(2012-11-15) Shirky Colleges Ignoring Mooc Disruption

Clay Shirky sees College Education's dismissal of the Disruptive Innovation of MOOC-s to be similar to the Music Industry's discounting of MP3-s. Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”... The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies... Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first.

Jan31'2013 update: MariaBustillos summarizes the ongoing debate between Shirky and Aaron Bady (Zungu Zungu). "Aaron and I agree about most of the diagnosis; we disagree about the prognosis," Shirky told me. "He thinks these trends are reversible, and I don't."

• More recent scholarship has focused on a different metric: the ratio of administrators to tenured faculty. Laments of the decline of universities into corporations clogged with clueless managers are nothing new; the late Bill Readings's The University In Ruins (1996) was eloquent on this point, as was the 2003 anthology, Steal This University. In 2011, Benjamin Ginsberg published an incendiary polemic on the subject, Fall of the Faculty. But a paper by Robert E. Martin and R. Carter Hill published at the Social Science Research Network late last year uses the techniques of the Organization Men against them; "Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities" balances prevailing administrative theories to arrive at the ideal ratio of tenured professors to administrators: three profs to each administrator. News that will cause your pointy-heads to ROTFL; as Martin and Hill point out, the current average is around two administrators to one professor.

Feb07: Shirky responds: Bustillos sees institutions like San Jose State experimenting with credit for online courses from startups like Udacity, and asks: "are we willing to jeopardize the education of young people (at the cost of millions or billions in public funds) on a bet like that?” To which my reply is: "Depends. How well do you think things are going now?" Bustillos' answers seem to be that in the world of higher education, things are going fine, mostly, and that the parts that aren’t going fine can largely be fixed with tax dollars. (Because if there’s one group you'd pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.) I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it... If you want to know what college is actually like in this country, forget Swarthmore, with 1500 students. Think Houston Community College, with 63,000. Think rolling admissions. Think commuter school. Think older. Think poorer. Think child-rearing, part-time, night class. Think 50% dropout rates. Think two-year degree. (Except don’t call it that, because most graduates take longer than two years to complete it. If they complete it.)