2014, a Good Year for HBCUs and Virtual HBCUs to (Quietly) Flip and MOOC

By The Gateway's HBCU. As the year 2013 winds to a close, the Academic Old Guard has lulled itself into an inertial stupor, convinced that the last two years' discussions of the pending MOOC "revolution" in higher education were just the blatherings of ambitious con-men, a noisy media vaudeville that would fade away if ignored for long enough, leaving things as they were before, as they were meant to be in this best of all possible worlds, with the (mostly white) sages firmly entrenched on center stages, technology relegated to its proper place inside but on the outer fringes of the classrooms, and the Old Guard's preferred, self-serving solutions to the persistent achievement gaps between white and underperforming minority students back at the top of the national agenda, i.e., more funding for more (mostly white) instructors. More...