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MOOCs are, and will be, big business, and the way that their makers see profitability at the end of the tunnel is what gives them their particular shape. … the MOOCs which are now being developed by Silicon Valley startups … aim to do exactly the same thing that traditional courses have always done -transfer course content from expert to student - only to do so massively more cheaply and on a much larger scale. … MOOCs are simply a new way of maintaining the status quo, of re-institutionalizing higher education in an era of budget cuts, skyrocketing tuition, and unemployed college graduates burdened by student debt. … the California legislature proposes to solve a real systemic crisis - collapsing public resources, diminishing affordability, and falling completion rates in the state’s higher education system - by sending its students to MOOCs. … If this bill passes, the winners will be Silicon Valley and the austerity hawks in the California legislature … To put it quite bluntly, MOOCs are a speculative bubble, a product being pumped up and overvalued by pro-business government support and a lot of hot air in the media. Like all speculative bubbles—especially those that originate in Silicon Valley—it will eventually burst.
Via Peter B. Sloep
This article does not really sing a song that is much different from the song sung by many other opponents of MOOCs. However, it does so quite elegantly and forcefully. For that reason alone it is worth reading.
MOOC proponents have never shied away from making bold predications, like Sebastian Thrun who predicted that "Fifty years from now there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education" (http://tiny.cc/83ygyw). Aaron faces them squarely when he claims that "MOOCs are a speculative bubble … [which] will eventually burst". I would hope it does, in the way he describes them as affecting Californian HE. I hope too, though, that the discovery of distance teaching that MOOCs exemplify, has a lasting effect, by making people reflect on the pedagogy, organisation and economics of (higher) education. (@pbsloep)