

MOOCs: Usefully Middlebrow  - ekm2
https://chronicle.com/article/MOOCs-Are-Usefully-Middlebrow/143183/

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xmonkee
Is this guy serious? He is literally insulting people for enjoying learning
stuff they are interested in because it doesn't carry the Seal of
Institutional Approval. He even calls Gates shallow for enjoying a course on
oceanography!

>Jonathan Freedman is a professor of English and American culture

I don't mean to demean any discipline, but I wonder if his specialization has
anything to do with the condescending tone. I just completed 3 MOOC's on
coursera (Algorithms with Sedgewick, that Scala course with Odersky and, my
favorite, Programming Languages with Dan Grossman) and I assure you none of
them were "lists, hooks, easy handles". They were difficult and I gave several
dozen hours of hard work to them. I wonder if he has ever actually attempted a
course? More likely just turned up his nose at all the commoners trying to get
an education.

I leave you with this totally serious quote from that article:

>Yes, the vulgarians who run Coursera and Udacity deserve to be swept into the
dustbin of history, and the fact that they seem not to have figured out how to
profit from their enterprises suggests that they'll soon be hoist by their own
capitalist petard.

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spikels
More MOOC bashing from college professors in The Chronicle of Higher
Education.

Again we get the old saw about the high "dropout rate" but as I hope everyone
realizes by now: clicking a button to checkout a free online class is not the
same thing as applying to a college, being accepted, registering for a class,
paying for the class... Apples and oranges

Only when colleges can deliver relevant, high-quality education at a
reasonable price will professors like this one have nothing to fear from
MOOCs. I see little if any progress being made while MOOCs continue to improve
their platforms.

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DoctorZeus
A worthwhile take on the historical place of MOOCs.

The problem with these has always been not just that they are oversold, but
sold from the wrong direction. Call them an alternative for the traditional
college course, and we can see how cheap, watered-down, and mass-market they
are compared to the real thing. Call them, instead, an alternative to the
traditional textbook (or even traditional lecture) then the improvements are
apparent, the possibilities open up before us.

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cafard
This may be the first time I've felt like stepping up to say good things about
MOOCs.

"Even though German models of scientific professionalism soon contested and
replaced such public outreach, there remained vestiges of this sense of
mission in the postwar era."

I would rewrite this as

"Even though a fad developed for pretending that literary criticism could
become scientific, we still spoke of it in less pretentious terms to audiences
where we would not be embarrassed by so speaking."

