designed to allow a state organization to accredit individual courses provided through organizations rather than universities (Florida Senate Bill 904)

There’s more — Christopher Newfield has a great rundown at his blog — but the list above has garnered substantial media attention and political movement. The California State University system continues to utilize MOOC providers in offering courses, extending an agreement with EdX for 11 CSU schools to offer a course in Circuits & Electronics, as well as the test-run of three remedial courses through the Udacity platform, courses developed and implemented with public money. This wave of political action has been met with high-level calls for a rethinking of college accreditation in our rapidly changing world.

This is not symbolic of a trough of disillusionment, but rather a springboard into a new reality. The concept of higher education is changing, fast. Before the ink is dry on the first round of peer-reviewed MOOC research, political movements are shaping a higher education landscape designed to support the MOOC and its endeavors. Whether the talk of globalized, democratic education is hype and bound to slide down, the landscape has changed, even if the legislators have yet to sign the contract.

What does it mean? Idle speculation isn’t helpful. But it would be wise to heed the advice of George Veletsianos and make sure to have a voice at the table of decision-makers who are designing this future of education.

* – I hate pointing this out, but criticism is not a bad thing. A critical perspective is an integral part of developing any system, structure, idea, theory, etc.

In my days of teaching creative writing, it used to be quite the stressor to get smart, motivated teenagers to take notes of their plots and characters.  These were students used to doing everything right and being able to beat the system just with what was stored in their heads.  I explained that creative writing was not about beating a system, and the more complex a story and a group of characters became, the more important it was to create a system where you could record those complexities so you could return to it as the story developed.  Some listened right away and got to work.  Some needed trial and error before coming to me so we could devise strategies.  Some never listened and became increasingly frustrated.  In the end, it was more likely for someone from the first or second group to have a coherent, rich story than someone from the third group.

I think about this as I read more literature on the history of MOOCs as described by the MOOC creators.  MOOC developers don’t spend a lot of time writing about this, which is concerning because just like any learning model, MOOCs deserve a thorough literature review prior to implementation (if a middle school teacher has to link a lesson on Where the Red Fern Grows to the saturation of various competencies and skills as dictated by the state department of education, an organization pining to offer courses for more than enrichment should be held to a similar standard).  I don’t necessarily blame them for not doing this on their own; popular media has not pressed the issue (and would rather run the narrative that MOOCs are ordained learning models that will democratize/economize/save education), and the MOOC craze has exploded to the point that I don’t expect Sebastian Thrun or Andrew Ng or Daphne Koller to sit down and comb through the prior research; they have other fish to fry.

But I’m doing it.  And I’m running into a problem.  First off, Thrun, Ng, and even Stanford’s Class2Go link their pedagogical practices to Salman Khan.  This isn’t uncommon or unexpected; Khan started his Academy in 2009, so it was fresh in the minds of these instructors and developers.  There is no written link as of yet between Khan and AI or Machine Learning, though Khan Academy’s movement toward data aggregation and personalized learning (which, as I will get into many times soon, sounds much better than it is) makes sense in an AI context. Khan recently published a pseudo-autobiography, the sort of book that takes a brief look at his history but focuses more on his vision for education.  And Khan puts a lot of stock into the idea that long lectures are not an effective learning model, so breaking up those lectures is paramount.  He cites some research, but not much, and in a number of cases cites the research as so (I am paraphrasing here): Yes, the research says this, but I/We/People figured this out on their own.  I just did this intuitively.  

First off, Khan is right — long lectures are not effective.  The problem is, lectures are not effective.  Or at least lectures are not an effective instrument in which to push a cornucopia of content onto a student.  Khan is drawing from research at the dawn of the cognitive revolution, a period in the late 60s and early 70s when psychologists (many of whom were working for the military) realized that people gained knowledge internally and a didactic exercise of that information was not going to be a reliable indicator of what was learned.  Research of the time looked at how people gain tacit knowledge, which is why future research looked at various learning styles and modalities for projecting information (whether it be auditory, literary, kinesthetic, visual, etc.).

This is what frustrated me about Anant Agarwal walking around a Future of Higher Education conference last month citing a paper from 1972.  There’s a ton of current research out there that builds on the cognitive revolution, realizing its importance but taking that focus to greater levels:  social learning theory, constructivism, connectivism.  Basic cognitive learning is part of it, but it’s not all of it, and we have 40+ years of research to prove that.  You wouldn’t know it from looking at the key players in the game today, though.  And that’s a problem.  There is a rich literature about distance education, online learning, learning theory and pedagogical models that notes the trials and errors since the cognitive revolution, trials and errors that sought to further the field:  PLATO, AllLearn, OpenCourseWare, Connectivism & Connective Knowledge.  MOOCs to this point have not shown an interest in bettering learning, but rather in promoting scale and access.  The approach from Khan Academy, xMOOCs and things like Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud is barren of contemporary pedagogy:  give students a computer and vetted content.  Why not give them a Kindle and a universal library pass?

