Mike's Reading and Thinking Notes - 11/4
Invasion of the MOOCs: "MOOCversations: Commonplaces as Argument" by Jeff Rice
Rice's article depicts a dialectic of MOOCs, which he initially presents as a contradicting conversation but proceeds to undermine by stating that the conversation involves a very old and traditional, conventional even, kind of conversation that is neither innovative or effective.
I liked the mention of MOOCs being "an occasional snack, not the entire meal" (87). I may be getting involved in a statewide grant-funded project to develop and pilot a series of dev. ed. MOOCs to help students begin their college coursework earlier and at less cost to them. This project seems noble to me, and I look forward to participating, although MOOCs do make me nervous a bit, for some of the reasons that Rice mentions (as he explains the conversation happening) in his article.
Rice argues that the conversation happening isn't as much a conversation as it is a repetition of positions and ideas, both of which have been rooted in other conversations going back many years.
The author's experience in a MOOC was surprising to me for several reasons:
- I couldn't believe the first "essay" was only 300 words; that's not an essay (how could it be?): that's a response or reflection.
- I was surprised that most of the students in his MOOC were other curious academics--fetishistic voyeurs of a sort--and international students, which seems like a unique student population (although I doubt that most MOOCs have this same demographic).
- It sounded like the peer review was pretty bad, which didn't surprise me. I'm still working to figure this out in web-based courses; I actually just ordered a book on the topic, which a friend of mine has a chapter in.
- Most disturbingly, however, was the analyzing the image assignment (Rice 93), whose questions exemplified one of the greatest dangers facing higher education (not MOOCs, in the first instance): the reduction of critical thinking to its most basic levels, seen in the very basic questions presented on page 93. I, too, do a visual analysis assignment in my class, and it is far more rigorous, drawing from rhetoric, semiotics, and post-structural theory.
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