The Boston Globe on HarvardX
Posted on May 18th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The Globe runs a long and well-reported piece on the growth of Harvard’s online education program.
I’ve become a cautious supporter of MOOCs, because the idea of providing access to Harvard courses to anyone in the world (well, anyone with an open Internet) is so clearly an outstanding thing.
But I do worry that as their production values increase, and the financial rewards of reaching more people off-campus than on become clear, professors will focus more on their online courses than their classroom work. And rationalize it: Just listen to neuroscientist David Cox:
Because the program offers his automated feedback tailored to students’ answers, Cox said, it offers more personalized instruction than he can give in a lecture hall, especially when Harvard students tend to be “mortified of asking a dumb question.”
“Automated feedback” allows for more personalized instruction than he can give in a lecture hall? That raises an eyebrow.
So I wonder if we can imagine a day—not next year, but maybe five years from now, maybe ten—when Harvard classrooms are ghost towns, populated by professors going through the motions and a handful of students who insist that actually going to class in person still counts for something.
One can envision a campus of students all sitting in front of their monitors watching…
One Response
5/18/2014 1:36 pm
There is a lot going on here worth talking about, but I wouldn’t have picked out David Cox’s comment as the money quote. (Full disclosure: He is a colleague, being a CS professor as well as a member of one of the biology departments.) More than 40 years ago I had programming job to code up an automated medical history taker. The results were as Cox suggests: people, not just Harvard students, are willing to tell computers things they would not tell people, even if they know full well that people will find out what they tell the computer. Compared to the anonymity of large lecture courses with hastily graded papers, the development of automated feedback tools is not in itself dystopian.
But the big questions remain. What is the business model going to be, and how will that business model impact the rest of Harvard? We get some hints — small fees for limited office hour consultations, extra pay for faculty who teach MOOCs. It will be extremely important to adjust the faculty incentives and rewards carefully and thoughtfully. I hope that when the reward structure is put in place, even provisionally, it will be announced and accompanied by an explanation about the institutional goal, what it is that Harvard is hoping to become and how it hopes faculty will spend its time and effort. We have a lot of such structures in place right now, where not just the terms of the deal but the rationale is known — compensation at a certain level for teaching in Extension, royalty sharing on patented inventions, etc. — these are designed not just to pay faculty for their time but to incentivize faculty behaviors that advance larger institutional goals.