MOOCs R Us

By Carolyn Foster Segal. There’s a legendary story about Anne Sexton’s learning how to write a sonnet by watching I.A. Richard’s educational-television series in the late fifties. I’ve thought about that fairly often while reading the daily stories on MOOCs. In the Sexton/Richards instance, there was a fortuitous electronic meeting of an excellent teacher who saw possibilities in the then “new” technology of television and a motivated student who was ready to write as if  -- and according to her this was indeed the case -- her life depended on it. That hyperbolic tone of the last sentence above -- a tone that readers of Sexton’s later poems and interviews are already familiar with -- is also the tone of a good many declarations about MOOCs.
Thomas Friedman’s latest column “The Professors’ Big Stage” is a case in point. His piece on “the MOOCs revolution” is riddled with contradictions, shallow thinking -- and an error in basic arithmetic. Read more...