Re:Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
by ctdonath on Monday March 04, 2013 @12:09PM
(#5319158)
Such is the natural supply-and-demand backlash resulting from promoting excessive demand for overpriced supply. Telling every kid "you must go to college" and then persuading them to sign up for absurdly huge loans cannot end well. The end, then, is MOOCs, and whether it is well, well, the author seems to think it isn't.
Charging some $3000 per class when many classes are little more than the content of a borrowed $30 book will, with a little social media technology, culminate in a teacher loaning the books to 100x his usual class population, charging 2% the usual per student cost, and coming out of the session with more money, more successful students (though perhaps a lower percentage), and the ire of anyone else who didn't pull off this stunt first.
The long-term consequences of prolific government-promoted-and-backed loans & grants skewed the educational economy so much that the correction will be dramatic and dire - and the correction, however many may dislike it, is unavoidable thanks to the nature of supply-and-demand. Such economic meddling should be avoided in any market for exactly such reasons: there will be a correction to the natural norm, and the longer that correction is held off and the process distorted, the more destructive the correction will be ... but the correction will happen.
Charging some $3000 per class when many classes are little more than the content of a borrowed $30 book will, with a little social media technology, culminate in a teacher loaning the books to 100x his usual class population, charging 2% the usual per student cost, and coming out of the session with more money, more successful students (though perhaps a lower percentage), and the ire of anyone else who didn't pull off this stunt first.
The long-term consequences of prolific government-promoted-and-backed loans & grants skewed the educational economy so much that the correction will be dramatic and dire - and the correction, however many may dislike it, is unavoidable thanks to the nature of supply-and-demand. Such economic meddling should be avoided in any market for exactly such reasons: there will be a correction to the natural norm, and the longer that correction is held off and the process distorted, the more destructive the correction will be ... but the correction will happen.