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As someone on the other side of the table (essentially chief revenue officer for a college)—there is a real dichotomy here: on the one hand, faculty were themselves trained face to face, it’s what we know best, the medium at which we are most proficient. That said, the presence of scaled alternatives makes the educational economics of yesteryear, no longer feasible. So our choices are:
(1) Cut salaries and tenures or
(2) Scale up Option (1) is a political third rail. Option (2) comes in many shades of grey: all in with someone like coursera, literally operating at 8x scale relative to traditional endowments, or lightweight (either roll your own or with select niche vendors), say 2x. By fiat, the closer the new medium to the old, the better the early results. Faculty CAN become entirely proficient and effective educators leveraging new technologies at 5c+ scale—but only if their’s a will. And, in order for the latter to exist, unfortunately it must be accompanied by a strictly positive remuneration, ie it cannot be free. This isn’t the utopia that MOOCs first promised, but rather the political realities higher Ed finds itself in. For these reasons, I myself have begun paying for professional tutelage when I encounter a pencil of mine in need of sharpening. Despite a career’s worth of mastering the practice of learning, my capabilities (and will?) were insufficient to glean more than the most elementary basics upon enrolling in MOOCs, however I came to learn that I benefited tremendously from personalized feedback in my learning, something AI is still some ways from delivering! |