MOOCs: Usefully Middlebrow

Is this guy serious? He is literally insulting people for enjoying learning stuff they are interested in because it doesn't carry the Seal of Institutional Approval. He even calls Gates shallow for enjoying a course on oceanography!

>Jonathan Freedman is a professor of English and American culture

I don't mean to demean any discipline, but I wonder if his specialization has anything to do with the condescending tone. I just completed 3 MOOC's on coursera (Algorithms with Sedgewick, that Scala course with Odersky and, my favorite, Programming Languages with Dan Grossman) and I assure you none of them were "lists, hooks, easy handles". They were difficult and I gave several dozen hours of hard work to them. I wonder if he has ever actually attempted a course? More likely just turned up his nose at all the commoners trying to get an education.

I leave you with this totally serious quote from that article:

>Yes, the vulgarians who run Coursera and Udacity deserve to be swept into the dustbin of history, and the fact that they seem not to have figured out how to profit from their enterprises suggests that they'll soon be hoist by their own capitalist petard.

More MOOC bashing from college professors in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Again we get the old saw about the high "dropout rate" but as I hope everyone realizes by now: clicking a button to checkout a free online class is not the same thing as applying to a college, being accepted, registering for a class, paying for the class... Apples and oranges

Only when colleges can deliver relevant, high-quality education at a reasonable price will professors like this one have nothing to fear from MOOCs. I see little if any progress being made while MOOCs continue to improve their platforms.

A worthwhile take on the historical place of MOOCs.

The problem with these has always been not just that they are oversold, but sold from the wrong direction. Call them an alternative for the traditional college course, and we can see how cheap, watered-down, and mass-market they are compared to the real thing. Call them, instead, an alternative to the traditional textbook (or even traditional lecture) then the improvements are apparent, the possibilities open up before us.

This may be the first time I've felt like stepping up to say good things about MOOCs.

"Even though German models of scientific professionalism soon contested and replaced such public outreach, there remained vestiges of this sense of mission in the postwar era."

I would rewrite this as

"Even though a fad developed for pretending that literary criticism could become scientific, we still spoke of it in less pretentious terms to audiences where we would not be embarrassed by so speaking."