{"id":5316,"date":"2014-12-16T11:54:36","date_gmt":"2014-12-16T18:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5316"},"modified":"2014-12-19T04:45:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T11:45:52","slug":"moocs-and-the-distance-learning-mirage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5316","title":{"rendered":"MOOCs and the distance-learning mirage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"alice\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like there\u2019s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I\u2019ve taken the red pill, and I\u2019ve seen Wonderland.\u201d \u2013Sebastian Thrun, 2012<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, the time has come to update my previously published survey<\/a>\u00a0of the history of hype and wishful thinking that has for more than a century surrounded distance-learning technologies. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be the last addition.<\/p>\n

Mail:<\/em>\u00a0Around 1885, Yale professor William Rainey Harper, a pioneer of teaching-by-post, said, \u201cThe student who has prepared a certain number of lessons in the correspondence school knows more of the subject treated in those lessons, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom.\u201d Soon, he predicted, \u201cthe work done by correspondence will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our academies and colleges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phonograph:<\/em>\u00a0In an 1878 article on \u201cpractical uses of the phonograph,\u201d the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0predicted that the phonograph would be used \u201cin the school-room in training children to read properly without the personal attention of the teacher; in teaching them to spell correctly, and in conveying any lesson to be acquired by study and memory. In short, a school may almost be conducted by machinery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Movies:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cIt is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,\u201d proclaimed Thomas Edison in 1913. \u201cOur school system will be completely changed in 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radio:<\/em>\u00a0In 1927, the University of Iowa declared that \u201cit is no imaginary dream to picture the school of tomorrow as an entirely different institution from that of today, because of the use of radio in teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n

TV:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cDuring the 1950s and 1960s,\u201d report education scholars Marvin Van Kekerix and James Andrews, \u201cbroadcast television was widely heralded as the technology that would revolutionize education.\u201d In 1963, an official with the National University Extension Association wrote that television provided an \u201copen door\u201d to transfer \u201cvigorous and vital learning\u201d from campuses to homes.<\/p>\n

Computers:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThere won\u2019t be schools in the future,\u201d wrote MIT\u2019s Seymour Papert in 1984. \u201cI think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured into groups by age, following a curriculum \u2014 all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Web 1.0:<\/em>\u00a0The arrival\u00a0of the web brought the e-learning fad of the late 1990s, as universities and corporations rushed to invest in\u00a0online courses. In 1999,\u00a0Cisco CEO John Chambers told the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2018s Thomas Friedman, \u201cThe next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education.\u00a0Education over the Internet is going to be so big, it\u2019s going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.\u201d<\/p>\n

MOOCs:<\/em> The New York Times<\/em> declared 2012\u00a0the “the year of the MOOC.” “Welcome to the college education revolution,” wrote the ever-hopeful\u00a0Friedman in a column heralding massive open online courses. “In five years this will be a huge industry.” The MOOC “is transforming higher education,” declared the Economist<\/em>, “threatening doom for the laggard and mediocre.” Academics were equally bedazzled. “There’s a tsunami coming,” said Stanford president John Hennessy. Opined MIT president Rafael Reif: “I am convinced that digital learning is the most important innovation in education since the printing press.” Harvard’s Clayton Christensen predicted “wholesale bankruptcies” among traditional universities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of these mediums and devices\u00a0have come\u00a0to play valuable\u00a0roles in education and training\u00a0\u2014 which is something worth celebrating \u2014\u00a0but none of them turned out to be revolutionary or transformative. There may be a deeper lesson here, a lesson about how easy it is to overlook the intangible virtues not just of classrooms but of\u00a0presence.<\/p>\n

Image: detail of John Tenniel illustration for 1865 edition of <\/em>Alice in Wonderland.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI feel like there\u2019s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I\u2019ve taken the red pill, and I\u2019ve seen Wonderland.\u201d \u2013Sebastian Thrun, 2012 Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, the time has come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5316"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5363,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316\/revisions\/5363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}