On the MOOC Challenge to Traditional Higher Education

By Jonathan Marks. In a recent Minding the Campus essay, Benjamin Ginsberg, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, worries about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Ginsberg is no softy about higher education. He has written a hard-hitting book on “administrative bloat,” the result of colleges and universities putting resources into management at the expense of instruction and research. But he is worried about MOOCs, which permit “one professor [to] lecture to tens or even hundreds of thousands of students with whom he or she has no interaction.”
In case you haven’t heard, MOOCs are online courses that enroll, typically free of charge, students who listen to lectures, do interactive, graded exercises, and engage in discussion forums. MOOCs are hailed as disruptors of a self-satisfied, overpriced higher education system and denounced as overhyped, poor substitutes for genuine education, which requires face-to-face teaching, mentoring, and discussion. Read more...