Against:
“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”
For:
Might it make some things better? Peter K. Bol, a Chinese intellectual historian, started depending on computers as a graduate student at Princeton, in the late nineteen-seventies, because he was a sloppy typist. Today, as the director of Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, he’s a leading exponent of the use of geographic-information-system technology in historical study—like Google Maps, except with a historical record’s worth of information in it.
To him, MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. “The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?” Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. “Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”
Now he thinks he can. This fall, Bol will launch ChinaX, a survey of Chinese cultural history from the neolithic period to the present day. He has also launched a course to let students get involved in preparing that program. Those in “Chinese History 185: Creating ChinaX”—a campus class offered only to Harvard students—have spent this term building Bol’s online course, module by module, in small groups under his direction. Teaching takes place in both a classroom and a computer lab.
- More Here by Nathan Heller
“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”
For:
Might it make some things better? Peter K. Bol, a Chinese intellectual historian, started depending on computers as a graduate student at Princeton, in the late nineteen-seventies, because he was a sloppy typist. Today, as the director of Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, he’s a leading exponent of the use of geographic-information-system technology in historical study—like Google Maps, except with a historical record’s worth of information in it.
To him, MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. “The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?” Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. “Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”
Now he thinks he can. This fall, Bol will launch ChinaX, a survey of Chinese cultural history from the neolithic period to the present day. He has also launched a course to let students get involved in preparing that program. Those in “Chinese History 185: Creating ChinaX”—a campus class offered only to Harvard students—have spent this term building Bol’s online course, module by module, in small groups under his direction. Teaching takes place in both a classroom and a computer lab.
- More Here by Nathan Heller
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