On MOOCs

I recently read an opinion piece labeled "Jump Off the Coursera Bandwagon" --published in The Chronicle of Higher Education--which puts up a few interesting points against online education:

There are critical pedagogical issues at stake in the online market, and MOOC's have not done nearly enough to deal with those concerns.

Coursera and its devotees simply have it wrong. The Coursera model doesn't create a learning community; it creates a crowd. In most cases, the crowd lacks the loyalty, initiative, and interest to advance a learning relationship beyond an informal, intermittent connection.

Why should we be impressed that an online course can reach 100,000 students at once? By celebrating massification, advocates of Coursera elevate volume as the chief objective of online learning. Is that truly our goal in academe?

Because posing a rhetorical question is a very poor form of argument, it is here I'll stop quoting and answer YES.

What MOOCs Do

MOOCs are an invaluable tool, and align better with the underlying principles the pedagogy than do traditional methods.
The goal of the professor is to ignite a curiosity in the minds of the uninitiated and stoke it in to a roaring flame. However, in order to stay employed and live in the real world they have to meet certain ratings from students; students that are easily upset with lower GPAs. They have to appease everyone, including all of the students that surf Facebook all the way through lectures.
If you must subjugate your students to treating you with a formal respect, the war is already lost. Teachers gain respect by being unmatched. MOOCs promise to bring these kinds of educators out in to the open, where they'll be respected by hundreds of thousands instead of a few in a classroom.
Students should never be totally loyal to their professors, and MOOCs allow students to quickly and easily seek out alternative styles of teaching, and alternative viewpoints.
As to "the crowd lack"ing the initiative to advance the relationship, that is an unfounded statement. Students that actively watch and participate in MOOCs are clearly far beyond those that are in traditional colleges that try to escape the classes with a good grade.
Now to the questions the author posed:
"Why should we be impressed that an online course can reach 100,000 students at once?"
Because it proves there is a vast market for education that is not being met, and that there are 100,000 students interested enough in the topic that weren't getting their needs met through traditional means.
"By celebrating massification, advocates of Coursera elevate volume as the chief objective of online learning. Is that truly our goal in academe?"
MOOCs allow everyone with a decent network connection to become classically educated. There is no bias based upon race, religion, color, ethnicity, or prior level of education.

Conclusion

Locking away education has been the prerogative of tyrants. In a world that is dominated by technologies few understand because of their complexities open on-demand education has no real drawbacks, other than possibly causing a change in the way education works.
I don't feel universities will go away for a good long time, they are simply too important of an institution to fail, but they certainly will change if MOOCs catch on; and I feel that many of the mediocre professors will be looking for new things to do with their lives, as will many of the mediocre students.
As a student, my goal is to graduate, and with a high enough GPA such that I can get in to a good grad school. There are some classes in topics such as Mathematics, Chemistry, or Circiutry where I would happily take the class, if it didn't count toward my GPA. I want the knowledge, and feel it would be exciting to learn, but not at the expense of my future; so I have turned to Coursera for these topics, and will never regret the time I spend learning.