This article describes the putative 'pivotal moment', which is when David Wiley "predicted in 2012 *the 'year of the MOOC') that organizations that created OER but did not explicitly embrace more multimedia and more interactive forms of learning would be gone by 2017" (like most such MOOC-hype, it misses the mark by several years, as Elluminate and similar multimedia applications were in wide use by then; we were using it in our original 2008 MOOC, and we weren't even early adopters). But his main point is to argue, "access to resources is only part of what our most in-need students require in order to succeed... most students – and particularly those students our current approaches to education are most likely to fail – need more than resources. They need a mentor, a coach, a cheerleader, and a confidant." And as we automate more and more of the teacher's role, he says, "the historic achievement gap between Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and low-income students and their peers will grow wider." It's hard for me to fathom this as a good argument for keeping the current system, when as we have just heard, the current system reliably produces exactly the achievement gap we're discussing.
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