BY JONATHAN REES
Did your online social life survive the Great Twitter Exodus of 2022? Although I’ve found Mastodon to be somewhat useful in this regard, I lost track of far too many online “friends” to count. That has only just now started to change. For example, Audrey Watters made her well-earned reputation during the Great MOOC Panic of 2012. Massive Open Online Courses are the subject that got me interested in education technology as well as just about every online friend I once had because we all commiserated over the fact that they were so obviously awful. Therefore, you can imagine how happy I was a few months ago to find Audrey returning to this subject and literally telling the world “I Told You So.”
Sadly, I can’t say the same thing. My long-abandoned blog devoted primarily to this subject is still online, but I don’t have to dig up those old posts to remember how I felt about MOOCs at the time. I went back and forth constantly between arguing, “There is no way that students are ever going to pay for an education that’s this bad,” and arguing, “Oh my God, we’re all going to be unemployed!” Yes, I contributed to the Great MOOC Panic of 2012, as well as to the defusing of the Great MOOC Panic of 2012, often at the same time.
After I stopped writing about MOOCs, I spent a lot of my downtime learning as much as I could about educational technology so that I could prove that there are better ways to teach online than watching tapes of Ivy League professors lecturing. I eventually began teaching my survey class entirely online, trying to create the best educational experience I could. When enrollment in those classes started to ebb, I assumed it was COVID-induced online course fatigue. I then returned to face-to-face teaching my survey class but tried to bring the best elements of the online experience with me—most notably the web commenting tool Hypothes.is so that I could keep discussions going online between class periods.
Nevertheless, me, my department and my whole college still have enrollment problems. I know things are tough everywhere for those of us in the humanities, but anecdotally I keep hearing stories about students dropping out of face-to-face classes like mine in order to take less demanding online alternatives. Sometimes those alternatives are available through our own university, but Colorado has also been very aggressive about getting universities to accept more transfer credit, so those less demanding online classes (thanks to the fact that they are online) could be taught just about anywhere.
This brings me back to MOOCs. What if MOOCs taught everyone in higher education not only that they can’t automate teaching entirely but also that if they made classes as easy for students as possible without setting off alarm bells there was still a lot of money to be made? Thousands of Students Take Courses Through Unaccredited Private Companies, reads one Chronicle headline on a story that includes my institution. Or what about the new phenomenon of dead universities coming back as online zombie colleges? In other words, if MOOCs were the bottom and the bottom doesn’t work, has the race to “close to the bottom” already begun? As things were a decade ago, I remain conflicted because it’s so hard to figure out if now is the right time to start panicking again.
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.