I truly believe people like Khan, Ng, Koller, Thrun, and Mitra want to make the world a better place and see education as a catalyst, and believe in their systems.  I just hope someone in their camps takes a month to go to the library and read on the history.  Because as this phenomenon continues to explode, the $$$ backing it wants to get a return on its investment, and it doesn’t care whether the learning theory behind the model is outdated.

There’s lots of good academic reading in this field — Terry Anderson, John Daniel, Tony Bates — but Nipper comes up in all of it.

I am not the first person to take issue with TED; both Evgeny Morozov and Audrey Watters pinpoint questions that should be asked about the TED spectacle.  One such question is that of rigor.  A person stands up at TED, has 15-20 minutes to speak, utilizes Public Speaking 101 tricks and parlance to create an evocative presentation, and is heralded with applause at the conclusion.  There is no question and answer session, no challenges to the brilliant ideas, no discussion or debate.  Presenters get an idealized environment to share their ideas with a global audience, cultural capital and validity built into the TED mechanism.  Viewers get to consume the ideas in rapid succession (either during TED or at the website), without any structure for conscious debate.

When an edutainment a speaker colloquium does not provide or promote a space for thoughtful interactive debate, the implicit position is that those at the colloquium are Right and True.  When a colloquium has the kind of cache as TED has generated in just a few short years (how’d that happen, btw?), such Truth becomes Gospel.  And that is the danger point, a place where a CNN Editor feels compelled to question the necessity of teachers (and if you think the article is tough on teachers, the caption to the accompanying video is the coup d’etat:  Want to fix education?  Ditch Teachers) based on a 15 minute presentation.  From a Google Search on Richard Galant, I can find no background in education upon which he can rigorously second the claims he puts on education.  The last paragraph is my favorite, and it’s a doozy:

Traditional education stresses tests and punishments, two things that Mitra said causes the brain to shut down its rational processes and surrender to fear. Adopting a method closer to that of grandparents, who shower children with admiration, is “the opposite of the parent method,” which relies on threats, Mitra said.

Now, Mitra has a good deal of published research on his “Hole in the Wall” schools.  And when Mitra says that students learn best from one another, well, there is a lot of truth to that.  But it’s not that simple.  Having seen some of Mitra’s research, I wonder if he dumbed it down for TED, or if he really believes that we should abandon schooling (Mitra is yet another person who buys into the Industrial Revolution argument about the history of education, an argument that only seems to pop up in educational technology literature, not in the ed theory stuff). But that paragraph Galant applies to the situation, in context with his headline and his caption (and don’t think that Galant, an editor, had nothing to do with the title or caption), is egregious.  I taught for a decade, have been involved in education for almost all of my adult life, and have met hundreds of teachers.  None of those teachers a) got into teaching to stress tests and punishment, or b) created a scholastic environment that stressed tests and punishment.  Teachers usually want to do the opposite; create a positive environment where students can excel, and create interesting curriculum and activities to help in that manner.  So to blame teachers, who in the past 30 years have seen their professionalism and autonomy impeded in a great degree by administrations and policymakers, to blame them for tests and punishment, shows a shallowness of argument only superseded by the regurgitation of a TED talk as Gospel truth.

I’m not going to go all-out against Mitra.  Again, students learn best from each other.  This is nothing new in educational research.  Where I will question him is in regards to the need for instruction and framing.  The big buzz with education right now talks about how content is irrelevant in a networked world, so competencies and abilities to utilize content are paramount.  Again, this isn’t new…this is an argument that started over 20 years ago, yet last year started to get traction (which makes you question motivation for adopting the argument). But the pioneers of the argument saw the role of instructor as vital to the apparatus, and that role had nothing to do with content delivery or sage on the stage.  Rather, the job of an instructor was to connect content to context through real-world application, problem-solving, environment, and assisting with knowledge gaps, among other things.

