Despite my skepticism about MOOCs, especially when it comes
to the subjects I teach (philosophy), I have been fantasizing about teaching
one. It’s a sad thing to confess. And I don’t dwell on it. But it just keeps popping into my mind. Partly, I’m drawn to the “Open,” and I think
that you can’t really have that in a meaningful way without the “Online.” I don’t need the “Massively” at all. But once you’ve got something open and
online, what would it mean to restrict participation? I suppose that you could have an enrollment
limit. Limited (but) Open Online
Course...LOOC...?
But anyway, there ARE some courses that I could imagine
teaching MOOly.
Elementary Logic. These
days, we may tell our students that logic is the study of how we think. Or ought to think. I think it would a lot better to say what logic
textbooks used to say: “Logic is what
logicians study.” Here’s why it would
lend itself to MOOCing: Logic (at the
elementary level) involves a system of rules which, though tricky to master,
can be very comprehensively expressed in ordinary language. The application of these rules can be drilled
through discrete exercises. And those
exercises can be checked automatically, say, by a computer. There is some room for explanation in logic,
but mostly the explanations consist in pointing out very definite errors. There is not much to discuss that requires
great attention, group participation, reflection, creativity, etc. Again, at the higher levels things are
different, but at the low levels logic is much like math—there are rules and
skills and problems to solve. With the
right tech setup, one instructor could lead almost any number of students
through a logic MOOC. Then again...with
the right tech setup, an instructor might not even be necessary....
And that leads me to another course I’d like to MOOC: my intro level course on Mark Twain and
Philosophy. This class is unlike logic
in just about every way. It requires
careful and extensive reading of very subtle stuff. It calls on one’s ability to move fluidly
back and forth from the most abstract philosophical idea to the most concrete
narrative detail. There are no rules to
learn, or apply, or practice. Unlike
logic, it is possible, maybe even preferable, for every single student to take
away something different from the course.
Unlike logic, it is a subject that grows and deepens and illuminates the
more it is subjected to discussion. Different
configurations of students can discuss the same passages over and over again,
each time gaining new insights—indeed, it can never really be safely asserted
that the topics have been completely explored.
With the right tech setup, you could set dozens of groups off on
discussion, and gather their thoughts
and reflections together again on a blog.
It would be hard to monitor the actual conversations, but then, why
would you need to? The instructor could
be replaced by a kind of network of discussion groups, all distinct, but all
coordinated and kept on track by a few representatives. Maybe this is more like the cMOOC (connectivist
MOOC) idea, or what is now called a DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative
Course). The goal is more to construct a
discursive learning community than it is to transmit something from a teacher
to students. The latter idea hardly even
makes sense in that picture.
It certainly seems like my MOOC fantasies range widely
across the stuff I teach. But what they
have in common is that they by their nature de-emphasize the role of the
traditional teacher/instructor/professor.
Where content is clear, rigid, self-contained, and univocal, it can
probably be conveyed, drilled, and assessed mechanically. We are, after all, in the age of the
machine-graded essay! Where the content
is fluid, subtle, open-ended, collaborative, and so on, distributed
conversations, loosely connected, are what we want. There’s nothing to convey, drill, transmit,
or assess.
It could be that the MOOC idea is most attractive to me when
it puts me out of business!
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