Digital Delights

In popular discourse of MOOCs, two dominant analogies seem to have emerged in making sense of MOOCs: MOOCs as textbooks and MOOCs as courses. Consider the open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel published by the San Jose State University Philosophy Department. The letter explains why the philosophy department refuses to pilot Sandel's JusticeX course.

When trying to explain the threat that JusticeX poses to undergraduate education at San Jose State University and in public higher education more broadly, the philosophers describe JusticeX as a course: "When a university such as ours purchases a course from an outside vendor, the faculty cannot control the design or content of the course; therefore we cannot develop and teach content that fits with our overall curriculum and is based on both our highly developed and continuously renewed competence and our direct experience of our students' needs and abilities." Here the course is defined as whole and integral, an experience designed as a complete substitute, fixed in its boundaries and uneditable.

In other places, when explaining some of the inadequacies of MOOCs, the SJSU philosophers analogize JusticeX to a textbook: "In addition, purchasing a series of lectures does not provide anything over and above assigning a book to read." Of course, to call a MOOC, "just a book" defangs the entity in a double-edged way. If it's not much more useful than a book, then it shouldn't be much more threatening than a book. The MOOC as textbook analogy is what Sandel adopts in response to the open letter, "My goal is simply to make an educational resource freely available--a resource that faculty colleagues should be free to us in whole or in part, or not at all, as they see fit."