And that’s where A Private Universe is important.  In the case study shown, a girl considered exemplary by standards and testing has a great deal of trouble explaining the seasons, and makes up arguments for her belief to work in the context of science.  Even after she is presented with the scientifically proven explanation for seasons, she still cannot let go of preconceived notions, notions that were developed through a number of factors:  environment, logic gaps, prior teachers.  If we let go of teachers and go straight to computers that track progress and utilize Big Data, they will determine if a student is wrong about how the seasons work.  And they will provide the information.  But what happens when the student is left alone to contextualize, interpret, put into action, etc?  According to A Private Universe, that student doesn’t improve.  That’s where the teacher steps in.  That’s just one place the teacher steps in.

My focus as a researcher is on how massive learning technologies affect instruction and the instructor; contemporary learning theory puts a great deal of importance on creating a learning environment (that could turn into a community), experiencing learning through authentic hands-on projects, and contextualizing information.  xMOOCs, as they have been sold, herald pedagogy but present a learning system of short videos and interactive quizzes, which original MOOC visionary George Siemens labels a return to 1960s educational theory and pedagogy*.

*If you didn’t click that link, do it.  Siemens has a fantastic idea on how MOOCs could utilize gaming theory from World of Warcraft or Call of Duty in establishing grouping for projects, the sort of thing that education professor and community learning researcher Linda Polin sees as an authentic use of gamification in learning.

Anyone thinking Siemens’ quote is overly critical or cynical should view Rivand’s direct quote of Anant Agarwal, the director of MOOC provider EdX:

EdX President Anant Agarwal said there is certain learning sciences research that many faculty, including himself, had long ignored as they focused on their own disciplinary fields.  “To me, these papers should be must-reads,” he said, citing specifically a 1972 study of memory. 

The paper Agarwal specifically cites is a bridge paper between the psychological/educational theories of behaviorism and cognitive thinking, where researchers began moving away from an idea that we could not understand how learning or the brain worked (and therefore should only study how stimuli manifest externally, which means learning is a conditioning/training exercise) into seeing learning as observational and understanding that the brain processes and treats information in different ways based on different methods and styles (which leads to Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking works of 30 years ago).  While this specific article is not considered canonical in the field, it hits a lot of the same notes as work that pushed psychologists (whose theories led to the birth of educational theory) away from stimulus-based learning into observational and intuitive learning.

There is one big problem here, though.  Agarwal is an AI guy.  Were I to suddenly have prestige in a field many others study, and I heralded a paper from 40+ years ago as must-read, I likely would be missing some of the important things that have happened in AI over the past 40 years.  I know cinema is not the most reliable indicator of progress, but if you view HAL in 2001:  A Space Odyssey, it’s kind of a big computer.

Kubrick saw the movement of computing in the 1960s, with big mainframes and the insertion/removal of cards/components and, understanding that things often get bigger, assumed computers would be huge by 2001.  The same thing goes for Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, where characters have to enter into Mother in order to fully utilize her information.

Obviously, things are different today.  And if that’s the case in computer science and AI, wouldn’t it stand to reason that important changes have happened in educational theory, pedagogy and learning over the past 41 years?  Changes that might make a behaviorist/cognitivist approach to learning look a lot like huge mainframe computers, unwieldy and behind the times?

Agarwal is not a trained pedagogue, and the interest that professors have in improving their skills is noteworthy.  But MOOC learning is not new, regardless of scale or prestige associated with companies like EdX.  There is a great deal of literature written in the past five, 10, 20, 30 years that explores new theories on learning and science shows a learning benefit greater than behaviorist or cognitive models.  MOOC developers would be well-served to invite some of these researchers to their summits to explore how contemporary learning theory can apply to a scaled platform.  Otherwise, the learning system of the future is going to look a lot like Disneyland’s Land of Tomorrow from the 1950s.

Udacity, along with other MOOC designers, is moving rapidly away from the video lecture model of teaching toward an approach that is highly interactive and based on frequent quizzes and human “mentors” to provide active online support for students.

As I mentioned yesterday, Udacity heralds the death of the lecture on their website, and in the same sentence promotes mini-lectures, which are the same as lectures except sliced up.  A sandwich doesn’t become filet mignon when you cut it into triangles, yet a lecture turns into best practices when captured to video and divided into segments.

Markoff, who again is a technology writer (the education writers haven’t made the run to MOOCs yet), mistakes interactivity for clicking buttons in a web browser, which is akin to bubbling answers on a scantron.  Also, I have heard of this “human mentor” Markoff visualizes.  I believe they were once called teachers, and they were trained in theory and pedagogy and in how to provide meaningful educative practice for a student.  They were also paid for it consummate to a professional.

Snark aside, I think I ought to state something at this point:  I am not anti-MOOC.  I am anti-lecture and anti-didactic learning, and to this point the MOOC is an exercise in lecturing, rote memorization, and glossy regurgitation via embedded quiz that is somehow more interactive than a paper and pencil.  I admire a lot about MOOC developers like Thrun, Ng and Koeller.  I also see a great deal to worry about if the system continues unabated.

