There's a fascinating, in a car crash kinda way, piece from a college professor insisting that massively open online courses (MOOCs) are the very devil. Essentially, the complaint is that having a cheap and easy way to teach undergraduates will mean that college professors will lose their current comfortable livings. Boo hoo, eh?
Talking about access to higher education allows MOOC providers like Coursera to avoid discussing the effect their services will have on people who work in higher education now. Professors, believe it or not, are people, too. They have families and health problems and student loans of their own.
Clearly, time to get a little Adam Smith on this professor. The sole purpose of any production is consumption: and we should listen and consider the interests of the producer only to the point that said interest is essential to the interests of the consumer. And I'm afraid that if MOOCs do indeed produce the technological revolution which lessens our demand for professors then that's just too bad for professors. Our only concern here is and should be the interests of the students. If they can get a better education through technology, the same but cheaper education, or even a worse and much cheaper education and that trade off seems acceptable to said students then that's just the end of the matter. The students' interests win.
What I think is much more interesting is the way that MOOCs, assuming they are successful, will kill off much of the research currently conducted at universities. For they will unravel the current cross subsidies, from teaching undergraduates to research work, that are the basis of how universities work.
We might see universities as places in which the next generation get fed their portion of humanity's accumulated knowledge. But the incentives within academia are really quite different: there it's all about the research work of the professorial staff that is really deemed the aim. The teaching of the undergraduates is the boring work that must be done to pay to support all those professors who will do all that research. Also, perhaps, to provide that subset who become graduate students who can actually help do the research.
So what happens if undergraduate teaching is something that is magicked away through the technological change of MOOCs? Clearly that river of cash that supports the professoriate disappears. As does the need for quite so many professors of course. Which will in turn lead to there being very many fewer people conducting research as there just won't be as many people in universities in the future.
One could argue that this is either a good thing or a bad one. Less engineering research is likely to mean that the future will be poorer than it need be. Yet equally I think we might argue that the world really doesn't need that 356 th monograph on feminism in Jane Austen therefore less research in certain of the arts departments might leave us all richer right now. Especially given that much of the research that does happen in such arts departments seems to be written purely and only to advance the writer's position and thus allow more unnecessary research to be paid for.
But you don't have to be as cynical as I am to see that this is where the real changes from MOOCs will come. The internet has shown itself to be extremely good at unbundling things, exposing cross subsidies. And it is undoubtedly true that undergraduate education subsidises research: so, if undergraduate education becomes cheap and cheerful videos, then who or what is going to pay for the research? And I suspect that the loudest screaming will come from those who are worried that, once we've exposed the cross subsidies and now must make the decision about which research to pay for directly, won't get their research paid for.
Which, to be honest, I think I welcome. The arts are indeed important in human life: but that really doesn't mean that we need yet more monographs on them entirely and purely designed to impress tenure committees.
