the online imperative, continued

Music: American Analog Set: Golden Band (1999)

As most who have done either will confess, learning and teaching are crafts, which is to say these counterparts concern a "hands-on" process. The origin of the term "craft" did not always imply the hands, but rather "skill" or "strength" (which may have something to do with the association with sailing "craft" on the water). Teaching is not always literally hands-on, of course, but may involve a physically remote lecturer in a lecture hall. Still, the connotation of craft is useful for explaining the learning process as one of continual adaptation that stretches back to the Platonic dialogues: although one can learn something from reading, in an (seemingly) unmediated interpersonal situation, teacher and student can interact, not just in speech, but through the subtleties of eye contact and body language. For example, many of us have had the experience of lecturing to a large room and feeling, for some intellectually impossible to identify reason, that the class was "not getting it" or that you have, somehow, "lost them." In those instances, you ask questions of the students, figure out what is going on, and then try teaching the material from a different angle. Moodwork and tone are crucial components of teaching.

I mention the crafty dimension of teaching because I am worried about recent trends in higher education toward "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, pioneered by Harvard and MIT. MOOCs allow tens of thousands of students to take "free" courses online from prestigious schools to . . presumably, "brush up their skills." Now, anyone with a critical bone in her brain will tell you this is primarily a public relations initiative premised more on the logic of branding than it is learning. But that's not what president of "edX," Anant Agarwal, has been saying to the press: "Our goal is to reinvent education," he said. With MOOCs paving the way, he argued that, online courses "will dramatically improve the quality, efficiency, and scale of learning worldwide and on our campuses." It's probably no surprise that Agarwal is also the head of MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (Still need a warrant? Think about those academic enterprises who are most comfortable with the U.S. version of capitalism.) Are "quality, efficiency, and scale" god terms in the academy? Perhaps "quality" is, but not often in concert with "efficiency" and "scale." Together, these words bespeak an ideology of standardization, that which Adorno hailed as the hallmark of "rationalization" deep in the heart of the culture industry.

There are unquestionably noble goals behind the push to make education widespread and free. Few could argue with the lofty aim of making education within the reach of the poor, who could not afford to go to college by other means (or in the traditional sense). These aims are premised on the assumption, of course, that "education" is possible in an online environment, or that what we call "learning" actually takes place (in some cases, yes, in some cases--"click click yawn"). Universities defend their online offerings as just as "rigorous" as their on-campus versions, but of course, what "rigor" means is never explained (and for me, being "extremely tough" in the classroom is frequently counterproductive; "rigor" must be strategic, and I shudder to think of an online course designed to standardize something like extreme toughness---that has more to do with a video game like Dark Souls than a craft).

Others defend the MOOCs as something like TED talks, designed to inspire students toward further investigation on their own. Aside from the (often hilarious) critiques of the TED business model, please note gentle reader that is not what the heads of the MOOCs portal are saying. They're not saying MOOCs will inspire further learning, but rather, that they comprise learning, that the courses they deliver will be of higher quality, efficiency, and scale. Although I will agree that the fundamental reason MOOCs are touted is public relations (this makes universities seem relevant to the corporate-dominated world, which is to say the development-and-mass-media world), the online imperative is being touted as the future of education to both the masses and policy makers. The only folks who apparently have no voice in the new The Wizard of Oz of Higher Education are the little people behind the curtain.

Because of its creation (or further entrenchment) of class divisions---smaller elite, more vocationally trained college students (the new working, middle class), we have good reasons to fear the online imperative. Teachers, in particular, have reasons to worry too. "Experts" have claimed, for example, that online courses will "transform the work of professors": "Besides potential cost savings," reports Terence Chea of the Associated Press, "the new generation of online classes can change how students learn on campus by relieving professors of lecturing duties and freeing up more time for research and discussion with students." It's hard not to laugh aloud when reading such a utopian sentence; anyone who has worked in higher education for any time knows exactly how to properly write this sentence. Let me restate it: "In addition to potential cost savings, the new generation of online courses will allow universities to hire fewer professors and relieve others of their jobs." I'm being hyperbolic, of course, but what reader doubts this is actually how such a utopian vision will be used? We have four decades of higher education's pursuit of "quality, efficiency, and scale" to predict the eventual outcome of the online imperative . . . if implemented successfully.

I say "if implemented successfully" because, as an educator, I know online teaching will meet with limited success. While it does "teach" something, I'm not sure that something is what we would call an education, or that it has anything to do with a craft, in the bigger picture. Let me be clear: I am not against online teaching. Some things can be taught online. Rather, I am against the replacement of traditional classroom teaching with online teaching, of "blended approaches" eclipsing the sun of knowledge (of how students have been taught for thousands and thousands of years). Now, those who advocate strongly for an online component to teaching also tend to be those who argue for it as a supplement to education, one piece of a broader program. Recently my colleague Diane Davis mentioned there was a big push toward MOOs in the 90s, and it was also met with resistance and, in the end, petered out because those who demanded its implementation in the writing classroom realized that it took more instructors and instructional time to actually teach with MOOs than to do it the old fashioned way. Indeed, studies of online teaching have tended to bear out the claim online courses take as many resources, if not more, than a traditional teacher in a traditional classroom.

Of course, such considerations may be moot if your university is jockeying for real estate. If you can't build out or build up, how can you increase enrollment? Well, you go virtual, of course. Which is what, apparently, the UT regents are considering (which is to say, they've already decided; reports of "consider" usually mean this): as The Texas Tribune reported yesterday, the university is already in negotiation with that portal of "quality, efficiency, scale," Edx, as well as its competitor, Coursera. Vice provost for education policy Harrison Keller is the pointperson and media representative for the project. Although presumably MOOCs are for the express purpose of continuing the land-grant university mission (educating the "industrial classes," expanding learning to the working poor, and so on), note what Keller had to say to the press yesterday:

These are very complex deals . . . There are lots of different dimensions around intellectual property, and in the event that there were revenues that were generated, there are a lot of things that have to be worked out. . . . We don't see these [MOOCs] as replacing what we do with our learning management systems or what we're doing on campus . . . but there are things you can do to leverage the capabilities of the platform and the scale of the audience.

Given all that I've just said, I suspect you don't need any rhetorical analysis to see the bottom line, not educational mission, is driving all of this, and the mood of teaching is one of numbers---standardization, rationalization, digitization. Notably, Mr. Keller has ties to the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, claims independent political status, and routinely votes Republican.