I got into educational technology because I saw tech as an opportunity to do more than the classroom allowed.  Markoff alludes to this as well, but he offers no basis for his allusion, no grounding in a traditional classroom, and his evidence is anecdotal.

***And a quick aside, this is the problem with the speed at which the MOOC has seen societal acceptance and political/organizational adoption — there is no rigorous body of research on which the MOOC stands.  It’s hyperbole and spin and potential and possibility, casting traditional education as an ominous spectre and the MOOC as Caesar’s Wife, all things to all men.***  

Markoff though, as mentioned, is a computer writer.  And perhaps this should get more attention — the people designing the MOOC come from a background of artificial intelligence and machine learning, where distributed learning is about networking computers for a rote memorization and not about connecting individuals with unique experiences to create knowledge and synthesize content in a useful artifact.  Their MOOC machine runs like a learning machine should…for a machine.  The problem is, 100+ years of educational research says human learning happens best just about any other way.  Initial research in educational technology sought to explore how technology could offer opportunity unique to the emerging field, where the technology was not just a tool of access but a programmable manipulative.  The argument that progress is doing the same thing as the classroom did before but putting it online and reading data to measure learning not only nullifies the field of educational research and theory, but it marginalizes any aspect of education that is not a data-driven input or output (that secures a profit for the start-up).  And as Dewey notes, that’s a whole lot.

That doesn’t stop MOOC providers from dressing themselves in pedagogy.  One can’t blame them; product management 101 indicates the importance of promoting value and rigor in an item, even if the promotion is the only place the value and rigor exist.  Case in point:  Udacity’s proclamation that the lecture is dead.  To prove the point, Udacity follows up with “Bite-size videos make learning fun.”  Perhaps this is just semantics, but the video remains a lecture, correct?  There is still only a one-way communication happening from sender to receiver, and the receiver has no opportunity to send back to the source.  That’s a lecture, just as a snack.

Learning is fun; watch any toddler engage a new concept.  Read some Piaget or Vygotsky.  Learning has the potential to not be fun, certainly — I know my high school geometry course was only 10 months long, but at the time it felt like watching the teacher write proofs on the Elmo overhead projector stole my present and future.  But fun learning was not invented four years ago with the advent of a ten-minute recorded lecture.  At best, it’s the seven second abs of education.

Will it be advertising?  Certifications or testing?  Career services?  Do the MOOC providers have any clue*?

*I read a lot of MOOC articles, and I notice the same stock images passed around via blogs on technology — a favorite of the Tech writers is the bespectacled twentysomething peeking over his laptop, eyes shooting to the side.  ENOUGH!  A man I greatly admire once told me to put images in my posts to break up the text; I agree, but I also believe in Eisenstein and the importance of montage, and am not going to take 10 minutes on Flickr to pull the same tired image as everyone else just because it’s out there and easy.  Somewhere here is a story about professionalism in an age of copyright and digital literacy.  Or maybe even MOOCs.

Any good critical pedagogue will tell you to look at the political, most notably the supplemental materials from President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, which discuss alternative means of accrediting institutions of higher education:

The President will call on Congress to consider value, affordability, and student outcomes in making determinations about which colleges and universities receive access to federal student aid, either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system; or by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.

The bold emphasis is mine, though I am not alone in finding it important; Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation sees the same outcome (from a very positive perspective).  I wish I could give extra focus to the word models, because the MOOC is model — a highly-pedigreed, deeply-pocketed model.  And it could make the perfect Hollywood story:  the intrepid educational visionaries, providing education of the highest quality and lowest cost to the nation, with students receiving credential/certification/degree for the work, at a cost covered by the amount of Pell grants.

I’m not just a naysayer.  I look at the above and think, “Huh.  Maybe I am wrong to be skeptical of this MOOC movement.  I mean, a lot of people are behind it, and higher education is way too expensive for way too little in return…”  But the Hollywood story plays out over two hours in a movie theater:  the history of higher education as an American right has roots of 160+ years, with ups and downs and ebbs and flows.  At one point the democratization of higher education was based in the ideals of high-quality democratic education for all citizenry regardless of socioeconomic status, a fight against the content-heavy, skill-based, rote educative practices accessible to the majority of citizens.  Current educational, technical and political ideology discusses education in these latter terms.  So while people might espouse the MOOC as the democratizing agent of education, such a term seems counter to that term’s meaning fifty years ago.