Bob Meister, President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and author of the classic "They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street" (please read this if you haven't already; here's a one page summary if you want to start there), has an utterly brilliant proposal to Coursera for a MOOC on Coursera's business model. This is one of the very best things I've ever read on MOOCs (here is our category on them). Here is the punch line -- MOOCs only make sense when public HE has already been privatized by turning to tuition rather than tax funds -- but please do read the whole thing.
I want to keep public higher education public in a sense [in which] for-profit content disseminated on the internet is not. A large part of Coursera's appeal lies in your own nearly-socialist vision of an informational Common to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing universities and colleges. I personally wish that this part of your vision were coming from the leaders of UC. Instead they are trying to sell students on paying higher tuition because of the demonstrated role of elite universities in generating income inequality while also persuading the legislature to increase “access” so we can generate even more revenue from the tuition we charge.
Here I agree with your and Coursera’s business logic’s implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission while raising its prices at three times the rate of inflation.
I disagree, however, with Coursera’s implicit claim that privately-financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by public systems to be an engine for reducing social and economic hierarchy.
If you want the Biblical version: we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.
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