Who needs real live professors when one can take an online course? Why does one need to even attend classes when one can just watch a series of recorded lectures by some brilliant professor at some top university? After all, how often do students actually interact with their professors? At the undergraduate level, probably not much for most courses.
Enter the Massive Open Onlince Courses (MOOCs). San Jose State's President wants more of his students to take MOOCs taught by Harvard's stars. Needless to say, San Jose State professors are like "what are we? chopped liver?" Well not quite, but there is quite the resistance to the idea. What is interesting is that students who used the MOOCs had a 90 per cent pass rate as opposed to a just above 50 per cent rate in one of the MOOC courses.
In the long run, MOOCs will just add to the trend of diminishing full-time academic positions. Indeed, many profssors are even giving up their tenured positions, and I am not talking about the likes of our former colleague Justice Brown going from one tenured position to another.
Speaking of Justice Brown - his torts and civil procedure lectures were legendary. One could envisage his lectures taped and played to masses of students for years to come. Indeed, at Cambridge and Oxford, a model of general lectures and indivualized tutoring by college tutors has existed for centuries. Maybe we will go back to the days when Adam Smith and his peers were paid individually by the students per course.
MOOCs are simply a way to get the general lectures delivered by the best teachers in the world, while inidivdualized tutoring is done by the local professor. On the other hand, it may be used short-sightedly by university administrators to cut costs, which would just render that university obsolete in the long-run.
